Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed
Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed
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Dashka Slater on Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A book-signing line, a name she didn’t know yetThe story reached her at the exact moment she was closing out her previous book. She was mid-event, pen in hand, when a stranger in line named Albany, California, and something in that mention caught. The detail that held her was not the incident itself but what surrounded it: she had a teenager at home whose digital life was largely invisible to her, and Albany’s school district had reportedly chosen restorative justice, the framework she had been thinking about since The 57 Bus, as its response.
I was signing books for The 57 Bus and someone in line said, ‘Have you heard about what’s happening in Albany, California?’ When I began looking into the story it resonated with me. I had a teenager at the time whose online life was unknown to me, and I have always been interested in restorative justice, which I heard was the path Albany had decided to use in this case. All of that pulled me in.
Curiosity alone would not have sustained a four-year project. What committed her was a specific moral discomfort she recognized from the reporting of The 57 Bus, a 2017 nonfiction narrative about a hate crime on an Oakland bus: the sensation of holding two contradictory convictions at once and being unable to resolve them.
I had that same feeling I had when I was working on The 57 Bus: really uncomfortable because values of mine were in conflict. Obviously, I’m repulsed, upset, concerned, outraged. I also believe in the ability of teenagers to learn and grow from their experience, and I am wary of punitive or carceral responses. I needed to understand what is happening. How could this have happened in this safe, liberal community that we all think we live in in the Bay Area?
She has written on her Substack about choosing to write toward fear rather than away from it, and Accountable fits that pattern: the Albany account touched nearly every category of harm she finds most difficult to think about clearly.
When I heard about the discovery of a racist Instagram account at a Northern California high school, I felt the same way I did when I heard about a nonbinary kid being set on fire aboard an Oakland bus: shocked, horrified, and desperate to understand… It touches on topics that arouse deep-seated fears in me: racism, misogyny, shaming and shunning, suicide, being an adult who does harm while trying to do good, being a kid who doesn’t feel safe. It isn’t always fun writing about the things that scare you. In fact, it usually isn’t. But I’m so proud of the result.
She also pushed back against reading Albany as a local curiosity. The Southern Poverty Law Center data she found placed it in a national pattern, and that scale changed the argument she needed to make.
This incident was being repeated in schools across the country. According to a Southern Poverty Law Project survey, in the fall of 2018 alone there were 3,200 incidents in our schools. Every school is facing these kinds of incidents and they, and their students, don’t have the tools needed to navigate these issues.
How she wrote it
A hundred-page outline, four years, and a pandemicShe started approaching subjects almost immediately after hearing the story at the book signing, before she had a contract or a completed outline. Getting most of them to agree took time, but the early outreach meant the reporting and the outlining ran in parallel for years.
I heard about the account while signing advance copies of my nonfiction narrative The 57 Bus and almost immediately approached the people involved to see if they wanted to work with me. It took some time, but eventually most of them did.
The raw material she eventually accumulated was enormous: hundreds of interview hours and thousands of pages of legal documents. Her method for managing that volume was to delay writing until the structure was settled, however long that took.
The outline for Accountable was over 100 pages long and was incredibly detailed. Outlining it took months, in part because there was so much material — hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of legal documents. But once it was outlined, I wrote it fairly quickly.
The COVID lockdowns reshaped the interview process in ways she hadn’t planned for. Students who might have been guarded in other circumstances found themselves isolated and looking for connection, and that shift in their emotional state changed what they were willing to say.
When you talk to someone for hours, and they are sharing their feelings and their vulnerability, it is hard to not feel compassion. My work on this book occurred over four years, and many interviews took place during the Covid lockdown. Many of the students who created or followed these posts were very isolated at the time, and were seeking a connection, which caused them to be very open.
One of the structural problems in writing about teenagers who did harm is that the surface they present to adults is often misleading. She found that getting past that surface, particularly with the boys involved, required sustained time rather than a different line of questioning.
It’s very easy for people to take boys at face value as people who don’t share emotions or care, but just underneath that they’re emotionally complicated beings who want connection and love like any other human being.
Protecting the futures of everyone she wrote about set a hard constraint on the nonfiction form she was working in. That constraint was also, in her view, one of the form’s genuine advantages over fiction.
My number one goal is that they get to have lives that are not defined by some terrible thing that happened to them or some terrible thing they did.
The discipline the form imposed ran alongside that goal: every claim required verification, because anything she couldn’t confirm had to stay out, regardless of whether she believed it to be true.
What she wants us to sit with
Punishment is not the same word as accountabilityThe book’s title points to the question she most wants readers to carry out of it, and she found that almost no one she encountered, including the students themselves, was working from a shared definition. She built her own definition across four years of reporting, and it has specific, sequential steps.
True accountability is an understanding that you caused harm. Taking responsibility — you did it — and understanding what that harm looked like and how it was experienced by the person or people that you harmed. Reflection on how you could do that, what was going wrong for you… and then beginning to make amends and figure out how to repair some of the damage, and finally, not do it again.
She noted that many of her early conversations with boys from the account were spent with them trying to prove they were good people, which is not the conversation accountability requires. What they needed first, she concluded, was enough support to be able to admit what they did while still believing they would be loved anyway.
The book documents in specific terms what the account cost the girls it targeted: depression, academic collapse, anxiety, and a particular burden placed on the Black girls at Albany High who felt they could not express anger without being labeled. One image she returned to in interviews captures what the account did to defenses the girls had already spent years constructing.
This account feels like our meteor through the roof that just destroyed all their defenses. All the stuff they let go in the past suddenly they couldn’t let go.
She stated her overriding purpose for the book plainly in a video interview, framing it as a goal she carries across all her work rather than a one-time ambition for this particular project.
Always, what I’m trying to do with my books is to open up conversations and to get people to talk about things that they might not have thought about before or have an avenue to think about. [paraphrased from audio]
The philosophy behind that goal she articulated most fully in a 2018 essay written about The 57 Bus, but she applies it directly to Accountable as well. The refusal to simplify is not a stylistic preference; it is, for her, an ethical one.
To me fighting bias requires being comfortable with complexity, because life is complicated, people are complicated, and kids are complicated. The message I want to send to young people is not simple, but I don’t think that makes it the wrong message. It’s an honest message and to me, that’s the only kind that counts.