It is of little concern to the general public that people are disappeared in this country.  Returning Iraqi veterans with serious brain injuries and other suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome are tucked away in corners of our cities or stashed away on rural farms. Arab and Muslim Americans are detrained and disappeared to detention camps in foreign lands.  In cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Cincinnati, young Black youths are disappeared too.  Shot while unarmed or incarcerated while despaired, Black youths do not garner the outrage of a general public who benefits from the perpetration of disappearing the future of Black Americans. 

Black on Black killings, police killings of Blacks, and incarceration of Black youths is a practice of disappearing generations of Black Americans, and yet, this practice of disappearing people at such an alarming rate is not front and center news.  It is not a subject for public debate on the conditions that bring about this tragic witness to the absence of democracy and freedom in the U.S. 

Like those disappeared, the violence of this practice is hidden from the general public.  Most have heard the equally violent narrative justification for the killing of Black youths or for their incarceration but no one bothers to question why a group of people are effectively removed from society.  This absence of the question, this lack of curiosity about fellow human beings is reflected in the ways in which law enforcement agencies across this nation, armed and ready, daily march to the battlefield to defend the homeland from - terrorists!

“The Justice Department has done almost nothing to nail cops who blatantly kill unarmed citizens,” explains Earl Ofar Hutchinson of AlterNet. “The see-no-evil policy of the feds toward police violence comes at a time when the number of police abuse complaints nationally remains high.”

Bush and his Fredo, Gonzales, can see fictive depiction of “evil terrorists” everywhere - in the homeland and in far off lands.  But murdering Black children at home and Iraqi children in their own lands is not descriptive of “evil,” and thus, Bush and the pack of his criminal friends cannot see themselves for the true terrorists they are to many in this country and around the world. 

In The Nation, Gary Younge’s article on the police killing of Brandon Martell Moore, in Detroit, signals another sinister progression in the campaign to disappear the future of Black Americans.  In “plain daylight,” Younge writes, off-duty officer Eugene Williams shot Brandon “in the back” as he was the last young man to exit National Wholesale Liquidators.  He had entered the store with friends to look at video games, Younge reports, when Williams, security guard at the store, approached the young men, “claiming they were not accompanied by an adult.”

According to Brandon’s brother the report explains, Williams, “put one arm on top of the other arm and started aiming at us.” John Henry Moore, Brandon’s brother said Williams “was shooting to kill.” Brandon was the last to exit the store.  Did he not run fast enough? Maybe he could not believe what was happening.

And this should be enough - a young, innocent Black man on the ground - dead.  But there is more.  There is the injustice on top of injustice.  Officer Williams, previously involved in a 1971 “fatal hit-and-run accident,” writes Younge, “while under the influence of alcohol,” shot a young man to death “during a neighborhood fracas” in 1979.  Five years later, he “shot his wife in the side during a domestic dispute.”  Now you would think Williams would have been dismissed from the police force and prosecuted for the 1971 incident or certainly the 1979 incident, but you would be wrong - not Williams! No, he still wears the badge authorizing him to disappear the enemy! Talk about blatant disregard for our lives and the lives of our children - our future. This is still a policy of exclusion of Black Americans, in the year 2007.

“For a young Black man to be killed in cold blood by cops does not raise an eyebrow," Younge writes.  “Only the inordinate number of bullets makes it newsworthy.” Only the inordinate number of bullets.  To overkill is to draw attention to the behavior of law enforcement personnel in much the same way attention was drawn to U.S. soldiers who were ordered to torture detainees at Abu Ghraib.  Don’t call attention to what we are doing, so no one will notice. 

We must have a public debate about the conditions of poverty, lack of adequate and empowering education, decent housing, and health care, that is designed to segment a population under the control of the prison industrial complex.  It is not a matter of gearing more law enforcement with arms.  We need people with less of a desire for material wealth and more with a desire to want change in the way all citizens in this nation live their lives.  And change means wanting to create a more equitable society, where everyone is included and everyone is cared for.  Listlessly reciting ancient creeds is not enough.  Serving two or three months in Africa or Latin America is not enough, particularly if citizens in your homeland are under attack now.  The life you save now is your life in the future.

BC Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.