AMERICANS USING BOOT CAMPS, PRISONS TO CONTROL BLACK KIDS

So now we know how Martin Lee Anderson died.

We can forget the original autopsy report filed by Charles Siebert, a
doctor so inept he wasn't technically a doctor ( he had allowed his
license to lapse ) when he issued the report. A doctor so inept 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 being hit, manhandled and choked by guards
Jan. 5 at a so-called boot camp in Panama City, Fla., the
14-year-old Anderson 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 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, over 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
support for the idiot 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 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 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.