School bullying
“Curry muncher” – that’s what an opponent called my 17-year-old son in the heat of a close soccer game. The other team was losing and frustrated.
This offhand epithet only mildly punctured his sheltered life during a rough game peppered with many scuffles and even a red card. Growing up in the Bay Area with a myriad of friends from different ethnicities, my son found the insult funny and had a genuine laugh about it. This sort of name-calling does not happen often in his world.
He would be the first to recognize his privilege and realize that the bubble that he lives in insulates him from the bullying and stereotyping that happens in many high schools.
Online bullying
With online bullying, about half of the extremist content focuses on race or ethnicity according to the Government Accountability Office, said Dashka Slater, a New York Times journalist. She is the author of “Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed. The statistics say that 3 in 4 American young people aged 15 to 25 have run into extremist content online.
This invariably bleeds into real life. One in four students aged 12 to 18 have seen hate or words or symbols written in their school and about 1.3 million students were bullied because of some aspect of their identity. “It’s very easy to feel like these are bad racist kids who are doing this, ” said Slater, at an Oct. 27th EMS briefing on School Bullying and How it Fuels a Culture of Hate.
She pointed out that often kids who aren’t even racist dial into bigotry because “they are often following the lead of a more biased peer and they’re imitating things that they are seeing on social media.”
An Instagram account that blew up a Bay Area town
Slater’s book “Accountable” investigates a six-year saga of hate acts and lawsuits in Albany, a small town just north of Berkeley. One of the cases even landed in the Supreme Court, but along the way, tore the small community of Albany apart and shattered the lives of the students involved.
It kicked off when a young Korean-American junior created a racist social media account on Instagram to share jokes about images of lynchings, the use of the N-word, and other slurs. The account had 14 followers in addition to its creator. At least 10 students were targeted, most of them black girls who happened to be friends of the creator.
Slater was shown “a photo of another Black girl and her Black basketball coach with a noose drawn around each of their necks and the caption, “twinning is winning.” Other memes included generic body shaming, an anti-Semitic post, and a South Asian boy who was targeted for the color of his skin, said Slater.
The girls who were targeted felt betrayed and hurt added Slater, not just because their identities were under attack, but also because the perpetrators were peers they had trusted.
An important observation, said Slater, was that kids of color who are harassed for their identity were harassing other students about their identity.
It’s not bullying. It’s just a joke
So why is this happening? Slater’s investigation suggests that extremist groups are carefully and thoughtfully targeting young people. They create racist memes and videos in their extremist channels and then migrate them into mainstream channels where kids run into them. Children often don’t have the critical skills to be able to analyze what they’re seeing “and so take that to mean that this is an acceptable kind of humor, that it’s not serious, that it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t create any lasting harm,” added Slater.
The racist Albany Instagram account started in a similar fashion. The boys involved were just trying to make one another laugh. “Put-downs, roasts, and pranks were how they jockeyed for status,” explained Slater.
And yet there was what she calls an appalling disconnect between what the kids were doing and who they thought of themselves as being. “Many of the kids who follow the account consider themselves to be anti-racist.” This inexplicable disconnect “was something that they had not themselves explored and was very misunderstood.”
Kids are being radicalized online cautioned Slater. As the algorithms serve them up more and more extremist content, they get kind of steeped in it. They don’t realize what is happening, or how they are being changed by this content she added.
Bullying in liberal enclaves
Children also are learning this behavior from their families, said Slater. These attitudes trickle into schools when kids act out the sentiments expressed by adults in their homes.
Unexpectedly, racist behavior occurs quite often in liberal affluent towns and within liberal families because of what’s happening online, warned speakers at the briefing. Albany is a perfect example of this. In this town of about 20,000 people, like many cities in the Bay Area, almost half of Albany’s residents are white, a quarter are Asian, 13% percent are Latino, while Black residents make up just over 4 percent of the population.
