By: susie day, CounterPunch+
One day over fifty years ago, in the boys’ restroom of a Long Island elementary school, a second-grader named Anthony Dixon got punched in the face by a teenaged boy. Anthony, knowing he was too small to punch back, bit: “I bit him real hard; blood was coming down.” The incident might have ended with some rote, tough-love discipline for both boys, except that Anthony was Black; the teenager, white. So, at seven, Anthony was sent to the New York Children’s Village, a facility for “troubled children,” where he remained until he was nine. As he grew older, he spent more time in various forms of state custody. In fact, Anthony, now 61, estimates that, since his first encounter with “the system,” he has lived maybe eight years of his life outside an institution….