Accountable: Parts 3–4

Picture him walking through the halls during the opening credits, high-fiving and waving at people from every social clique while the movie’s theme song pulses in the background.

As school officials would later describe in court documents, it wasn’t long before there were close to a dozen girls talking and crying, their voices growing louder and louder as they shared their hurt and indignation.

You posted the video you are instigating it

He’d already gotten an earful from Rina, who had taken him aside to talk to him about it.

But the feeling of being watched lingered. The feeling that every inch of her was being assessed, analyzed, judged, and then dismissed as unworthy.

“At least have it down on paper that they were doing inappropriate stuff.” Anything more than that, she thought, would only make things worse. “I didn’t want more repercussions,” she says.

Boys saying inconsiderate/demeaning things in passing about colored people AND women

In 2015, a group of twelfth-graders created an account on Instagram they called Broke Boys where they posted degrading pictures of female classmates.

In each case, the administration’s response seemed lackadaisical at best.

“A lot of powerful, popular boys were involved or implicated, and I remember the prevailing wisdom was, nothing’s going to happen to them,” says Ned Purdom, who taught AP Literature, English, and Journalism at the high school when the Broke Boys account was discovered.

“A lot of powerful, popular boys were involved or implicated, and I remember the prevailing wisdom was, nothing’s going to happen to them,” says Ned Purdom, who taught AP Literature, English, and Journalism at the high school when the Broke Boys account was discovered.

“By not addressing cyberbullying, we are perpetuating the problem and unconsciously cultivating it by not taking proper action,” Davis wrote.

“By not addressing cyberbullying, we are perpetuating the problem and unconsciously cultivating it by not taking proper action,” Davis wrote.

“We are giving males a false sense of security and a confidence to move on with and even escalate their actions, but more importantly, we’re desensitizing women to these issues by making it seem ‘normal’ for these things to happen.”

“It’s a complicated task to investigate allegations of cyberbullying. Snapchats disappear, DM groups are closed to outsiders, and people are often afraid of providing evidence to administration because of concerns about retribution.”

They probably will do at least something about it, because these are blatantly racist.

Andrea and her father had been like mirror images: both stubborn to their core. “I wear his face so we’re always going to be very similar,” she says. “And for a while I really resented that, resented that we had so many common qualities.”

When he wasn’t cooking or hanging out with friends and family, the genial, funny facade would fall away and the man who remained seemed dimmed, exhausted.

When he wasn’t cooking or hanging out with friends and family, the genial, funny facade would fall away and the man who remained seemed dimmed, exhausted.

TV shows like Hannah Montana, iCarly, and Wizards of Waverly Place weren’t allowed in his house because the girls on those programs were far too sassy for his taste.

She worried about him, especially as she saw him not taking care of himself, but she was also furious at him for choking her, furious that he still didn’t seem to respect her autonomy.

It wasn’t until months into their friendship that she had finally told her best friend, Lydia, her tone so deadpan that Lydia didn’t believe her at first.

As she would later explain in a declaration filed in court, both the phrase “on the edge of bringing my rope to school” and the drawing of nooses around the necks of Lolia and her coach could be construed as threats of violence.

Rina’s mom was more visibly upset about the account than her dad. A surgical nurse, she would later say that the pain of learning what Rina and her friends were going through felt like having her chest cracked open.
Rina’s dad was more stoic.

Today was a very hard day and I know there are speculations as to why but I want to be clear, BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL, EVERYONE IS EQUAL, and lastly BE MINDFUL OF WHAT YOU PUT OUT INTO THE WORLD

“It was never anything that I’d ever actively look up and peruse through, or honestly thought about deeply,” Eren says now.

He was a default double-tapper, who scrolled and liked, scrolled and liked.

He still didn’t know the role his phone had played in revealing the account. He just knew that he was getting a blizzard of condemning texts and he was far more interested in figuring out how to survive the storm than he was in understanding what had caused it.

“By knowing about it and not saying anything about it, you are condoning this,” someone wrote.

“I recognized then: Yes, I did have a role in it. Being a follower of the account, liking, commenting, everything like that, that holds weight,” he says. “And that kind of prompted immediate introspection, like what does that mean for me as a person and my morals?”

“And that kind of prompted immediate introspection, like what does that mean for me as a person and my morals?”

Racism is microaggressions like describing a Black person as “articulate.”

At its most basic level, racism starts with the notion that human beings can be divided into categories based on physical attributes like skin pigment, hair texture, and the shape of eyes, noses, and lips.

When you think of racism as a system, rather than as a state of mind, it can help sort out all those contradictory definitions. The word can describe the most vile and horrific kind of human behaviors: slavery, lynching, discrimination. It can describe appalling attitudes like hatred, cruelty, and contempt.

But it can also describe behaviors and attitudes that are more like being selfish, or rude, or clueless—harmful, but also commonplace and potentially inadvertent.

“Worst case we can revoke a suspension if we learn that one or two had tangential involvement,” Williams replied.

But determining what tangential involvement meant wasn’t easy. None of the administrators had much familiarity with social media and the ways teenagers used it.

And even if they had, they might still have been hard-pressed to assign specific levels of culpability to each of the account’s thirteen followers. Was someone who followed the account but never liked or commented on a single post the same as someone who commented frequently?

There’s no way for me to rationalize why I did what I did. It was all just my stupid judgment of what would entertain my friends.

In time, his mental health stabilized and he moved to Los Angeles after serving a short stint in jail.