Slater, Dashka. Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed. Macmillan/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 08/2023. 496pp. Nonfiction. Trade $20.99. 978-0-374-31434-7. GRADES 6–12. OUTSTANDING.
Slater presents an account of the racist Instagram posts targeting Black girls by a Korean student at Albany High School in the Spring of 2017 and the reverberations throughout the town and school district when the posts were discovered. In a style similar to that of her previous work (The 57 Bus, 2017), Slater lays out the sequence of events after the discovery. The students who created and followed the site were initially suspended, but then brought in for a restorative justice session that went horribly wrong, resulting in a series of lawsuits against the school district. Slater creates a narrative pieced together from detailed research, including extensive interviews with the students who created the account, the students who were targeted by the account, school administrators and staff, parents, and other community members. Racism, toxic masculinity, Internet trolling, and bullying are all explored in this complex story of casual racism between kids who grew up with one another in a small, tight-knit, supposedly liberal community.
Rachael Reiley—Hillcrest Elementary K-8 / Oakland Unified School District