Accountable: Parts 11–15

“I’m trying to figure out how to say this in the least offensive way possible,” he said. “It really is kind of reprehensible stuff.”

While some websites are clearly created by white supremacist groups, many are designed to hide their origins by looking as if they are created by legitimate scientists or come from peer-reviewed journals. They use scientific language and even have scientific adherents, the most prominent of whom was James Watson, half of the Nobel Prize-winning team that deciphered the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule.

The people who promote them tend to portray themselves as the few brave voices willing to speak the explosive and politically incorrect truth. Sociologist Dr. Reanne Frank has dubbed this narrative “the forbidden knowledge discourse.”

One of the first people to divide humans into “races” was Carl Linnaeus, sometimes called the “Father of Taxonomy,” who invented the two-part naming system we use to classify all life-forms.

Writing in the mid-1700s, when people didn’t know much about human difference, Linnaeus suggested that there were four races of people from four different continents. Homo sapiens americanus, as he labeled Native Americans, was “red, ill-tempered, subjugated.”

But his categories, and his ideas about the “nature” of each group of people, have lived on long after the abolition of race-based slavery. In fact, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the claims of today’s “race realists.”

Evolution, blood groups, the measurement of skulls, IQ tests, genetics—each of these scientific breakthroughs was almost immediately used by someone to bolster the argument that people can be divided into racial groups and then ranked, with white people always landing at the top.

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.

Up until World War II, many U.S. textbooks talked about the superiority of the white race as if it were an established fact, and promoted eugenics—the idea that “defective” humans should be prevented from reproducing—as an example of forward-thinking social policy.

After fascism was defeated in Europe and the horrors of the Nazi regime were exposed, these ideas were taken out of textbooks and for a while they were actively refuted.

But in the 1960s, race nearly disappeared from science textbooks. The political upheavals of the civil rights movement made the topic too “controversial.”

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.

One reason that people can be susceptible to false ideas about biological race is that in high school science classes, genetics is often taught in its most simplified form, where a single set of gene variants, or alleles, govern a particular trait like eye color. Left out of the equation is the role of the environment, which can influence how genes behave.

According to his police report, Officer Andrew Jones was acquainted with the boys and had a good rapport with them, and the boys spoke candidly to him about what had happened.

Natalie, Andrea’s mom, wanted her to sue the boys. Get herself some justice. Andrea hated the idea.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “This is not going to be a continuous way that I spend my ever-so- fleeting time.”

Still, he tried to make himself claw through the miasma of his depression and find some motivation.

But to some of the people who’d been impacted by the account, the party had an ominous, Confederate-flag-waving feel to it.

Most of them made a point of not attending. The one exception was Ana, who put on a cropped flannel top and a pair of acid-washed Daisy Dukes and went to the party.
The backlash was fast and furious.

Ana knew people had a certain expectation of her, both because of the video she’d made and because her father, Lewis, was the de facto spokesperson for the parents of the people targeted by the account.

“With this mixture of being really uncomfortable and also feeling really sorry for them. They should have known better. There’s no excuse. It was such a dichotomy of feelings and I didn’t know what to do with myself aside from to be nice but to distance myself.”

“Students have the right to be free of online posts that denigrate their race, ethnicity or physical appearance or threaten violence,” he continued.

“Although some of these plaintiffs’ conduct may have been experienced as hurtful and unsettling by classmates,” the judge explained, “the court cannot say that their involvement affirmatively infringed the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone.”

When he was younger he used to go there with his friends, string a hammock between two trees, revel in the silence.

It happened almost by osmosis—that sense that there was a different way to be in the world. “I had so many role models and just great people to look up to and strive to be like,” he says.

“You’ll have no options after that,” she told Andrea. “You’re limiting a plethora of opportunities for yourself if you don’t do anything.”

Lydia lived in an adjacent town, a wealthy enclave of just over five thousand people.

In March 2018, Andrea’s attorney filed a complaint in Alameda County Superior Court against Greg, Charles, Patrick, and their parents for battery (in the touching of her hair), violation of her civil rights, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and invasion of privacy.

For the students who had returned to Albany High School, the settlements were a windfall. Their families didn’t have private school tuition to pay, so the money was simply absorbed into bank accounts that were already well stocked.

The apologies offered. The contrition expressed. All of that seemed hollow now.

More than once, the tension had erupted into full-blown conflagrations.

She was used to talking about race and gender with her students—that was a hallmark of her teaching—but she wasn’t used to feeling like she couldn’t stop them from wounding each other.

You are not perfect, but you are good. Read the word and the world. Learning is contemplation over time.

Charles sat down for deposition after deposition, not really clear about which case he was being interviewed for.

Once these students were exposed, social media users would mete out the punishment: doxing them, sending them hate messages, reporting them to their job or school.

The platform where it all started was now poised to be the instrument of revenge.

After attorney fees were subtracted, the total didn’t quite reach the hoped-for $80,000 benchmark, but it was still a nice chunk of change.

So picture her now, materializing in front of her freshman self.

“Had I just continued that trajectory at Albany—how I would be as a person—I think I would be worse off,” Eren 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.”

After settling her lawsuit, Andrea moved to San Marcos La Laguna, in the southwestern highlands of Guatemala, to study meditation, metaphysics, and yoga at a retreat center by Lake Atitlán.

Number of times per day that the average Black teenager encounters racial discrimination either online, offline, individually, vicariously, or through teasing: 5