RIGHT WHERE WE WANT THEM

So now we know how Martin Lee Anderson died.

We can forget the original autopsy report filed by Charles Siebert, a
doctor so inept that he wasn't technically a doctor (he had allowed
his license to lapse) when he issued the report. A doctor so inept
that he once described a person he autopsied as having "unremarkable"
testes. The person was a woman, so if she had testes at all, it would
seem quite remarkable indeed.

Siebert claimed that after Anderson had been hit, manhandled and
choked by guards Jan. 5 at a so-called boot camp in Panama City,
Fla., the 14-year-old died of sickle cell trait -- a genetic blood
disorder carried by 1 in 12 Americans of African heritage. That
finding has been roundly hooted by real doctors, who say it is
unlikely in the extreme that the condition could lead to death.

Friday before last, a new autopsy told a different story. Dr. Vernard
Adams, Tampa's chief medical examiner, found that the child died
because guards covered his mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia.

Just so you know, Martin Lee Anderson was an A and B student, good at
math. He wound up in the boot camp after he took his grandmother's
car for a joy ride.

In other words, hardly the second coming of Al Capone.

As it happens, news of how he died came almost simultaneously with
news of another appalling mistreatment of children in detention.
According to a report from an advocacy group, the Juvenile Justice
Project of Louisiana, more than 100 teenagers were left locked in a
flooded prison in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They had to scramble
to the top bunks to avoid drowning. They went up to five days with
nothing to eat or drink. Some drank flood water. A large number had
not been convicted of any crime.

And, the vast majority were, like Anderson, black. Indeed, while New
Orleans was about 67 percent black, the report says the prison was
well over 95 percent black. No surprise. Human Rights Watch reports
that black people are more than eight times as likely to wind up
behind bars as whites.

It is telling how mutely we absorb that fact. Some see in it only
proof of the ravaging effects of poverty and miseducation; others see
support for the idiotic claim that criminality is a native defect of
African peoples. You seldom hear anyone suggest that it is this way
because we the people want it this way -- that in our silence, we
give tacit approval to this means of controlling a population whose
mere existence we have historically found threatening and inconvenient.

In the James Crow years, the institutions of government and society
could hardly have been more brazen in pursuit of that goal. White
teachers told black students that they should aspire to no goal
higher than to work as janitors and cooks. White cops turned black
suspects over to lynch mobs.

It could never happen that way in this enlightened era, of course.
And yet it happens in other ways.

A 2002 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says
black kids are labeled as emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded
and shipped off to special-education classes at rates of up to four
times those of white kids. A 2000 study co-sponsored by the Justice
Department tells us that of people who've never done time in juvenile
facilities, a black drug defendant is 48 times more likely to be
jailed than a white one with the same record.

The means have changed, but the end -- repression, control -- remains
the same, and we steer black kids like cars until they reach it.

Granted, there may have been some white kids in that fetid, flooded
prison. There were certainly some in that brutal boot camp. Yet it's
no accident that African-American children are always so
well-represented in those lousy places -- not happenstance that they
are so readily found among society's discards.

So our concern for them now feels ... well, let's call it belated.
And self-deluding.

Those children were right where we wanted them to be.