How a Century of Racist Policies Made Ferguson Into a Pocket of Concentrated Despair

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8. And it's been kept invisible

In 1973, my husband and I drove to Florida. I-95 wasn't quite complete yet, so there were a few stretches where we had to take secondary roads that wound past tumbledown shacks. They looked like something off a movie set -- but they were very real and I'm sure there were people living in them.

But a few years later, the last gaps in the interstate were filled in, and those shacks and those people were effectively wiped off the map. They became non-persons.

Something similar happened a few years later when we were returning home from visiting friends in Washington and the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel was closed so we had to detour through the city streets. We became hopelessly lost and passed through block after block of black neighborhoods before we found out way to the other side.

More invisible people. Poor people struggling to survive who you would never see or hear about on the evening news.

This country is very practiced at keeping people invisible -- until something happens that gets noticed. That's the real reason why Ferguson has blown up, and it has nothing to do with Mike Brown's personal flaws or virtues. It's about an opportunity to be seen.