Online Hate: Unfriend or Speak Up?

The morning of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I logged in to Facebook as I do most weekend mornings to see the status updates of 200 or so acquaintances. Many had posted links to news articles and patriotic photos or comments about their memory of that day in 2001. I was not prepared, however, to read a blatantly xenophobic post by someone I had gone to high school with. He called for the extermination of Islam and the strategic bombing of all countries in the Middle East.

My first instinct was to “unfriend” him. Why clutter my newsfeed with outrageously ignorant comments like these? Then I thought of my students. If one of them had said something similar in class or written it in an assignment, I would have dropped everything and grabbed hold of the teaching moment. I would have taken the time to probe at their reasoning and unpack the hatred. To ignore it would have been to condone it.

As much I wanted to simply unfriend this person I have not seen in 15 years and move on with my Sunday morning, I replied in as few words as possible. “I am extremely offended by your post,” I wrote. I hoped he would rethink his opinion or ask me why he had offended me so we could talk about it. Instead, he emailed me privately that he was sorry to offend me. He didn’t remove his post, just my response to it. 

But in a few hours, several of his other acquaintances posted similar messages in response, asking him not to spew hateful messages. By day’s end, he deleted his post.

The trouble is, I don’t know if he still carries the original emotion that fueled him to write such an inflammatory message. He knows now that it is not publicly appropriate. Was it enough? This is really no different than when a student makes a misogynistic or homophobic comment within earshot, notices I’m there and says, “Oops. Sorry, I didn’t see you, Ms. Thomas.” In their mind, it’s only a problem if the perpetrator of hatred is caught.

Now I’m left wondering where my high school pal and I diverged. We grew up in the same suburban town. We attended the same high school. We had some of the same teachers, who had the chance to teach us to be tolerant and understanding. If teachers have the power to mold minds or change the thinking of their students, why didn’t this work on my “friend”? Did it work on me? Do the beliefs of our family of origin outweigh anything we might learn during our formal education? I suppose if this were true, I would be a happy meat-eating, pro-life Catholic. I’m not.

Perhaps most baffling to me is that this “friend” has a dark complexion and a name which could be mistaken as Middle Eastern. Could he have suffered from the backlash of racial profiling after 9/11? Did he feel eyes on him at the airport? Did someone swear at him as he walked down the street? Is that what fueled his misplaced hatred toward all of the Middle East and to the world’s second-most popular religion?

I may never know what he experienced on 9/11 or in the aftermath. I wish I knew what he is thinking; if he felt true regret, or just embarrassment at having been challenged in public.  But I won’t be able to find out because instead of working through the discomfort, he unfriended me the other day. Had I not been writing this piece, I might not have noticed. In the world of Facebook, the polite thing seems to be to delete rather than discuss. If only it were so easy to eliminate hate.

Thomas is an English teacher in California.