Dylan acted racist at times especially when in Eric or other friends’ company but he wasn’t a racist bigot to the core. When I say this, I’m not trying to negate the fact that he participated in bigotry. It’s just a bit more complex, a little bit of a contradictory combination of a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in answer to this question.  . First, we need to look at the background of Dylan and where he grew up all of his life.  Suburban Colorado, Littleton more specifically, is a rather homogenized, rampant strip malls amongst neighborhood sprawl consisting of  predominantly conservative, mainstream WASPs.  On top of that, the culture was heavily influenced by Christian churches peppered about with various denominations most especially the ‘born again’ fundamentalist groups.   It’s an ‘inside the box’ type environment which, as a whole, considers the embracing of diversity or difference, as a foreign concept. Having been born and raised in the area, Dylan was already much more of a conditioned product of this isolating, limited environment.  In comparison to Eric who had only lived in the area a few years, Dylan was more culturally indoctrinated in an unconscious sort of way because he primarily interacted mostly with kids and adults of his same culture and race.  Other than the metropolitan Denver area, it’s highly doubtful that gay people lived openly in the suburbs. 

On the other hand, Dylan was brought up by liberal, well-educated parents. Dylan’s parents likely raised their son to embrace equality, to be inclusive and accepting of others who were different or struggling with deficits. At some point, his mother’s career revolved around working with disabled children. I do believe I read somewhere that Dylan had even accompanied her to work on occasion. He was aware that his mom helped challenged children with disabilities. So, there was this kind of mixed-message dichotomous foundation that Dylan grew up with in regards to be exposed to diversity and also being comfortable embracing people different from himself.

Dylan’s parents came to the conclusion that their little boy was intellectually advanced and so pulled him from regular public elementary school into CHIPS, the gifted program, where it was reinforced to him by the educational staff on a regular bases that he was ‘unique’ and ‘special’. But, by middle school years, Dylan was thrust back into the average public middle school which stood out in stark contrast to the sort of distinguished coddling he’d been accustomed to in CHIPS. He was no longer groomed with those subliminal messages of ‘important’ nor was his abilities showcased as they had been before. Dylan eventually got the undercurrent message that he was markedly different in all the wrong ways than his average peers within public school. He must have, somewhere along the line, concluded he was deficient because it was difficult for him to fit in, to be accepted and embraced as part of the acceptable majority. He equated uniqueness with being no more than strange. He was special in that nerdy, awkward, computer geeky loser sort of way. On a visceral level, Dylan felt himself a stranger in a strange land, a ‘minority’ of sorts caught adrift.

In his journal, Dylan observes that everyone knows everyone except he is like an “outkast”. He takes stock of his ineptitudes: “Me looking weird, acting shy, doing badly in any and all sports.” In growing up “gifted”, Dylan was put in the spotlight, showcased as relevant for that promising tuture contribution, yet, from regular public middle school onward to high school, it was a slippery slope of a slowly diminishing, eroding sense of self-worth. “I was made human without the possibility of being human.” or “I’d rather have nothing than be nothing.” His poetry sounds like Pinocchio lamenting that he was made to look like a human boy but was cursed with not actually, truly being human. Outwardly among his peers, Dylan tried to fit in and managed acceptance within the school’s already predetermined social caste cliques; he made it in with the ‘geeks’ as per usual and then within that low-end spectrum of that, the ‘fringe’, those militant or artsy wierdos.  Dylan adapted in his demeanor in any way that would afford him ‘sameness’ with his fringe peers, something he wanted more than anything: to be equal, to be normal, to be included. So, yes, he freely exorcised the usual slang and racial slurs that was / is, unfortunately, the typical crass lingo of middle/high schools.  It’s all too easy to conform to the derogatory in every day conversations with peers:  ‘let’s dub the freshman fags’ or ‘hey, nigger’ or ‘what a fuckin’ retard that star wars geek is.’   It’s the usual rampant teenage dude speak that obviously is still very much a part of school culture today as a way to brandish machismo and ego boost.  So, yes, Dylan went right along with the racial slurs as many do.   For the most part, it almost becomes a sort of mindless adopted language. If you had asked Dylan if he literally meant every single one of those derogatory comments, he’d probably shrug with indifference. It’s just what is senselessly done in High School, and Dylan adapted and conformed with the rest in his struggle to feel worth something in a sea of affluent, often favored, popular students. Even Devon admitted that the racial slurs were an everyday occurrence at Columbine and so she didn’t really see that Eric and Dylan were markedly more prejudice than the next TCMer, or jock or preps. It’s a bit banal like, say, car alarms that are super sensitive and go off for no good reason and so since everyone hears them on a regular basis, who the hell is paying literal attention to the noise? It just happens. Of course, just because it’s a common practice doesn’t make it any less harmful and potentially abusive to those on the receiving end. Dylan was called a fag often and regularly. He calloused over with all those insults with thee solution to externalize and dump the pain, to cast it off on on to someone else the he and his peers deemed of lower status. Anything to fit in – to be the same and not feel deficient.

