"Accountable" by Dashka Slater, Parts 5–7

He was tall, broad-shouldered, and deep-voiced, with square-jawed good looks and an affable, even-keeled temperament.

When that happened, Wheaton usually walked Billie over to the counseling office because her mental health was fairly precarious.

But him having spoken up once in her defense seemed so meager in the context of all the other posts he’d let go by.

Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey coined the term misogynoir—a combination of the word misogyny and the French word noir (“black”)—to describe the particular ways that Black women are stereotyped and dehumanized.

The apologies came too soon, or maybe too late.
They sounded too hasty, or else too polished.
Just a bunch of smart words grouped together.
Cut and pasted. They came by text
when they should have come in person.
They came in letters that were never sent.
Not everybody gave one, so nobody gave one.
They were scattershot. They were stilted.

On Reddit’s front page were memes that had been “voted up” by a lot of people, and in 2017 a lot of those memes found humor in things that objectively weren’t funny, which was kind of the point.

“Like with all these jokes, in the back of my mind, I know it’s wrong,” he explains. “It’s offensive. That’s part of what the humor comes from.”
Something about the surprise of it. Something about it being transgressive, shocking, not meant to be said or even thought.

“It’s a fairly explicit strategy from some groups to draw in young people who are interested in pushing boundaries or being edgy,” explains Lindsay Schubiner, program director at the Western States Center, which has created a tool kit for combating hate at schools.

Hate groups of all kinds have discovered that messages that are disguised as humor, irony, or trolling are far more persuasive and attractive to young people than straightforward racism. Take, for example, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which its editor, Andrew Anglin, once described as “non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.”

Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred.

The most successful trolls live in a shadowland where everything is ambiguous. Are you being racist to be racist, or racist to make fun of political correctness, or even racist to make fun of racism? Who knows?

As Brian Friedberg, the senior researcher for the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center observes, “There’s an ambient anti-Blackness in Internet culture that often goes uncritiqued, or largely unnoticed.”

The app iFunny, for example, contains thousands of memes that glorify Nazis, mass shooters, race war, and armed insurrection, while the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism, has found white supremacist, antisemitic, transphobic, and pro-terrorism videos garnering millions of views on TikTok.

The app iFunny, for example, contains thousands of memes that glorify Nazis, mass shooters, race war, and armed insurrection, while the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism, has found white supremacist, antisemitic, transphobic, and pro-terrorism videos garnering millions of views on TikTok.

By 2016, three quarters of American youths ages fifteen to twenty-one had run into extremist content online, an increase of about 20 percent from 2013.

Those online exposures inevitably bleed into the real world.

His method was to take a random picture from Instagram or Snapchat and then add the most incendiary image or language he could.

“My sense from our conversation yesterday is that you felt constrained and bound by the discipline matrix,” Val Williams wrote Melisa Pfohl on Thursday, March 23.

Albany was a tiny district, and few of its professional administrators or elected school board members had ever navigated a crisis of this magnitude.

“He’s done something just egregious here,” his stepfather, Alexander, remembers saying.

“These guys deserve to be expelled (and without that expulsion being ‘stayed’),” a former school board member wrote in an email to a current board member, “and if they aren’t expelled, the message of white privilege and rich white people getting away with stuff, and the message that Albany is a racist city and a racist school, will reverberate around the country. Our district and our city will be tarnished for the foreseeable future.”

Racism, of course, has done all of that and more, which is one reason that it elicits such strong emotions. A slur, a stereotype, a joke, an assumption is never just itself. It’s also everything that came before it, centuries of wounds, cuts on top of cuts on top of cuts.

The person who made the joke or used the slur didn’t commit all of racism’s many crimes, but they still used the same weapon, its blade honed by repeated use.

Being racist and sexist isn’t illegal, and even language like “on the verge of bringing my noose to school” didn’t meet the standard for being a criminal threat, which California law says must be “so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific” that it communicates serious intention and the “immediate prospect” that the threat will be carried out.

Other researchers have focused on feelings of powerlessness, which can afflict anyone who is categorized as low status, whether it’s because of race, class, or bullying.

In that meeting, the lawsuit contends, Principal Anderson told Murphy that the flames of the Instagram account controversy would have burned themselves out if Murphy hadn’t “tossed gasoline on the fire” by responding to Lolia’s request.

On Sunday evening, after followers of the account had completed their three-day suspensions and were getting ready to return to school the next morning, Principal Jeff Anderson sent out a terse email informing them that their suspensions had been extended.

In study after study, social psychologists have found that people are less likely to intervene or offer help if there are other bystanders present. One reason for this is called “diffusion of responsibility.” When lots of people could intervene, no individual feels that intervening is their responsibility.

In general, people are more likely to intervene if a situation is clearly dangerous, if the perpetrator is there in front of them, and if the cost of not acting seems higher than the cost of acting. All of which means that online bullying and bigotry are particularly prone to the bystander effect.

Gauge from others’ responses: If somebody else says something, you can keep silent.

A local nonprofit called SEEDS (Services that Encourage Effective Dialogue and Solutions) volunteered to hold a mediation session between the two groups of students on Thursday, March 30, the day the eleven followers, likers, and commenters were supposed to return to school.

Looking back now, he can see that he was hoping to receive some kind of absolution, a way to get back to the life he’d had before.

“I still definitely did not consider the full ramifications of everything,” he says.

“But I had this remorse that I wanted to try to right it, for my own self, in a selfish sense, to maybe stop this inner turmoil.”

Seated at a curved dais beneath the city seal, the members of the board moved through the mundane items on their agenda until it was time for public comment.

He talked about going to a rally at the high school over the weekend, when more than three hundred people had joined hands to encircle the school in a gesture of solidarity.

“We have been conditioned that accountability means pain and punishment,” observes Aishatu Yusuf, Impact Justice’s vice president of Innovation Programs. She defines accountability differently—as “an understanding that a harm took place and that you are responsible for a piece of that harm.”

“The conflation of accountability and punishment is what leads to continued, archaic activities that solve nothing,” she says, asking, “Is our goal to prevent this crime or action from happening again, or just to punish an individual?”

“And if the world isn’t changing for me, and my people are going to keep being persecuted, oppressed, and killed, why do I have to act differently? Why do we need to forgive? Let’s treat the oppressors how they treat us.”

And I think we conflate working toward a better world with being silent. We conflate working toward a better world with being accepting of bad behavior. We conflate working toward a better world with being docile. They are not the same.