9 face murder charges in recorded after-school brawl in Georgia
It started out as a fistfight. Two girls -- emboldened by bystanders alternately yelling out support or derision -- went toe-to-toe in the residential street before they tumbled to the ground.
It only got uglier from there.
A two-minute cell phone video shot by a witness last week in Hephzibah, Georgia, captures the chaos as others join the fray, some wielding bats or pipes, others their fists. The driver of a black car targets two young men, narrowly misses them, and backs up on the subdivision lawn, striking another vehicle.
In the end, an 18-year-old boy was mortally wounded.
So sad and senseless
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We got to do better, we really do. 
Jacobs told CNN that six current Glenn Hills High School students have been charged: Quiasha Henley....
The other three charged, according to WJBF, are Quiauna Henley, 35...
We are wanted to feel sympathy for him and say he's a victim.
That means we downplay his maturity and legal status and make him "boy."
If he were 16 and we wanted to play up his maturity and respect owed, he'd be a (young) "man". It's tough to call a 13 or 14 year old Af-Am male "boy." Because it's racist. Unless your skin color makes you trustworthy, then it's not. The sociolinguistics are tormented and tortured, all the more so because different communities have shifting standards.
We do the same thing with girls. If an 18-year-old girl is victimized, she's a girl. if she's 14 and faced with making the decision over health or abortion, she's a (young) "woman." What's clear with "girl" is that it's not a race thing. So for "boy" we must cite two variables when only one will account for all the data in most situations. There's a reason many dislike Occam's razor so. In this case, the "secondary" variable accounts for all the data and the primary variable is pitched in for rhetoric and outrage.
In the '90s I lived in Los Angeles. I'd been conditioned for a few years to only refer to Native Americans as Native Americans. Suddenly there was the "Indian Gaming Initiative" (I think the word was "gaming", not "gambling"
. Ads appeared on the tv and radio talking about Indians, with tribal spokesfolk using the word. Indians are touchy feely and we're more sympathetic to Indians; Native Americans are proud and independent.
It's PR, pure Madison Avenue. Or as Lakoff would put it, "framing." As Lenin would put it, agitprop. As I put it, "linguistic manipulation."
