Columnist Susan Snyder: A lesson in ‘acceptable’ violence

Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2003 | 8:15 a.m.

It's been a week since I met a Mojave High School senior who challenged me to consider the labels adults place on young people and the sticky residue they leave behind.

The 17-year-old criticized the ongoing updates about the 311 Boyz, a group of Centennial High School students accused of committing vicious attacks during the summer.

Her classmates and their neighbors die of gang shootings and receive a fraction of the attention, she said. Violence somehow is more acceptable when it happens in such places as North Las Vegas.

"I go to school now with people who are 'in the ghetto' per se, and their cousins have been shot by gangs. You don't hear about that," she said. "But there's the 311 Boyz on the morning news every day."

She said she feels sorry for the Centennial students who now bear the kind of guilt-by-association her classmates have long endured.

She recalled an October 2000 incident in which five Mojave students were charged with animal cruelty after beating the bulldog mascot of rival Centennial.

"I was a freshman," she said. "I was on the tennis team, and everywhere we went the whole school was reflected on. We just had our homecoming (this year), and the dog still was brought up.

"Next year, even though none of the students who are there would have been here when it happened -- they'll still be viewed as 'the school that beat the dog for school spirit,' " she said.

She then spoke of how a teen who lived next door to her boyfriend in North Las Vegas was shot by a gang member who lived across the street. Her boyfriend's little brother was outside playing with the family's dog at the time.

Neither the little brother nor dog were injured.

But the boy next door died.

"The gun shells were left in the yard," she said. "The (news) stories said, 'Local gang member shot.' It made the 5 o'clock news, and then it was over with."

Over for us -- the media, the community at large, the people who live in neighborhoods where such incidents "aren't supposed to happen."

But this teenager has news for us: These kinds of attacks aren't ever supposed to happen. They just do, in some communities more often than others. And it's time we examined the effects of the labels that linger.

Maybe it's easier for us to consider these kinds of crimes when the ones accused and the ones attacked are cleaned up and easy to find in the sterile atmosphere of a courtroom.

They're paraded past us, flanked by lawyers who answer our questions and give us the sound bites that satisfy our curiosities.

Their actions were captured on video, making it easy to watch from our La-Z-Boys. It's certainly easier than venturing into "the ghetto" to see the boy lying on the pavement.

"If you're missing and you're rich, you're in the news," the Mojave student said. "If you're not, maybe you'll end up on a milk carton or something."

Affluent. Gifted. Magnet. Talented. Honor student.

Low-income. Remedial. Watch-list. At-risk. Gang member.

The labels we affix leave no child behind when it comes to creating images for them to live up to.

"We're 'ghetto' supposedly," she said. "It's like you're lower."