Book Review: “Accountable” by Dashka Slater

I first came across this book during an episode of The Daily, “The Rise of Deepfakes in American Schools”, where they investigated a terrible new trend about the use of generative AI use against young girls of colour. In the podcast, the hosts ask the question of schools,” How unprepared can we be?” One of the guests on the podcast was the author, Dashka Slater, who investigated and explored the cause and impact of a social media account on a small school in Albany, New York.

This books brings the reader inside the students’ lives, as a deeply anti-black and misogynist ‘finsta’ account is uncovered at Albany High School. You can read Slater’s NYTs article HERE – it is excellent, but I can recommend this book to educators because it follows the students from beginning to now using their own words, and that of their families, as well as from interviews that she conducted, and court documents plus minutes from school board meetings.

You know that saying, Truth is Strange Than Fiction? This is a great example, you can’t make this up. Unfortunately.

I would recommend this book if you are:

(1) An educator engaged in EDI+B work
(2) An education administrator
(3) A parent and / or educator interested in learning more about social media use in teens
(4) A teenager


The book reads very well, and I won’t be going into detail because this book is driven by the stories of individuals as they unfold over time, and as the impact of the social media account is felt by those targetted by it, and also those who created, followed and engaged with the account. The intersections of where harm is done, where trauma is felt, where lasting impacts on the lives of those involved, and with the school’s responsibility is complex.


The Role of Social Media in the Lives of Teens

Slater does an excellent job of explaining the role that social media plays in the lives of teens. She recounts the ‘Rules of Instagram’, explaining everything from what a ‘Finsta’ account is and how it is used, “This is the account people who really know you follow, the place where you spill tea…” (pg. 41), the power of comments, “Comments are worth more than likes, but the language of comments is complicated” (pg. 42), to the implication of “attention”, “…what [attention] earns and what it costs.” (pg. 43)

It is in these Finsta accounts that many teens try out ‘edgy’ jokes. From her NYTs article, she recalls one of the students’ saying about the finsta account in question, “he couldn’t remember much other than that it had seemed “edgy,” in the same vein as YouTubers like iDubbbz and Filthy Frank, whose accounts he followed and who were known for their provocative antics, which included everything from using racial slurs to baking cakes made of hair or vomit.” It is this type of ‘edgy’ humour that this book is about – what is the purpose of edgy content, what does it mean to post, to follow, to like and comment on such accounts, and what does this say about you as a person when you do?

The young men who created, followed, posted, liked and comment, on this private account largely identify as white and asian, and cis-gendered. They didn’t see the harm of what they were doing until the account was discovered by their friends, who identify as female and black and of colour.


Racism

The account had posted images that are horrific, that drew upon significant stereotypes and “Race Realism”. By reading this book, I was exposed to new, insidious ways of manipulating thinking into strengthening stereotypes.

Misogynoir. “Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey coined the term misogynoir – a combination of the word mysogyny and the French word noir (black) – to describe the particular ways that Black women are stereotyped and dehumanized.” (pg. 127)

Race RealismAlso known as scientific racism, biological racism, and human biodiversity. White supremist groups use this approach to promote their ideas through, what looks like, science. This is how one of the young men fed the flames of the account.

Slater does an excellent job debunking Race Realism, while also pointing out the difficulties of race and how it is understood, taught, and taken up in education. Interviewing Dr. Ann Morning, a sociologist who studies the intersection of race and science, “What makes people susceptible to this kind of thinking, Morning says, is the fact that we talk about race all the time as if it were a genuine scientific concept.” (pg. 369)

Stereotype Threat. When the anxiety and stress about being conscious of confirming a stereotype about your identity makes it more challenging to do an action successfully related to that stereotype. (pg. 317) Sadly, the account raised this threat to the young, black women who thought those boys were their friends. “But the feelings [of self-doubt, deceit, and shame] were always there, the feeling that maybe other people saw her the way the boys who followed the account must, as ugly or stupid.” (pg. 317)

Racism created a school environment where no one felt safe: not the students, not the teachers, not the adminstrators, and not the parents. Slater describes the school as follows:

Students running through the school. Students sobbing. Students slamming doors. Students pacing. Student who didn’t seem to recognise their own teachers. Students coming into classrooms to rest and regroup, desperate for a sanctuary where they could take a calming breath. Student who were friends with the Instagram followers who had made thei calculation that they’d better be out there protesting if they didn’t want to be branded as racists. And hundreds of students sitting in the atrium and ont he steps and on the school’s front lawn, waiting for the [accused] boys to come out. (pg. 228)

What follows is the story’s nadir. When shame, guilt, revenge, love of a child, trust and broken trust and all the other emotions you can imagine, come together when edgy, online humour collides with the real world of those that it targeted.


What Makes Someone Racist?

