It had barely a dozen followers, but the discovery of its racist posts turned a Bay Area community against itself — and changed students’ lives forever.

Credit…Illustrations by Pola Maneli

By Dashka Slater

• Aug. 17, 2023 (NYTimes.com)

Earlier this summer, Melisa Pfohl, an elementary school principal in Albany, Calif., was sitting cross-legged on a friend’s couch drinking coffee and scrolling through the emails that had accumulated while she was on a brief, end-of-the-school-year vacation, when she opened a message from her school district’s superintendent. It was short and to the point. On June 20, the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear the last remaining appeal from the last remaining lawsuit stemming from an Instagram account that convulsed Albany High School in 2017.

When the account was discovered, Pfohl was in her first year as a high school assistant principal after spending a decade teaching elementary school. A biracial Asian and white woman with wavy silver hair, expressive brown eyes and a silver hoop in one nostril, she had known many of the students embroiled in the Instagram account since they were in third grade and had been personally named in some of the ensuing lawsuits. Now she put down her coffee and began to cry. “It was a huge relief that this whole thing is done,” she says.

Done, and yet also not done. Because Albany, a liberal, affluent town of around 20,000 people in the Bay Area, is still struggling with the aftermath. It was a private Instagram account with barely more than a dozen followers. Few people saw it when it was live. Yet its discovery derailed lives, shredded relationships and caused families to flee both the town and its public schools. What happened in Albany happened online, but the repercussions played out everywhere people gathered: in homes and classrooms, at supermarkets and on sports fields, on Facebook and Nextdoor.

Part of the injury was to the town’s self-regard. Albany is so tiny that people who live there call it Smallbany. Bordered by Berkeley to the south and east, by the gray-blue waters of San Francisco Bay to the west and by El Cerrito to the north, Albany is just under two square miles. It isn’t one of those fancy suburbs with gated communities and sprawling McMansions. It feels like a funky little backwater. The homes are mostly stucco bungalows or shingled with wood, the yards and porches festooned with rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter signs.

Almost half the residents are white, and more than a quarter are Asian. Thirteen percent are Latino. You could call it “diverse,” and you probably do if you’re white, but it doesn’t feel as diverse to Black residents, who make up just over 4 percent of the population. It isn’t that diverse economically, either; median household income is above $113,000 (nationally the figure is about $70,000). Parents shoehorn themselves into Albany’s modest dwellings for one key reason: the schools. If you’re one of Albany’s roughly 1,200 high school students, you know you’re lucky to be there.

That’s one reason the Instagram account was so painful. The schools — three elementary schools, one middle school and one traditional four-year high school — are what bind Albany together. After the account’s discovery, they were also what wedged it apart. The divisions remain in place.

At the town’s middle school graduation in June, parents whose children had been on opposite sides of the chasm opened by the account sat two rows apart from one another and didn’t speak. At the high school, where disciplinary policies and much of the curriculum have been revamped in the account’s wake, teachers deployed competing narratives about how exactly the events should be interpreted, with some seeing them as a calamity that occurred despite Albany’s particular virtues (small, liberal, educated, interconnected) and others as a consequence of Albany’s particular shortcomings (too white, too insular, too wealthy, too obsessed with academic achievement).

The questions that the account raised — about fighting bigotry, about the impacts of social media and about the best way to respond when young people in your community fail so utterly to live up to the values you thought you shared — had no simple answer. Whatever you believed about Albany, about America, about teenagers, racism, sexism, social media, punishment and the public discourse on each of these topics, the story of the Instagram account could be marshaled as evidence. It was the incident that explained everything and yet also the incident that couldn’t be explained. But I have tried: I spent more than five years reporting on what happened, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews and reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, as well as police reports, social media posts, letters, diaries, photographs, text messages, videos and public testimony.

“It’s like the event that tore apart our city,” says Kim Trutane, who was on the school board at the time and now works as the district’s spokeswoman. “More than that, it kind of ripped our hearts. Because everyone was just like: How could this have happened? How could such a hurtful and damaging thing have happened in Albany?”

For A., it all started a little before 11 a.m. on March 20, 2017. A junior at Albany High School, she had just left her third-period culinary arts class when she was met by a group of girls, most of them Black. “OK, we’ve got to tell you something,” one of them said. “Like we have to tell you.”

A. waited impatiently. It was probably just some kind of boy drama. But it wasn’t — not the kind of boy drama she was expecting, anyway. There’s a racist Instagram account, the girls told her. A bunch of people are following it. And there are pictures of you on it.

Everyone at school, it seemed, had at least two Instagram accounts — the curated one that your relatives and people from other schools could see, and a more informal “spam” or “finsta” account for posting memes, rants and candids for your inner circle. But this account was something else.

Two of the girls in the hallway, one of them Black and one Asian, were the ones who had seen it. Over the weekend, they had been hanging out with one of their close friends, a biracial white and Mexican boy whose nickname was Murphy. (Because they were minors at the time, all the young people in this article are referred to by their initials, middle names or nicknames.) Murphy and the two girls had gone to see the movie “Get Out,” and afterward, he had shown them a private account created by another friend, a Korean American boy whose middle name was Charles. It featured memes about Black girls’ hair, about slavery, about lynching.

Most of the girls gathering around A. were in tears. They had known Charles and many of the account’s 13 followers for years. A multiracial group of extended friends, they had slept over at one another’s houses, hung out together in class and at lunch, lounged around after school watching movies. Several of them were even planning to go to prom together.

A. was the only one of the girls who wasn’t surprised. She slammed her fist into a wall. I should have listened to my mom, she thought. I should have done something to prevent this.

A. remembers feeling out of place in Albany from the time she transferred into the school district, in the third grade, and the feeling intensified when she went to high school. She had a Black father and a white mother, and it seemed clear to her that she wasn’t the kind of girl that Albany boys liked. Those girls wore Lululemon leggings, tossed their long, straight hair over their shoulders, laughed when boys teased them or put them down. Those girls were smart enough to get into a good college but not outwardly so smart that they made people uncomfortable. A. was never going to be one of them. It wasn’t just her brown skin or her curly hair or her low voice. It was something in the way she held herself. Her friends described her as “strong,” “funny,” “sarcastic” and “straightforward,” but beneath the confident exterior she was on shaky ground. Her father had died suddenly just before she started high school, and she had been struggling with depression ever since.

The problems with Charles and his friends had started a couple of months before. She was in Algebra 2, deep in her own thoughts, when she felt a hand in her hair. It belonged to a white boy she sort of knew; they had friends in common. She swatted the hand away. Being pawed like this wasn’t unusual: Whenever she changed her hairstyle, someone’s hands would be in it. She wasn’t about to make a big deal about it — it was the middle of class, and anyway if she got into it with everyone who tried to touch her hair, she would be exhausted.

Then a friend showed her a video of the entire interaction that Charles had posted on his finsta. He had captioned it, “Touching the Nap.”

She confronted Charles on Snapchat, and after some back and forth, he deleted the video. But a few days later, she heard that Charles had posted another classroom photo of her on the same account. This one just showed the back of her head: her bun, her ear, the hood of her sweatshirt. The caption asked whether the photo was of her or another Black girl in the junior class, as if they were impossible to tell apart.

This time she confronted Charles in person and made him delete it. “Don’t post anything else,” she told him. “We are not cool. Don’t talk about me.”

But the feeling of being watched lingered. It made it hard to go to school. Eventually, at her mother’s urging, she talked to Melisa Pfohl, then assistant principal, about what had happened, but she insisted that she didn’t want the school to take any action. “I didn’t want more repercussions,” A. told me during one of many interviews over the ensuing years. Pfohl remembers wanting to respect the autonomy of a teenager who said she preferred to handle the situation on her own because the people involved were part of her social circle. While it seemed like “a messed-up” thing, Pfohl says now, “I didn’t know it was forecasting anything at the time. I sure wish I would have.”

By noon, the girls’ distress had attracted the attention of the school’s administration. Pfohl and the school’s other assistant principal, Tami Benau, ushered them into a conference room. Everyone was talking at once; many were crying. The chaos made it hard to piece together a narrative. Eventually, Benau went to interview Murphy, the boy who revealed the existence of the account, while Pfohl distributed photocopied forms for recording student complaints. Only a couple of them had seen the account firsthand, but now the others remembered the questionable comments and racist jokes they had shrugged off in the past. Everything looked different today.

The problem was, they didn’t have any evidence. Already the 10 or so girls in the conference room were starting to feel hopeless. It would be their word against the boys’, and then everything would go on as normal. Still, they wrote down what they could on the forms:

Private Instagram account of disgusting racist images about multiple black girls in my grade making my very close friends ball their eyes out and have fits of rage.

I’ve heard multiple racist comments made to my friends.

This also affects me b/c I am a Black Girl, already am selfconscious of my self.

One girl, Kerry (a version of her nickname), hadn’t gone into the conference room. She was close friends with both A. and Charles. The daughter of immigrants from Thailand, she was known for being such a good sport that her friends teased her constantly, particularly about her refusal to say anything bad about anyone. Now she was thinking about how she could get copies of what the other girls had seen on Murphy’s phone.

