Pubdate: Tue, 16 May 2006
Source: Ft. Worth Star-Telegram (TX)
Copyright: 2006 Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas
Contact:  http://www.star-telegram.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/162
Author: Leonard Pitts, The Miami Herald
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

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.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman