There have been hundreds of incidents of hate, racism, intimidation and violence reported across the country since Donald Trump’s election as president.
Latino middle school students in Michigan were taunted with chants of “build a wall.” Here in Louisville, a family came home to find an unsigned letter in their mailbox using a racial slur to suggest black people are not welcome in that neighborhood. And The Thinker statue at the University of Louisville was vandalized with graffiti that read Trump-Build-That-Wall.
Along with appeals to economic anxieties of working class voters, Trump’s campaign used rhetoric that has apparently inspired a wave of incidents against African-Americans, Muslims, women and Latinos. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there have been more than 300 hate incidents reported since November 8.
I spoke with Ricky Jones, who chairs the University of Louisville’s Pan-African Studies Department, about the factors that created a space for hateful rhetoric and the acts that have followed, and how the media and other institutions are grappling with it.
Listen to the conversation in the audio player above.
On the normalization of racist rhetoric in politics and the media:
"To some degree that’s always been around. I think there’s a level of surprise and shock in post-election America. But to be quite frank with you, a lot of that is among white liberals who are not used to or at least have not opened their eyes to the presence of this type of rhetoric and to the presence of that type of entity in America that’s existed for a long time. Those of us on the other side, those of us of color who are engaged in this and have been engaged in this for decades in some cases understand that those elements have already been there. They’ve been masked a little bit."
The effect of the Trump phenomenon:
"It did give license to people to be a bit more bold about it. But we’ve continuously seen the phenomenon of this constriction or even eradication of space for people to have legitimate conversations about race, legitimate conversations about ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation and religious choice, and all of these things. Race is really the trump card, though. That is the dominant variable.
"And so you’ve seen for so long certain forces, say, any black person who raises the issue of race, called a racist themselves. And quite often, white liberals have said nothing."