As she walked to her fifth-period class, she pulled out her phone and found the Instagram account the girls had been talking about. It was private, so she couldn’t see the posts, but the app listed the people she followed who also followed it. One name stood out: a boy of mixed Asian, white and Latino descent who would later be identified in litigation as John Doe. Kerry hardly knew him — they had spoken only once or twice — but they were mutuals on Instagram, and another friend of hers, Rosie (a version of her middle name), had dated him briefly. Both of them were in psychology, her next class. When she walked into the classroom, she asked Rosie to borrow Doe’s phone and then meet her in the restroom.

Doe and Rosie have different memories of what Rosie said when she approached him. Rosie, who is white, says she asked him straight up: “Kerry says there’s this weird racist Instagram account you’re following. Can I look at your phone?” Doe remembers her offering a made-up excuse, something like, “Hey, my phone just died, and I need to call my parents.” They agree that he unlocked his phone and handed it to her.

Minutes later, Kerry and Rosie were standing in the middle of the girls’ bathroom, their heads bent over the borrowed phone. Kerry took pictures of the screen with her own phone as Rosie scrolled through the account. Some of the posts were the kinds of things you might see on any other high schooler’s account — memes, guys roasting each other, the regular kind of dumb. But the rest were shocking: a half dozen posts mocking different white and Asian girls at the school for their weight or other aspects of their appearance. Worst of all was the overt, unfiltered racism: Black men being lynched or beaten. Jokes about the Ku Klux Klan and racist slurs. A screenshot of the Snapchat conversation between Charles and A. about the hair-touching video that was captioned, “Holy [expletive] I’m on the edge of bringing my rope to school on Monday.” 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.”

“It was so much worse than I anticipated,” Kerry says. “I didn’t think I would react that badly, but I was physically shaking.”

They didn’t have much time. If they were gone for long, their teacher would notice. Rosie scrolled; Kerry photographed. She took pictures of the most offensive posts, roughly two dozen — about half of the total. She took pictures of the comments and the list of followers. Then she sent them via AirDrop to Pfohl and some of the girls.

As A. sat in the conference room, going through the images, she had trouble taking in what she saw. Then she saw a familiar photo. It had been lifted from her own Instagram account — her favorite picture from a trip to Lake Tahoe with her best friend. It had been paired with a photo of a gorilla. “I just got this stomach feeling of like, Wow, basically anything I do is not going to be good enough for these people,” A. told me. “I can’t even take a picture of myself in the snow, looking how I look, and post it on Instagram.”

That night, Charles, sobbing, called his sister, who was away at college. She wasn’t that alarmed at first, because he had called her in tears plenty of times, usually after getting into a fight with their mother, who had divorced their father a few years earlier. Compared with his sister, who had been both an academic and an athletic superstar in high school, Charles was kind of a slacker — smart enough to take advanced classes like A.P. computer science and A.P. physics but not motivated enough to get better than B’s and C’s. He had a close group of male friends that he had hung out with since middle school or even earlier, most of them white or Asian, and he also was tight with a couple of groups of Black and Asian girls. With the girls he tended to let his guard down more, allowing them to glimpse the depression that had dogged him since the collapse of his parents’ marriage. His stepfather, who is white, would send him emails brimming with spiritual advice. “Depression is one bad habit you cannot afford,” he wrote in one. “You may have every reason to be depressed, but accepting those reasons will only deepen your depression. Do not give in to the dark side. … Choose not to be depressed!”

This time, however, Charles wasn’t calling to complain about the usual family conflicts, which were often about his mother’s frustration with his passivity, his lack of drive, the amount of time he spent playing video games. “It’s really bad,” Charles told his sister. “I did something really bad.”

It took him a long time to tell her what. “We’re going to figure this out,” she assured him when he finally choked out a description of the Instagram account. She suggested he start by taking responsibility. He remembers writing his apology with her on the phone, the two of them editing it together. He posted it on Instagram that night:

I completely betrayed people who considered me a friend and I cannot even begin to explain how disgusting I feel. All things that were portrayed on the account do not actually portray my true feelings about people of color. I want to be someone with integrity, someone who cares about all people and someone who people can trust. I have not lived up to that at all. There’s no way for me to rationalize why I did what I did. It was all just my stupid judgment of what would entertain my friends. I cannot express enough that no one but me deserves any hostility or consequences. I don’t expect forgiveness because my actions are unforgivable.

Then, exhausted from crying, he fell asleep.

