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By Root 782 0

across the country began identifying students who were “different,” and then proceeded to “keep them under surveillance, remove them from the school, or subject them to intensive therapy until they are able to be like everybody else,” social psychologist Elliot Aronson detailed in Nobody Left to Hate. Further, schools enlisted students in the campaign. “By asking the ‘normal’ students to point out the ‘strange’ ones,” Aronson wrote, schools were “making a bad situation worse by implicitly sanctioning the rejection and exclusion of a sizable group of students whose only sin is unpopularity.” Within short order, schools were expelling outcasts simply for being outcasts.

More than ten years after the massacre, that attitude has not disappeared. A semi-popular senior in Maryland described emos to me as “the ones you point out during a boring class when you and your friends play the ‘who’s most likely to bring a gun to school’ game.” When I met with editors to propose this book, one of the first subtopics one of them suggested was the “danger” of outcasts, as in “when good outcasts go bad.”

From one perspective, the evil outcast theory may have seemed sound. When the masses send impressionable youth to conceal in dark corners the activities they should be comfortable if not proud to exhibit in the open—expressing exuberance, watching anime, building robot models, dressing uniquely, playing games, reading for pleasure, loving someone of the same gender—they seal off crucial outlets. If you contain a force of energy in a tightly enclosed space, eventually the container will explode. So, too, the emotions of a stifled teenager. Especially when that teenager is being tormented day after day. Like Annmarie. Like Blue.

When the pain of losing the club he founded was still raw and Herman and his followers were rubbing salt into his wounds, Blue unwittingly found himself thinking about how much he wanted to kill them. He had a passing daydream about taking his former friends and Mr. Pakaki “into the desert, with a CZ 75 in my pocket, bullets in their heads.” When he admitted this, months later, we talked about this feeling more in-depth. “I know very well how much the anger welling up inside me could hurt somebody. But sometimes I feel that it’s too much to contain,” Blue said. “I’m scared of myself in a way. It’s not that I’m going to hurt somebody that I worked hard on getting to know. It’s that I don’t know what would happen, but I do know something would. And it could be violent. It could be anything, really.”

“Should I be concerned?” I asked.

“I’m confident in myself that I have enough self-control, really,” Blue concluded. “Those [thoughts] are just really annoying.”

The error in the evil-outcast theory is that it assumes that only social outcasts can develop into Columbine-like killers. Identifying the outcasts and tossing them out of schools is akin to singling out a Middle Eastern passenger for extra airport security screening, or stopping a driver because he’s Latino. Just because a kid listens to screamo doesn’t mean he’s angry. Just because she plays Warhammer doesn’t mean she’s violent. Just because her face is pierced doesn’t mean she’s disrespectful. Just because he wears all black doesn’t mean he’s sad. This practice is what I call outcast profiling. It is counterproductive, it is bad policy, and it is discriminatory.

I selected a handful of popular students who appeared to be well-adjusted and asked them a delicate question: “Have you at any time daydreamed, fantasized, or even had just a passing thought about physically hurting someone at school?” A surprising number answered yes. “When I’m really mad at someone,” answered a Midwestern female jock. “At least once a day,” said a popular Louisiana boy.

Even the students whose popular cliques ruled their schools answered affirmatively. “Most definitely,” said a Canadian queen bee. “The thoughts are mostly fleeting but they’re there, usually about hurting losers or bitchy girls.” A Southern boy who dominated his high school said, “I used to think about pushing people