Accountable by Dashka Slater

 

Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed is Dashka Slater's follow-up to The 57 Bus, which I thought was a lucid look at a complicated, hard issue. Accountable follows the same pattern of examining the intersection of teens and hatred. At a school in the Bay area of California, a student creates an Instagram account in which he posts racist photos and memes of his classmates. What follows is an examination of the fallout of this account for the victims, the people who engaged with the account, and the entire community. 

This is a field that is so ripe for this type of deep dive examination. Cybercrime and cyberbullying is such a huge issue. Even if students move schools, their online reputation may follow them. What is the role of a school in preventing and/or punishing cyberbullying? Why are teens even engaging in this type of behavior?

I feel like one of the things I say about the students at the university where I work is that they are unmotivated and many of them are not smart, but they are nice. And I have thought this about most teens I have worked with in my life. 

I was teaching a class once about racial politics in the U.S. when a student raised his hand and said, "Why are we even talking about this? Once everyone in your generation dies, all the racists will die, too." (Let's ignore the "your generation" like I am billion years old.) It was hard to defend against this logic because no one in the room considered themselves a racist, just like none of the teens who were part of this racist Instagram account would have said that they were racist. 

Anyway, I half sort of bought into that student's argument because it did seem to me that the young people I met were more accepting of differences than when I was their age. It seemed like we were on a trajectory of more inclusivity. And then Trump was elected. And all those differences in acceptance levels disappeared. 

This is an important book, particularly for teens and parents of teens.  It's not perfect (there are too many characters, too many endless scenes about sad teen girls), but it's definitely worth your time. Don't be intimidated by the huge page count, either - there's a lot of white space and the chapters move by quickly. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

The cops interviewed the girls as well, asking if they'd ever been physically harmed or threatened. Had they ever felt like their lives were in danger?

No, of course they hadn't. For many of them, it was just the opposite. These boys had been their friends, or the friends of their friends. They'd slept over at one another's houses, chatted with one another's parents, hung out together at school. And all the while those boys had been thinking of them as monkeys and imagining them being lynched. (page 78)

I'm going to skip right over boys and girls have sleepovers (am an old fogey, I guess) and talk about how this is really important for young people to learn early. The people most likely to commit violence against you are the people closest to you, so be careful who you pick as your friends. 

Education researcher Dr. Brian Donovan has looked at the beliefs of high school students in schools very much like Albany High School: affluent, majority white, but still relatively diverse. About a fifth of the students at these school believe ... that there are differences between the races that determine people's intelligence and other abilities. That belief is shared by about the same percentage of U.S. adults. 

Ugh. Just ugh. 

Hat mention (why hats?):

He had a full white beard and was wearing a black Stetson hat.