How do you respond to a young person who is upset by racist jokes at school?

The sixth-grade boy who raised his hand was wiry and short. “People at my school make racist jokes,” he said when I approached him. His voice had yet to change. “How do I get them to stop?”

I was sitting on the stage at a high school in Piedmont, California, finishing a conversation with two high school students about my new book, “Accountable,” which was adapted into The New York Times Magazine this past August. Both the article and the book tell the story of the unrest that befell a California high school and its community after some students created and shared racist material on an Instagram account. Since the article and book came out, I have spoken at schools across the country about the issues the story raises: radicalization on social media, racism, humor, lad culture, the consequences of bullying and the difficult question of how to effectively comment.

This particular audience was largely adults, and they responded with applause, as if the boy’s desire to stop racist jokes was triumphant enough. Maybe it was. But this sixth grader wasn’t looking for approval. He wanted a real one answer, not the platitudes adults fall back on when asked about the toxic social dynamics of middle and high school: “Be nice!” “Speak your mind!” “Be an upstander!” He wanted to know how to get the people at his school to stop making racist jokes without becoming the butt of the jokes.

I talked about having a firm but non-confrontational phrase ready, something like “Dude, that’s messed up.” I talked about how to identify which classmates had the social influence to influence their peers and how to approach those people. I talked about when to get an adult involved and how to choose the right one. But as I spoke, I thought, “You know I’m just a journalist, right? I’m the one asking to ask. Why do you think I have the answers?”

This is both the joy and the fear of talking to young people about current issues. I usually start by asking students to raise their hands if they have seen or heard hate speech online, whether it be the use of slurs on gaming platforms; racist memes or videos on social media; or ugly comments in the comments section of an article or video. Of course they all have that. We all have.

If I have managed to keep their attention – harder to do just before lunch or during the first lesson, when they have only just woken up – the students will respond to my presentation with questions that show how relevant the topic is for their lives and how enthusiastic they are about the subject. they are for guidance.

Sometimes the questions are philosophical: “How do you know if someone is a good or a bad person?” “You say everyone has the ability to transform, but what if it’s a mass murderer?”

Sometimes they are practical: “What should we do if we see something racist online?”

And often the questions are very personal. Usually at the end of my presentation there is a small group of students waiting to talk to me. With the sensitivity typical of their generation, they will keep some space between each other so that the person speaking to me is not overheard.

In that little cocoon of privacy, I have heard a young woman sob in my arms after she said, “Those girls you wrote about must have felt that way. heard. But no one listened when it happened to me!” I’ve heard the stories of young people being targeted with everything from racist comments to violent bullying. I answered questions about freedom of speech and the role anger plays in the emotional health of victims.

“I didn’t want to write about my experiences with racism,” wrote Jeena Ann Kidambi, a student from Framingham, Massachusetts, in an essay about the girls, Ana and A., who are featured in the Times article because they were targeted by racist Instagram account. Like A., she wrote: “I didn’t want to dwell on those memories. However, writing this essay and embracing my emotions on this subject gave me closure and freed myself from the stranglehold of anger.” (The essay won a contest in her school district, sponsored by the Swiacki Children’s Literature Festival at Framingham State University.)

At one school a girl spoke so softly that I had to lean towards her to hear her. Hesitantly, with her eyes on the ground, she asked how people could make up for the damage they had done if the wronged person would not talk to them. She didn’t tell me what she had done, but I could tell it haunted her—both the guilt over the injury she had caused and the fear that she would be punished forever.

I often think about this girl and wish I could give her a better answer. At every school I visit, I remind students that it is a work in progress, that they will both experience harm and cause harm during their teenage years, and that they have the capacity to survive both. And every time I walk away I’m struck by how vulnerable they are to forces they didn’t create or control.

Dashka Slater is a writer in California with a focus on teens and criminal justice. Her book “The 57 Bus,” a New York Times bestseller, was based on an article she wrote for the magazine in 2015 and won a 2018 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association.