In a chapter dedicated to this question, Slater writes, “When you think of racism as a system, rather than as a state of mind, it can help sort out all the contradictory definitions [described above].” (pg. 88) And this is significant, because through her interviews with the students involved, it is clear that while they are posting anti-black hate, they still don’t see themselves as racist. For example:

When he got home after the movie, he posted a message to the 1,200 or so followers on his main Instagram account. “I did not create this account,” he remembers writing. “I do not condone what was posted on this account.” It went on, a paragraph-length defense against the accusation that he was racist.

If anything, his post, which he labored over for hours, made things worse. “By knowing about it and not saying anything about it, you are condoning this,” someone replied.

So what does online engagement with ‘edgy’ accounts mean? The school administrators grappled with questions:

(1) Was someone who followed the account but never liked or commented on a single post the same as someone who commented frequently?
(2) What about people who hit the like button, but never commented?
(3) What about the pope who commentd by didn’t say anything racist? (pg. 91)

And eventually, the lawsuits came. Which meant that the lawyers representing the administrators and the schools grappled with The Tinker Test. The Tinker test was established after a 1969 court case, “Tinker v. Des moines Independent Community School District, where students were disciplined for wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam war.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas wrote in the decision. Instead, the court held, school officials must prove that a student’s conduct would foreseeably lead to a substantial disruption of school operations. (pg. 350)

And so, this is where the discussion shifts: away from race trauma and towards the disruption of school operations.

It is worth reading this book, because Slater does an excellent job, in plain language, conveying the different elements of the case put forward by both sides, and the judge’s decision.

“Students have the right to be free of online posts that denigrate their race, ethnicity or physical appearance or threaten violence, [the Judge continued]. They have an equivalent right to enjoy an education in a civil, secure, and safe school environment. [The account creators and followers] impermissibly interfered with those rights either by creating the harassing posts or by liking them or commenting on them in an approving fashion. That gave the school the right to discipoine them either by expulsion, in Charles’s case, or suspension…” (pg. 396)


Intervention

This is a story that has many cautionary tales within. Originally, the Albany High School administrators didn’t know what to do when students organized a sit-in, while the accused students were in the school. Administrators aren’t given a playbook for events like this; however, this book is a great place to start. What went wrong, how would your school handle these cascading events?

The administrators then called in an organization to help the healing; however, they didn’t vet the organization thoroughly, and they proved not up to the task. Their ‘session’ actually turned up the heat because of lack of proper facilitation and safety in place prior to the session.

Here, Slater does an excellent job helping educators understand (and dare I say create a playbook) events through a different lens. She calls on experts to delineate between shame and guilt, between calling out and calling in. “Shaming people can thus have the effect of making them double down on the behaviour they’re being shame for…Calling out happen when we point aout a mistake, not to addresss or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender…Calling in, by contrast, is always done with love.” (pg. 251)

The error was thinking that these students were ready to talk. But they weren’t – the emotions were too high, the pain to real, and the words still inflamatory. Indeed, students didn’t have the words yet to express how they were feeling, nor what they needed to feel whole again.

Slater also calls upon the graduate work of Sarah E. Jones, who explored college students’ attitudes towards the conditions on whether or not they would step in and intervene with something they saw online.

  1. Honour Proximity: Respond only if you are close to the victim or know the story behind the interaction
  2. Respond According to Severity: If it doesn’t seem really harmful, keep scrolling
  3. Embrace the Cultural Environment: Base your actions on what is considered acceptable in your peer group
  4. Gauge from Others’ Responses: If somebody elese says something, you can keep silent
  5. Avoid Personal Consquences: Make sure that you don’t end up being the next victim

These are really unwritten rules of how to behave online, and they offer up reasons why youth won’t intervene, and they explain how this finsta account kept going and going, despite so many people knowing it was wrong.

These also offer up a great tool for educators and parents to speak about cyberbullying with their students and children. Does this resonate with them? What does “harmful” really mean – harmful to whom? What strategies might we have to intervene if we felt we wanted to?


Perspectives

Out of this awful experience, Slater offers the reader the many different perspectives of what happened, what was felt, and why, as well as the historical, contextual experiences of the US in general, Albany’s history, and the history of the people involved. She offers the legal perspective as well as the educators and education administrators. It is these perspectives that make this book the ‘one good thing’ to come out of this otherwise terrible experience.

I think that this book would be a very effective read for school leaders, guidance and those that work closely with students on EDI+B work. It would even be an effective book club for educators.

On the author’s website, there are a host of great resources to guide such discussions: https://www.accountablebook.com/resources


John Doe had continued the soul-searching journey that began after the account’s discovery. By his sophomore year in college, he found that he was grateful for the way the experience had changed him. He was more serious now than he’d been as a 15-year-old social butterfly, plagued by both anxiety and depression. Still, he thought he had gained more than he had lost. “Had I just continued that trajectory at Albany, how I would be as a person — I think I would be worse off,” he says. “I would probably be less introspective, less critical. I would think less. Because I question things now in a way that I don’t think I could have before, had I not gone through the experience like this.”

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