And then there’s Eric, a kid that had multiple uprooting from several schools like that of revolving door. Each time he started a new school, he was by default, slammed back to the very bottom of that pecking order ‘food chain’.  His lack of height, slight build and his noticeable chest deformity translated into a self-perceived sense of inadequacy, an engrained unconscious sense of feeling physically defective. He was angry at always being the perpetual minority each time in starting as the new school as that‘weird’ outsider. Eric took that self-hatred and turned it around at others, focusing that scrutinizing lense off himself and on to others, the actual ‘minorities’ in his country, the retards, the stupids of the world. He displaced his feelings of unworthiness onto others and leveraged his self-deemed superiority. Eric tinkered with racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, neo Nazism ideas – hey, whatever worked – use any means necessary to boost the status from the bottom of the food chain to at least the lower-middle of it. Dylan by himself was one thing but combined with Eric, Dylan easily slipped into the ‘gang or pack mentality’. And if it was Dylan and Eric and maybe someone else like say Chris -all making fun of or threatening the mentally challenged “retard” student, well then, it’d be an even more potent, asserting sense of high. It becomes their gang of self-acceptance against a vulnerable deficient, minority. What better way to make one another feel better about themselves, to boost their egos in their own self perceived deficits than to embrace the same racist, bigoted mindset within the group and reinforce one another in that moment? The more the merrier.

So, there is Dylan as a decent individual, the laid back dude working sound and conversing and collaborating with Alejandra Marsh in theater production. But there is also a naughty, relishing Dylan, the dude that sits there in the Commons with Eric and writes up a list of all the racial slurs they can think of for the Mexican ‘spics’ unbeknownst to Alejandra who was, in fact, Mexican. Dylan and Eric would chat among themselves and make those derogatory jokes about the 1% African American students at their school and how they spoke ignorant ebonics. There is the best of Dylan that has been with his mom at her job and has seen what she does to help the handicapped – there is a core part of him that knows from values instilled that this is correct way to be. There is also the worst of Dylan that hates that fact that he feels himself is forevermore an ostracized minority within Littleton, a deficit, an unworthy nothing, a piece of chewing gum on the underside of a jock’s gym shoe, and so he finds it all too easy to give in. to relish displacing his own sense of unworthiness on to other scapegoats, minorities. There’s Dylan threatening Adam Kyler, a special education student who probably represented as unattractive as Dylan felt about himself, and so he gets his kicks out of intimidating him. Almost anyone will do, and in so doing, boosts his feelings of self-worth and superior ranking. I tend to think that you’ll find a great deal of racism in an exclusive, affluent culture like Littleton which helps to propagate sheltered kids who are not exposed to the diverse world outside their little milk toast world. So, no, while I don’t think Dylan held the exact same intensity of racists beliefs that Eric began to acquire, Dylan definitely did participate in on the racism along with Eric as a means to elevate his self-worth. Dylan acting by himself, was a completely different snapshot.