In the first comprehensive review of post-election bullying, BuzzFeed News has confirmed more than 50 incidents, across 26 states, in which a K-12 student invoked Trump’s name or message in an apparent effort to harass a classmate during the past school year.
In the parking lot of a high school in Shakopee, Minnesota, boys in Donald Trump shirts gathered around a black teenage girl and sang a portion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” replacing the closing line with “and the home of the slaves.” On a playground at an elementary school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, third-graders surrounded a boy and chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
On a school bus in San Antonio, Texas, a white eighth-grader said to a Filipino classmate, “You are going to be deported.” In a classroom in Brea, California, a white eighth-grader told a black classmate, “Now that Trump won, you're going to have to go back to Africa, where you belong.” In the hallway of a high school in San Mateo County, California, a white student told two biracial girls to “go back home to whatever country you're from.” In Louisville, Kentucky, a third-grade boy chased a Latina girl around the classroom shouting “Build the wall!” In a stadium parking lot in Jacksonville, Florida, after a high school football game, white students chanted at black students from the opposing school: “Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump!”
The first school year of the Donald Trump presidency left educators struggling to navigate a climate where misogyny, religious intolerance, name-calling, and racial exclusion have become part of mainstream political speech.
These budding political beliefs among some students carry consequences beyond the schoolyard. Today’s high schoolers will be eligible to vote in 2020, and today’s fifth-graders will be eligible to vote in 2024. But even if the wave of Trump-related bullying doesn’t reflect some widespread political awakening among young people, it indicates a more troubling reality: the extent to which racial and religious intolerance has shaped how kids talk, joke, and bully.
I am old enough to remember school yard arguments about the Vietnam War and Watergate, where children often argued their parent's point of view overheard at home with angry words and sometimes angrier fists.
We only had the vaguest understanding of the various arguments, but we were certainly not lacking passion or confidence that we were right.
That was one of the most volatile times that I can remember in this country, and to be honest it essentially pales when compared to what we are seeing today.
For all of his faults Richard M. Nixon was a man concerned with setting a proper example and the dignity of the office.
Donald Trump on the other hand is like an escaped circus orangutan who passed out in the Oval Office and woke up with everybody calling him Mr. President.
He is a classless, racist, misogynist who has no idea how to comport himself as a human being, much less the leader of the free world.
That means that every young, impressionable child who looks for an example of how to deal with responsibility, interact appropriately with others, and demonstrate self control, will look at the leader of his country and find the worst possible role model imaginable.
There is no way that is not going to have a negative impact on the future leaders of tomorrow.
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