The account had started at a chain restaurant called the Melt that was known for its grilled-cheese sandwiches. Charles was sitting in a booth with three friends, two of them the children of first-generation immigrants from China and the third a white boy who carried the cachet of also being friends with the high school’s popular kids. It was a winter weekend day sometime late in 2016 or maybe early in 2017, and the four boys, as they later explained in interviews and court documents, were doing what they always did when they were together: trying to make one another laugh. As they waited for their food, Charles scrolled through pictures on his phone — memes he had made, photos he had saved for future memes. His model was the stuff he saw online, in YouTube videos and subreddits, material that seemed funny precisely because it was offensive. Charles didn’t think too deeply about the morality of that kind of thing. What mattered was that these memes made his friends laugh.

Humor was the glue of their friend group. They were the class clowns and the envelope pushers. The ones far more focused on cracking one another up in class than on whatever they were supposed to be learning. Put-downs, roasts and pranks were how they jockeyed for status.

Charles showed the other boys a photo of his friend Ana (a version of her first name) wearing a little black dress and a white coat. Ana, who has a Black father and a white mother, had posted it on Instagram with the caption, “i wanna go back to the old way.” “Does she really, though?” Charles said. When we talked about this moment more than a year later, he wasn’t sure if he had made the joke more explicit: If they really went back to the old way, Ana would be enslaved.

Whatever he said, the others laughed. So he turned the joke into a meme, right there at the Melt, stitching Ana’s post to an old-fashioned engraving of a naked Black man hanging from a tree while being beaten by a white man. He captioned it, “Do you really tho?”

“You should post these somewhere,” his white friend said, then suggested Charles make an Instagram account expressly for this kind of “edgier” content. They all said they would follow it if he did.

So Charles made a new private account and called it @yungcavage, a play on “young savage.” By March, it had 14 followers, including Charles himself. The first few followers were Charles’s close friends, all juniors, like him. The remaining six weren’t in Charles’s inner circle. Three were juniors he was friends with but didn’t spend a ton of time with outside of school, and three were sophomores he knew casually because one of them was in his Mandarin class and had introduced him to the others. Six of the followers were white; the rest were Asian, Latino or Middle Eastern.

Looking back, Charles traces his offensive humor to video games, because if you played a single game of League of Legends online, you were almost guaranteed to hear a barrage of racist terms and homophobic slurs from the other players. In the online kingdom where the edgelords reigned, you gained citizenship by signaling approval. On Reddit forums there were memes that had been “upvoted” by a lot of people, and in 2017 a lot of those memes found humor in things that objectively weren’t funny, which was kind of the point. Racist jokes. Jokes about suicide, pedophilia, rape, incest, mass shootings, the Holocaust, people with disabilities.

It was easy to laugh at those things when they weren’t about you — and you could prove you belonged in the kingdom by laughing even if they were. “Like with all these jokes, in the back of my mind, I know it’s wrong,” he says. “It’s offensive. That’s part of what the humor comes from.”

Something about the surprise of it. Something about it being transgressive, shocking, not meant to be said or even thought. Which meant that the worse it was, the funnier it would be. “I guess the humor just got darker and darker as I explored more of the internet,” Charles says.

Ironic racism could feel like something that just happened, hatched in the peculiar incubator of inside references, digital gags and detached exaggeration that is Gen Z culture, although there is evidence that white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups have actively pushed this kind of humor into the mainstream. (Because Reddit has improved its enforcement abilities since 2017, much of what Charles and his friends used to see there has migrated to platforms like 9GAG and iFunny and Discord or has been transformed into videos on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.) In 2017, offensive humor was pretty commonplace at Albany High School, at least among white and Asian boys. Shortly after the account was discovered, a senior named Jillian Guffy wrote “What Does It All Meme?” in the Albany High School newspaper. “The constant exchange of offensive memes breeds a vicious competition where the jokes get increasingly more shocking until the initial jokes are no longer very outrageous,” she wrote. “If every time we open our social media accounts we are met with offensive memes, it’s only natural for us to get used to that type of media.”

Today Charles says that if he saw the account as an outsider, he would conclude that the person who made it was filled with hate. Not just because of the content of the pictures, which were bad enough, but also because he targeted specific people, including his Black friends. Ana, in particular, had been one of his closest friends since eighth grade. “The fact that it was people that I had interactions with on a daily basis definitely made it look like I hated these people,” he says. “Which I don’t.”

He knows this is hard to believe and that it sounds as if he’s making excuses. “All the pictures are super messed up,” he says. “It’s definitely racist. I’m not in denial about that, but the way I explain it, I feel like it still makes it seem like I am.”

During the period when Charles was posting racist images on his @yungcavage account, he also wrote a thoughtful essay about racism that connected the hypocrisy of the founding fathers with the failures of Reconstruction and the present-day prison system. Perhaps the essay was written just to get a good grade. Or perhaps these two parts of his brain had found a way to coexist inside his skull, like neighbors who take the same elevator to side-by-side apartments in the same building but never engage in conversation.

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