Word: boyness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...feelings of inferiority grow ceremonies, sacred rituals and symbols of counterfeit power--swastikas, trench coats. One boy, Eric Harris, establishes a home page on the Web: "Welcome to the works of the trench coat." They have become their symbol. Disguised, secure, they are free to cultivate what W.B. Yeats condemned as "an intellectual hatred." For Trench Coat Mafia members no less than ethnic cleansers, hatred becomes an object of intense study, a major, a creed. There is pleasure in it, in being on the outs with society. The boys form a Nazi fan club. They pick up enough German...
...always been tough to picture him as a murderer, this tiny boy with the bright, quick smile and dimples the size of gumdrops. As he romps across the floor of his home on Chicago's South Side, he looks like one of Barney's little friends. Too early, though, this nine-year-old fully understands that when you're poor and black and accused, real friends can't be found in a purple dinosaur or anywhere else in TV land. Indeed, for the past year his best friend has been the stately gentleman sitting quietly in the living room wearing...
Last week, as the boy ran into the living room, Pincham scooped him up and held him facedown across his knees. "Have you been good in school? Have you been obeying your teachers? Have you been nice to your parents?" Each question was punctuated with a tickle, so the boy's "Yes!" responses were sung in breathless hysteria. It was a lighthearted moment in a year that has been heavy with pain and injustice. As the boy dashed out of the living room, the adults quickly turned sober again. Rosetta Crawford, the boy's grandmother and family matriarch, took...
Last August, Crawford's grandson and another boy, one year younger, were charged with the murder of an 11-year-old girl, Ryan Harris, in a case that gained national attention as much for the youth of the suspects as for the crime's sickening details. Harris' body was discovered in the weeds of a vacant lot, her head smashed with a rock, panties stuffed in her mouth and leaves in her nostrils. A month later, after semen was discovered in her underwear, the charges against the boys were dropped, and DNA tests linked the crime to a convicted...
Meanwhile, both of the wrongly accused boys are still reeling from the trauma of the past nine months, from what family members describe as police "interrogation," to the murder charges filed in a hostile courtroom, to their returning home under house arrest--and the mobs of journalists camped outside their homes for weeks. Even today nightmares haunt the boys, according to their friends and relatives, and school days have become a dreaded ritual of taunting, fights and confrontation with youths who tease them about the murder. The younger boy, who once wore his hair in tightly braided corn-rows...