BY HANK REICHMAN

Last month the New York Times Magazine published an article, “The Instagram Account That Shattered a California High School,” by journalist Dashka Slater. It recounted the troubling tale of a racist Instagram account, created by a California high school student and followed by just thirteen of his fellow students, all white and Asian boys. The account was vulgar, crude, even vicious at times, and deeply offensive, but it was also juvenile and, well, rather stupid. Even its creator, a Korean American junior, and its followers did not take it seriously, which was a big part of the problem. Their fellow students did take it seriously, however—at least once they found out about it in the spring of 2017. Several of them, Black or mixed-race girls, had been friends with the boys involved but were racially targeted just the same in some of the posts. Their discovery of the account set in motion an escalating series of tragic events, including several expulsions, a near-riot on campus, fractured young lives on both sides, dueling lawsuits, and a deeply divided adult community.

The article is worth reading and provides an important cautionary tale for educators. But I’m here to urge that in addition (or instead) you read Slater’s remarkable book, on which the Times piece is based. Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed merits a wide audience, especially among educators, including in higher education. It is a deeply sensitive, empathetic, and in-depth account of an incident and its consequences that, sadly, as Slater makes sure to note, is by no means an isolated case (according to the book, one study documented some 3,265 bias-related incidents at K-12 schools nationwide in the fall of 2018 alone).

I read Accountable in part because I live in the community it concerns—Albany, California—and my daughter graduated from Albany High School where these events occurred. Albany is a small town of about 20,000 people adjacent to Berkeley, home of the University of California, which maintains a student family housing complex in Albany. Although built as a working-class suburb a century or so ago, its residents—mostly white and Asian, with a growing Hispanic minority—are now more often professionals—engineers, attorneys, computer programmers, nurses, and the like, as well as some professors and graduate students. It’s known for its excellent schools, which in the interest of diversity have welcomed transfers from neighboring, less affluent communities. Politically, it’s overwhelmingly progressive, voting as much as 90% for Democrats nationally and progressives locally (Barbara Lee represents us in Congress). That was not always the case, however. The town has a history of redlining and, when I first arrived in Berkeley to go to graduate school in 1969 its image was highly colored by the presence of a John Birch Society bookstore on one of its main commercial streets.

Albany High School

I had been only vaguely aware of the events Slater chronicles when they took place, both because my own children were long out of school and because in the context of the new Trump presidency places like Berkeley and Albany seemed to be, or so we hoped, more refuges from racism than incubators of it. At the time it seemed almost unreal to me that this would happen, although as both parent and educator I was well aware of how extensive and harmful adolescent bullying could become.

In any event, Slater’s book is an eye-opener. Her ability to treat both the victims of the harassment and its perpetrators with compassion and understanding, without minimizing the culpabilities of the latter, is masterful. The book raises many important questions about punishment versus restorative justice, about how much responsibility we can fairly place on adolescent actors, about the impact of social media, about the legal boundaries of free expression in and out of school. To her credit, Slater avoids judgments, but does not shy away from pointing out failures, and not only—not even mainly—among her young protagonists. This is a powerful story that will evoke strong reactions in readers, as it did in me, but Slater manages to maintain her fairness and reasoned perspective while finding ways to communicate the emotional intensity of her story.

Few, if any, adults in this tale come off well. This is especially true of the educators, although in fairness they were clearly caught off-guard, almost totally unprepared to deal with the rapid rise of social media that was so profoundly transforming their students’ lives. At one raucously counter-productive public school board meeting, dominated by accusations and recriminations from students and parents alike, one parent stood up to ask, in Slater’s words, “for a moment of community introspection, an investigation of the ways that Albany itself might need to change, and nobody was listening.” Slater does not explore how in the long term the school district has responded to the crisis—she mentions that the high school principal was dismissed mid-crisis but does not examine any curricular or student services reforms since then. Still, I expect, and certainly hope, that some lessons have been learned.

One lesson that we should all take from this tale concerns the inadequacy of treating racism and racist ideas—indeed, all bigotry—as solely, or even mainly, a matter of personal belief and responsibility. I get the sense that among both educators and parents in Albany there was an untested conviction that because the community is progressive and its schools fairly diverse that racist, sexist and similarly offensive ideas and behaviors would lack fertile soil in which they could grow. But this is the US and no place, and no one is immune to our national evils.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has pointed out that Naomi Klein’s recent book, Doppelganger, is less about its author’s own struggle to avoid being confused with Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist icon turned looney right-wing anti-vaxxer, than it is “about the instability of identity in the virtual world and the forces pulling people away from constructive politics into a shadow realm where clout chasing and conspiracy theorizing intertwine.” It should come as little surprise that such instability and such forces have first been experienced by those perhaps least prepared to deal with them: teenagers. But that is one important lesson of this book. As Slater informs us in a sobering conclusion, 73.2 percent of U.S. young people ages fifteen to twenty-five have encountered hate posts online, and 23 percent have been targeted by such posts. During the 2018-19 school year, one in four students ages twelve to eighteen reported encountering hate words or symbols written in their school.

It is impossible to read this book and not conclude that young people need better education. That it is impossible to defeat (or as some might have it, move beyond) racism and bigotry without directly and meaningfully confronting racism and bigotry, their histories and their present-day structures.

Yet here we are in a country where state legislatures in Florida, Texas, and other “red states” are mandating, via what PEN America calls “educational intimidation bills,” not only that anti-racist and other anti-bigoted ideas not be taught, but that seek to punish educators for even broaching these topics.  Anyone who has thought, “well, this is a red state issue,” think again and read this valuable book. It’s not a red state story, it’s not a blue state story. It’s an American story, and it’s not a pretty one.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012 to 2021 chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October 2021.