there’s a lot of focus on the “anti-woke crowd” and cancelling online by adults but not much attention is paid to how teenagers often create these same right-wing mobs against other students. very long thread

one place i’ve encountered this very clearly is what happens when white people, especially teenagers, are called out for their racism or simply doing something bad that they felt entitled to do.

last year i complained some kids in my grade were partying and joking about their cop parents not coming to break it up at the start of the riots. they found these tweets and suddenly lots of (mostly white) classmates were flooding my mentions and attacking me

specifically, they were trying to make me the bad guy and make me shut up. they made anonymous accounts to harass me, posted on anonymous stories insulting me, and when i called a few out for being non-Black and saying the n word, it got even more aggressive.

they reported me to the principal and tried to start a campaign to get me stripped of being valedictorian which eventually ended in me being forced to delete the tweets. It was stressful and awful in the moment, but ultimately i was fine. But the mob mentality was there.

however, when it is NOT white people/people who are respected who attack these certain subset of kids, it gets even worse. recently, an anonymous account appeared to try to hold our campus police accountable for policing Black students and students of color -

and not addressing strangers fishing/biking/maskless on campus (currently our campus is closed to the public). the account allowed submissions of photos of people who shouldn’t have been on campus. there were issues with it, but the intent was to get the school to act

in particular, a photo of some local teens were posted on it. these teens found the account and started taunting in the comments. the account owner self-identified saying they were a student of color, and kept fighting with them (along with some other students fighting them)

Suddenly, a bunch of the teenagers friends were commenting, their parents started to show up in the comments fighting people, and total strangers began fighting. It got aggressive fast but it was the same kind of mobbing. The teens were in the wrong - they trespassed and fishing

line has literally been found stuck around birds on campus. these teens were majority white and so were the parents. the school did take some action and the account died down as mixed feelings grew. however, it was just discovered that screenshots were posted on a far-right site

the screenshots include comments from students at my school, their profiles, taunts about appearance/transphobia/tons of disgustingly racist anti-semitic comments about the people posted. this included many Black students and students of color. this is an active threat to them

the teenagers who started the initial mob likely don’t know this has happened, and even if they find out will still probably not feel guilty. but they are distinctly at fault for this. people much smarter than me have analyzed this type of white violence

the fragility starts young, the self-victimization, and the use of proximity to whiteness (not all students harassing people were white and there is definitely a class layer to it too!) and it’s just as dangerous as when a far-right mob happens in the streets

most students, especially students of color, who have been outspokenly leftist/anti-racist/even sometimes just mainstream dem have seen this from classmates. it truly is on a level unlike any “cancelling” from the left reaches (barring bad faith leftist actors with big platforms)

it’s scary and it’s often brushed aside as just teenage bullying but it truly is white fragility and supremacy in action. the white students who get attacked? we usually end up ok. but Black students especially and other students of color can have their lives threatened by this

We can’t just keep writing this off as cyberbullying because it is beyond that. you can’t blame individual students who may have inflamed those mobs either because in the end, they’re not at fault.

White students learn from a young age how to leverage their privilege, even if they don’t realize exactly what they’re doing. And because of that, they feel powerful after engaging in these mobs because they never see accountability, they don’t see that they were wrong.

Other white students need to be at the front of calling this out and helping to defend non-white students if they see this start to occur. take over the fighting, be the one who is attacked, etc. Support systems need to be there for everyone involved too

It’s terrifying. It’s white supremacy. And adults in positions of power need to learn how to intervene and not just say “oh you should watch what you post on social media.” I have so much more to say on this but my head hurts so yeah. End of thread (?)