A Code With No Conscience
By Jiner Huang ’28
In his 2016 hit single “Rolls Royce Weather Every Day,” featuring Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz wrote: “we think you outchea snitching, that’s why we ‘round here whispering / I think my palms are itching, I think my bomb is ticking.” Upon release, the song joined an impressive lineage of street rap denouncing the practice of “snitching.”
“Snitch,” a term coined around 1800 as part of the ‘street codes’ of contemporary Americans and popularized in criminal and street codes, once referred specifically to a participant in a crime who turned on their co-conspirators to reduce their own punishment. Today, this specific role is better known as a “criminal informant,” according to Alexandra Natapoff, but for several reasons—the proliferation of street rap being one of them—people with no connection to prison or street culture have incorporated the word “snitch” into their everyday vocabulary, and in turn latched onto the “no snitching” creed. When the code of the street is extrapolated into our school hallways, our inability to make context-sensitive judgements and our refusal to hold peers accountable promote dishonesty instead of loyalty.
Distrust of formal institutions and strong norms against informing authorities render snitching a violation of group loyalty and the snitch a most despicable actor. But it only makes sense to live by that code if the code is honored in your community, first of all, and there is very little honor to be upheld in that life. The cartel member who turns in other members and the student who tells on you for cutting the line in Forbes are hardly morally identical, but the characterization of both of them as “snitches” collapses all situations into one. Now, we are more afraid of being disloyal than being complicit.
Indeed, the virtue of loyalty has been diluted by our growing loyalty to certain destructive practices: in the academic sphere, for instance, staying “loyal” to your friend by letting them cheat on their assignments may instead be a form of “loyalty” to their self-destruction. The code is only as honorable as what it protects, and our aversion to “snitching” evokes a struggle for survival and self-preservation long before it becomes a testament to our character.
Beyond our immediate academic community, the ecosystem runs on snitching. While snitching is to us the lowest form of social betrayal and self-preservation, modern institutions depend heavily on insider information. Law enforcement relies on witnesses, and intelligence can not operate without informants: investigations can only proceed when people are willing to tell authorities what they know. The basic act of information-sharing has taken on a variety of names: reporting, whistleblowing, and snitching are some of them, and none carry the exact same connotation. At Milton, we seem to have instead indoctrinated ourselves with the notion that any reporting constitutes an act of betrayal.
The advent of artificial intelligence changes our stakes. Academic standards have always been collective, but our school environment is now riddled with academic dishonesty. The unauthorized use of AI—whether it be by sending it a page of math homework, asking it to répondre en français (respond in French) with perfect grammar, or urging it for answers to a test question while hiding out in the bathroom—has become not only ubiquitous but also socially tolerated.
Dishonesty, however, came long before AI: though cheating has always existed, the maintenance of academic integrity has always depended on a culture where everyone agrees that dishonesty is not worth it. AI has lowered the stakes of cheating and upped the stakes of reporting, but even more problematically, per a study from Boston University by Huang et al., we are now more likely to cheat if our friends are doing so, and simultaneously less likely to report them.
In the absence of the “police”—teachers and administrators to endorse those who “dare to be true”—there is no longer an incentive to uphold integrity in the face of the spread of academic dishonesty. Adults on campus can punish cheating and create increasingly convoluted policies regarding AI and phones, but they cannot manufacture a culture of integrity. The social consequences of holding each other accountable have been distributed backward: the dishonest person is protected, while the honest person pays the social price. “Snitches get stitches,” indeed, but they also “end up in ditches.”
That said, the elementary school principle of “always report” would be just as impossible and undesirable to implement in our community. Not every trespass requires the same response, as our own disciplinary process exemplifies. We must, then, stop outsourcing our own autonomous moral judgments to the oversimplified slogan that is “don’t snitch,” because by acting under the pretense of loyalty we just as easily pledge ourselves to dishonesty. We inherit all kinds of rules before we are old enough to question them, but the process of growing requires us to decide which rules deserve our loyalty. Choose the code to follow, and walk your own streets.