Pubdate: Fri, 10 May 2002
Source: Kansas City Star (MO)
Section: Special to TeenStar
Copyright: 2002 The Kansas City Star
Contact:  http://www.kcstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/221
Author: Nick Allen

TREAT ME LIKE I AM, NOT HOW I LOOK AND ACT

Every time I leave the house people stare at me like I am some kind of an 
exotic animal. They walk faster and avoid eye contact like I might leap out 
and bite them.

I am treated like blacks must have been in the '50s in the South. Or the 
way Jews were treated in Hitler's Germany.

But what I am is an alternative lifestyle teen-ager in the American 
suburbia of the new millennium.

I am on the end of the social spectrum where people assume everything about 
you. I am what society sees as the source of our problems. People believe 
I'm here to annihilate anything that moves. From malls, movies and school 
to the homes of my friends -- my life is a constant battlefield and I am 
outnumbered.

One battle happened at the mall with my two friends. We'd been selling 
necklaces we'd made with beads. When we approached a cart to buy more 
beads, a man stood at the register eyeballing us. He processed our every 
move. A small family walked up and started touching beads left and right 
and the man at the register never said a word. But at us he barked: "You no 
touch beads!" We dropped our beads and watched the family touch beads and 
not be harassed.

One time a couple friends and I decided to meet at the movies. Having no 
one to drive us, we skated to the movies. We arrived exhausted, like 
over-worked horses. We hadn't walked through the door all the way when a 
large woman bellowed "SKATEBOARDS ARE NOT ALLOWED HERE!" As her spit 
splattered against the cashiers' booth, we cursed the woman and the theater.

But our war is not just fought out in the world, but in our own school. I 
can sit in class with my hand raised and the right answer in mind and not 
be called on. I am automatically seen as a suicidal, hard-core, drug addict 
who is going to kill everyone in my school because of who I am, what I am 
and what I listen to.

Things don't stop there. I have friends whose parents blame their problems 
on their choices of friends. That they have bad grades because they are 
affected by us. That somehow us listening to metal or skateboarding is 
affecting the way their kids think. That somehow we influence them to make 
choices like self-mutilation or drugs.

It has nothing to do with us. If they self-mutilate it's most likely a 
problem caused by their homelife. And drugs are usually the same.

We are picked out to make others look good. Like how my friends are 
searched for drugs on a regular basis but in class I listen to football 
players talk loudly about "getting wasted" and nobody does anything.

What I'm getting at is, discrimination isn't just about skin color or 
religion. It's about lifestyles, personalities and generalizations.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth