There’s something delicious about hometown drama after you’ve gone off to college. My high school years were hard enough without all the shenanigans going on in the hallways. But when my school started popping up in the local news last year, I gobbled the drama up from the safe distance of my dorm room. Like everyone else, apparently, I’m a sucker for a good tale of teenage rebellion.

The tale: for decades, my high school has had an unofficial group of mostly white, upper class senior boys who would sit in the front row of pep rallies and football games and chant and rave in a spirited and rowdy manner. They were also associated (to no small extent) with drinking and partying. They had a game day uniform, football jerseys, construction boots, and striped overalls. The school administration, citing past incidents of gameday misconduct, attempted to disband the group by banning their beloved overalls.

The parents of the boys threatened to take the administration to court for violating freedom of speech. The boys were just being boys, trying to have fun and get everyone involved in school spirit, they said. Fox 9 picked up the story, interviewed the superintendent and the mother of one of the boys. One day, the boys came to school wearing their overalls and refused to go home and change when the principal asked them to. A cell phone video of the boys and the administration standing and yelling at each other in the hallways went viral.

The school security guards are present in the video, but they don’t lay a hand on the group of boys refusing to budge. The community agreed the boys should have done as they were told, but the administration took the brunt of the blame for gloriously mishandling the group’s behavior. I didn’t think this shouting match was entirely odd, until another video, this time from South Carolina, went viral.

At Spring Valley High School, a teacher called a sheriff’s deputy to remove a sixteen-year-old student after she refused to put her phone away during class. The video shows the deputy then flipping the girl out of her seat and dragging her across the floor. The man has since been fired. Many people, from the sheriff of the county to, The View commentator, Raven Symone, have placed the blame of the incident on the “very disruptive and very disrespectful” behavior of the student.

I think back to my hometown community’s reaction to the overall-clad boys, and our society’s sympathy towards teenage rebels in general. We romanticize teenage rebellion as part of the magic of growing up. From James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause to Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, delinquents are portrayed as handsome, tortured souls up against a cold and outdated society. These figures make us nostalgic for a time when we could make mistakes and find ourselves.

The media comes up with any number of excuses to not feel the same for black teenagers who come into conflict with authority. Michael Brown reportedly stole cigars and grabbed at Officer Darren Wilson before being shot. Trayvon Martin looked suspicious. The student at Spring Valley High refused to put her phone away. Defiance is romantic for white teenagers, but for black teenagers it can be used to justify violence and even murder.

We need to stop asking ourselves what rules the black teenagers broke but why the police officers, who are supposed to be trained in de-escalating potentially dangerous situations and keeping everyone safe, so often fail in avoiding violence. We need to question why white teenage rule breakers are seen as normal but black teens are seen as dangerous.

Because if making mistakes really is part of growing up, the response should never be brutality.