Accountable: Prologue–Part 2

The people closest to it were caught up in the group’s centripetal force, the whirl of jokes and banter that kept them all together. To speak up would have meant risking being thrown out of orbit.

The people closest to it were caught up in the group’s centripetal force, the whirl of jokes and banter that kept them all together.

Any of the top dogs in the group could have done it, or even someone on the periphery who couldn’t have been shamed into shutting up.

In 2017, Albany had just under twenty thousand residents, residents who counted themselves lucky to live in a place that seemed to offer the sophistication of the metropolitan Bay Area combined with the intimacy of a small town.

Of course it was exclusive, when you considered the cost of housing, but it wasn’t one of those fancy suburbs with gated subdivisions and sprawling McMansions.

Albany felt like a funky little backwater.

Albany felt like a funky little backwater.

The town had two main thoroughfares: Solano Avenue, a pedestrian boulevard peppered with small boutiques and restaurants, and San Pablo Avenue, a charmless state highway lined with car dealerships and insurance offices and dive bars.

Still, there was something comforting about living in a like-minded community at a time when so much of America seemed to be embracing bigotry and prejudice.

In 2017, your role was spelled out in a page-length poem in the high school yearbook that offered a breathless torrent of instructions for incoming students:
Work hard.
Make your parents proud.

While the percentage of white and Black students nationwide who got their education from community colleges is about equal, Black students were about one third less likely to graduate from a public four-year university, a discrepancy fed by differences in both income and access.

Charles was a kid who floated, drifting from room to room like a half-filled balloon, neither soaring nor sinking. He was hard to pigeonhole because he was so often contradictory.

Sometimes he’d sit and talk earnestly with one of the girls, his eyes filling with tears as he confessed how angry he felt most of the time.

Other times he was reckless and goofy, filled with frenetic energy, as if daring himself to cross some invisible line.

His dad had lost his job in the 2008 recession and now he spiraled into a deep depression; eventually, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

She was frustrated with his passivity, his lack of drive.

Both of his parents tended to compare him to Eliza, who had been a model student, a star athlete, and a winner of accolades of every kind.

Since Alexander was a software engineer, she enlisted his help in blocking Charles’s access to the Internet. An elaborate game of cat and mouse unfolded as Charles figured out how to evade each method, whether it was by breaking into a locked closet to get the router password or figuring out how to disguise the MAC identifier for his computer.

The line of demarcation was so clear. Healthy, curly natural hair close to her scalp, giving way to damaged, straightened hair below her ears.

“She was very, very empathetic,” he recalls. “If there was ever any type of issue, problem, it was really easy to talk to her about it because she didn’t judge at all.”

Despite her small stature, she was a beast on the varsity soccer team, where she played forward.

She’d lob Asian slurs back to him and they’d go back and forth that way.

But it was hard to tell sometimes whether his friends were laughing with him or at him. Andrea suspected the latter.

He was a button pusher, the kind of kid who thought it was funny to yell an anti-Hillary Clinton slogan out the window of the car when driving through liberal Berkeley or to set off M-80s behind the Albany pool.

Black artists and activists like journalist Ida B. Wells, essayist W.E.B. Du Bois, and singer Billie Holiday worked to make the scourge of lynchings visible to the world, just like Black Lives Matter activists have worked to call attention to the unarmed Black people who are killed by police.

They kept their anguish hidden, their faces smiling, and since he’d never spent much time thinking about the ways their experience of the world differed from his own, he assumed they saw the humor in it, the way his guy friends did.

Greg was the most recent addition to their group, the white boy among the other three Asian boys, and carried the cachet of also being friends with the popular kids.

As they waited for their food, Charles scrolled through pictures on his phone—memes he’d made, photos he’d collected that might be used for future memes. His model was the stuff he saw online, in YouTube videos and subreddits, some of which was funny precisely because it was offensive.

Charles already had a spam account in addition to his main one, but Greg suggested he make a second one expressly for this kind of “edgier” content.

Your main account is perfectly curated: photos of you, your family, your pets. This is the account your relatives and people from other schools will follow.

Some people sprinkle likes with careless abandon, double tapping on every post they scroll past, giving likes in the hopes of getting some of their own.

Others are stingy with the like button, only bestowing their approval on a worthy few.

By 2018, Instagram had earmarked most of its $390 million marketing budget for attracting and retaining teenage users.

An internal presentation described the migration of young people to other platforms as “an existential threat.”

An internal presentation described the migration of young people to other platforms as “an existential threat.”

Afterward, people who witnessed it couldn’t remember how overtly racist the presentation had been, but it was discomfiting enough that the teacher went straight to the administration seeking advice about how to handle it.

The stereotype that Patrick was invoking is a familiar one.

Often referred to as the “model minority myth,” it portrays Asian Americans as uniformly hardworking and successful, and blames the struggles of Black Americans on laziness or lack of aptitude rather than on the discriminatory policies that have often kept their efforts from yielding the same results.

It feels
like power it feels like tapping
a vein when I tap those keys,
sending a quip, a snicker,
a gif, a meme.

It feels like singing like tap
dancing every staccato
click is stiletto sharp it feels
good to tap these keys
because from way over here I can
hold you down
and never have to see you
gasp for air.