Kids who are in religious or ethnic minorities, or are gay or disabled, are more likely to be bullied in school than other kids. Their point of difference can be a point of vulnerability. In the last decade, schools have put more energy into preventing bullying, to the benefit of these kids and others (girls, too, are more frequent targets). And they’ve often had the authority of the courts, state legislatures and the federal Department of Education behind them.
Now the country has elected a man who threaded racist, xenophobic and misogynistic messages and mockery of disabled people through his campaign. Donald J. Trump’s victory gives others license to do the same. There are already signs that during his presidency, the moral values that schools and parents have been helping to instill in young people — empathy and “upstanding,” a term schools use that means looking out for fellow students who are being mistreated — will be in danger of eroding.
Since Mr. Trump’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center has received more than 430 reports of bullying, harassment and racist displays around the country. “We haven’t seen this volume in the United States in decades, with the exception of the wave of anti-Muslim incidents that followed 9/11,” said Ryan Lenz, a spokesman for the center. Not all of the reports have been verified. But they include real and painful episodes at secondary schools and colleges.
At York County School of Technology in Pennsylvania, white students were filmed walking through the hallway with a Trump sign and yelling, “White power!” Minority students there report being called racial epithets and say some have been staying home from school.
At Maple Grove High School in Minnesota, racist graffiti, mixed with Trump slogans, made black students feel unsafe. “I went in and looked on the bathroom door and honestly was in shock,” said Moses Karngbaye, a junior. “That’s the first time I honestly felt like crying at school.”
At the University of Michigan, a man told a student that if she did not take off her hijab he would set her on fire with a lighter. At the University of Pennsylvania, black freshmen were added to a racist “lynching” thread on the text messaging service GroupMe, reportedly by three people, including a University of Oklahoma student who was suspended for being involved in the chat. “I am petrified and all I want to do is cry,” one Penn student tweeted.
Asked on “60 Minutes” about the bile that is leaking out in his name, Mr. Trump said the perpetrators should stop. But he also played down the damage, saying of the slurs and harassment, “I think it’s a very small amount.”
On Sunday, he announced his choice for chief strategist in the White House: Stephen Bannon, who ran the alt-right website Breitbart News Network before joining the Trump campaign. As lists of bigoted and fear-mongering Breitbart headlines circulated, the site posted a new one about the reports of racism and harassment: “Wave of Fake ‘Hate Crimes’ Sweeps Anti-Trump Social Media.”
President Obama and the first lady held a conference on bullying prevention in 2011 at the White House. The president also taped a message for L.G.B.T. kids as part of the It Gets Better Project. President George W. Bush stood up against bigotry at a crucial moment in his tenure, visiting a mosque to condemn a wave of attacks and threats against Muslims in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. It’s possible that Mr. Trump will someday similarly rise to the occasion, but so far the evidence mostly points in the opposite direction.
According to Mr. Bannon’s former wife, he didn’t want their daughters “going to school with Jews.” Breitbart has used anti-Semitic headlines and imagery. Asked to account for this on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, the Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich called the charges against Mr. Bannon a “smear” by the left, asserting that he’s not an anti-Semite because he used to work at Goldman Sachs and in Hollywood. In other words, Mr. Gingrich denied the reality of Mr. Bannon’s record and then resorted to stereotypes about Jews to defend him.
In the last few years, I’ve traveled the country to talk about bullying, as the author of a book on the topic. Parents often ask about the impact on kids when they see celebrities or leaders treat other people badly or fail to stand up to bigotry and prejudice. There’s no way to measure the precise effect. But kids are attuned to cultural expectations. They absorb shared ideas about what behavior is permitted and what is intolerable. If the president of the United States and his top officials wave away racism and harassment, or traffic in prejudice themselves, kids are at risk of getting the message that this stuff is O.K. after all. That should be obvious to anyone in elected office.
It’s also clear that if we can’t count on our national leaders to counteract bigotry, then we have to redouble our efforts to do so ourselves. When parents and alumni at Maple Grove High posted pictures of the racist graffiti on social media, the district issued a statement: “The tweet you may have seen of a racist message scrawled in a school bathroom is real and we are horrified by it. It goes against everything we stand for.” The school officials promised an investigation, acknowledged the danger to minority students and staff members, and said they would work to heal the impact on the school’s culture and “on every member of our school family.”
Those words are a start and deeds must follow, in small moments of kindness and larger acts of standing for justice. At this moment, local civil institutions and all of us, in our communities, are being put to a test. We have to show heart and conviction. We have to ensure that our kids learn the values some leaders have forgotten.
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