Definition: Given a real-life anecdote of a complex ethical situation, generate a suitable title that describes the main event/root cause of the situation. Imagine that the given text is a social media post, and you have to write the title of the post, so the users can decide to read the main text or not.
Input: Context: My town has low, low tolerance for slurs of any kind and more. This is partly because a couple of years ago, a closeted gay student killed himself due to bullying that included repetition of the f-slur and more. 

Last year, my school even received multiple bomb threats because the school administration didn’t punish a white student who called another student the hard n-slur. So yeah.


A couple of nights ago me and my friends were out eating ice cream after a movie. At this point it’s 11PM and we’re all pretty tired (and emotionally devastated), so we just want somewhere quiet and nice to hang out. 

All of a sudden, a group of middle school boys (one of them was wearing their ID on a lanyard lol) come in and instantly start surrounding the three of us that are girls. Immediately all of them all start talking at once and making comments about our hair or our clothing, and one of them starts calling me a black girl (I’m very clearly Asian) and refers to me as “my n——a”.

It was funny at first, given that we’re all high school seniors and just assumed these kids were trying to act cool, but they start throwing out even more slurs and joking around about trans, LGBTQ people and the like. 

At some point, it just gets outright annoying. I take out my phone to check the time and all of a sudden they start trying to grab it from me, so we all just stand up and leave. 

When I got home, I told my other friends the story, but a lot of them started getting really mad at me and calling me an asshole for not telling them off, or telling them that “they shouldn’t be throwing around that kind of language” since by doing nothing, we may have just “encouraged a group of middle school boys to grow up thinking they can get away with anything”. 

In that kind of situation I didn’t think it was  appropriate for me to all of a sudden start lecturing them, especially considering the fact that I’m not much older. But because of the negative background our town has with this kind of stuff, I can still see where they’re coming from. 

AITA for not telling off offensive middle schoolers to act better for their age? Should I have tried to correct their behavior? 

not telling off a group of middle schoolers