Santa Barbara, a liberal community where you think this would never happen, is another one of “those very places around our state that we are experiencing this,” said Connie Alexander, President of the Santa Barbara NAACP and longtime educator.
African American people, especially the youth, still experience the highest levels of hate. “The violence of language is where it starts,” said Alexander, when young Latino students name-call black students.
It happens every day and then moves into physical violence.
In one horrific incident, “a young man was assaulted, thrown to the ground. He was beaten up. The boys jumped on him, jumped on his neck, and chanted ‘George Floyd.’”
It blew up in the community. People wanted a resolution, but, said Alexander, “I could tell you to this day that that family still has not received any of what was coming to actually resolve the situation. It took five months for that young man to even get a mental health check-in to see a therapist.”
The repercussions are heartbreaking. “Ten percent of black youth at some point might consider suicide or attempt,” warned Alexander.
It’s easier to be a bully than to get bullied
In the Latin community, reports Anahí Santos, the Wellness Coordinator For One Community Action, she sees Latino youth bullying indigenous peers, with serious consequences. It’s easier for young people to navigate school being a bully. In the long term that could turn into gun violence, leading to drug abuse problems and eventually ending up in jail. Santos contends that it is hard for Latino youth to even connect to joy “because our struggles are so big.”
For many, even at the age of 12, “we’re already worrying about being like the main caretaker in our family, having to take care of siblings, having to work during the summers or sometimes even, you know, asking days off during the week to work and provide for our families. And so when I say that it’s easier being the bully than it is being bullied. It’s like, the closer you are to, like a white or like whiteness, the safer you are, right?”
Santos advocates for the inclusion of Ethnic studies in school curriculums so young Latinos can learn about their peers’ cultural background, and feel pride in their own history.
Building these connections helps them recognize that “there’s just a lot of racism that’s embedded within Latino culture, and it’s our own community hurting itself.”
Bullying inside communities
In Oakland, high school sophomore Mina Fedor was horrified by the xenophobia unleashed on her Asian community when COVID-19 struck. At the time Fedor was still in middle school.
She founded AAPI Youth Rising and organized a small community gathering at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park. Only 70 attendees were anticipated but over 1,200 people showed up.
“That day I realized that I can make a difference by taking these small actions and that people actually wanted to hear some of these perspectives of youth.”
She recognized that an issue that needs to be addressed is Asian students making fun of other Asian students and trying to bring down other API groups to seem like they can fit in. “I think that’s a big problem,” said Sedor, ” … a lot of the hate that I see sometimes is from within.”
The lack of representation in media and history books leads to perceptions of Asians being “perpetual foreigners”, said Sedor. “We are cast as model minorities that are too successful and these stereotypes are being reinforced by those in power and to keep us in.”
AAPI Youth Rising has developed a One Day of AAPI History Lesson that’s being taught in classrooms across the country to break down stereotypes about Asian Americans.
Is bullying a crime?
While not all forms of bullying represent unlawful discrimination, some are acts of hate crimes, said Becky Monroe, the Deputy Director of Strategic Initiatives and External Affairs at the California Civil Rights Department. These acts of hate “inflict physical and emotional harm on students and their school communities.”
Schools must provide all students with a safe, supportive, and inclusive learning environment, free from discrimination and harassment, continued Monroe. “Schools have a legal obligation to ensure that students are not denied opportunities, treated differently, discriminated against or harassed because of their race, color, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or disability.”
Empirical research demonstrates that acts of hate inflict substantial harm on students and their school communities – causing physical and emotional harm, said Monroe.
This is part of the reason that we developed California versus Hate, explained Monroe, to make it safe and easy for people of all ages to report acts of hate and get support.
California vs Hate is not run by the police. Your report will not be shared with law enforcement without your consent.
You can currently submit reports online in 15 languages and, when calling the hotline, you can get access to support in over 200 languages. Callers will be connected with a professional trained in culturally competent communication and trauma-informed practices.
This resource is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to CA vs Hate.
Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay