Saturday, a group of high school students appeared to be taunting and harassing a Native American near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. It looks pretty bad, but in this case, it may not be as bad as it looks at first glance.
In a video taken after the Indigenous People’s March in D.C., a Native American man is seen chanting and drumming. Male high school students, some wearing MAGA hats, most of whom are Kentucky students attending the anti-abortion event March for Life, are gathered around him. Some students are making tomahawk chops in the air, and others are clapping in rhythm to the drum beat and jumping up and down. One student is standing directly in front of the Native American man with a smile that looks both derisive and intimidating.
However, as more video surfaced, the nature of the incident itself and the intentions of the students became less clear. It could have been an act of vile racist bullying on the part of the students, but it also could have more to do with boisterous adolescents acting up while acting out Native American stereotypes. That would make their actions on a par with the adults at Atlanta Braves games chanting and chopping in the stands, making the students’ actions less about bullying and more a display of their ignorance encouraged by a society which fails to teach them respect for cultures different from their own. (Here’s a thoughtful, careful analysis of the events where the writer neither condemns nor excuses the students’ actions.)
But there is no gray area in another incident which took place last week. During a high school basketball game, front row fans from a predominantly white Minnesota school displayed a large Trump 2020 banner while their team was playing a predominantly black school. Their racist intent was unmistakable. For these students, the Trump banner was the new Confederate flag.
And during two other high school games, one during the 2016 campaign and another during 2017, students from predominantly white schools shouted “Build the Wall!” at their predominantly Latino opponents. Their use of Trump’s racist slogan was a deliberate attempt to bully and intimidate the other schools’ Latino students.
But examples are only examples. They don’t necessarily indicate a trend. The question remains, has race-based bullying increased among high school students who are Trump supporters? A few studies make it look like that is the case.
In Virginia, middle school students completed a school climate survey in 2013, 2015 and 2017. In a recent study, researchers divided the surveys into two groups based on whether the areas around the schools voted for Trump or Clinton in 2016.
According to the study, before 2017, the surveys showed no significant difference in student bullying between high schools located in the Trump or Clinton country. However,
In 2017, 18 percent more middle school students reported they had been bullied in communities around the state that voted for Republican Donald Trump for president, compared to those communities that had favored Democrat Hillary Clinton. In particular, race-based bullying rates were 9 percent higher in the GOP-favoring localities versus those in Democrat-leaning ones.
Looking deeper into the data, researchers found that the larger the vote for Trump, the greater the increase in bullying.
When the researchers separated the bullying into categories — physical appearance, sexual orientation and race/ethnicity — the only category with a major change from 2015 to 2017 was race/ethnicity. Incidents went up in Republican areas and down in Democratic areas.
Whenever I cite studies, I always remind readers, Buyer Beware. It’s easy for studies to twist data to arrive at a predetermined result. But in this case, it’s hard to argue with the study’s conclusion. Trump support in the Virginia schools was a significant factor in the level of students’ racial and ethnic bullying.
A similar but less robust study was conducted among high schools students in Massachusetts, with similar results. From 2015 to 2017, non-biased student bullying went down significantly while bias-based bullying went up by almost the same amount.
The two studies give a strong indication that the Trump effect is at work among students, encouraging his supporters to bully racial and ethnic minorities. Incidents around the country like the ones I mentioned above support the studies’ conclusions.
Has Trump unleashed students’ racist ids which had been raging just below the surface before he burst on the scene, or is he like a parent who teaches children to hate and fear people who are different from them by example? Take your pick or mix and match, as you wish. Whatever the reason, in the Age of Trump, we are a nastier, more hateful, more overtly racist nation than we were before he began his presidential campaign.
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2019.
David, I am not sure how you judged the heart and the intentions of the black supporter sitting with the banner. “There is no place for politics in school?”
Can anybody think back 10 years to this:
Video of the students at the Burlington, N.J., school shows them singing songs seemingly overflowing with campaign slogans and praise for Barack Hussein Obama, repeatedly chanting the presidents name and celebrating his accomplishments, including his great plans to make this countrys economy No. 1 again.
Can you remember if you complained about that? If you did thank. If you didn’t why not?
One thing is for sure, his great plans didn’t turn out be so great after all. Can that be part of this hate that eminates from the left?
The commenter above has proven his/her ignorance by citing an incident that has nothing to do with the article presented. Sometimes it’s just best not to say anything. That way people may suspect that you have no sense, but you haven’t given them anything to prove their suspicions.
All of the leftists so wanted to blame those young, white, christian, and obviously conservative, boys. The internet mob shifted right into gear and the boy received death threats and other horrible insults.
Turns out it was the black Israelites group of (black) men who instigated it by yelling vile insults at the Native Americans and the boys. No one seems very sure how it escalated from there, but as the adults in the situation, these (black) men, and to a lesser extent the Native Americans, are responsible, not a group of children caught up in it.
But that doesn’t fit the leftist narrative of blaming conservative white males, and especially Trump supporters, for everything under the sun.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.
I made this comment on another thread but it is apropos here as well. These “children” chose to wear MAGA hats which was a provocative act in itself. Innocent boys? Not hardly.
I made this comment on another thread, too, but it’s also relevant here. Safier’s right–this is an issue that’s far greater than one confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial, but it’s not new. The only thing new is that, after decades of progress, it’s getting worse again.
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It should also be pointed out that educating kids in a religious, all-male, practically all-white school is exactly the sort of totally twisted social structure that encourages toxic masculinity, white male privilege, mob behavior and disrespect for other genders and races, while poisoning young minds into thinking that others who are different are somehow less than them, or even less than human.
Kids from this school were photographed in blackface, which apparently used to be a regular occurrence at their school. These current students went on Fox News and defended the practice as part of their “school spirit”:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/covington-ca
Look at the foto in the tweet attached to that story. They wore blackface because they were purposely race-baiting an opposing team that had black players on it. And until they were outed by another viral video five years ago, their school LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS AS IF IT WERE NORMAL, DEFENSIBLE BEHAVIOR.
The current crop of students was in D.C. to protest abortion, because of course as teenage boys they know all they need to know about that issue–namely, that a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body is less important than what males think and their own religious dogma. These poor kids are dupes, child soldiers in the culture war that Tchump started: Make America Great (for White Men) Again.
But hey, never mind all the hard evidence that this is totally f*cked up. Just look at the kid’s smirk when he faced off with the indigenous leader. Look at his friends acting like they paid a nickel to watch a freak show. A picture tells a thousand words. They’re entitled little punks who think the whole world was created just for them and everyone else exists just to amuse them. And the reason they think that is because F*CKED UP ADULTS ARE TEACHING THEM TO THINK THAT WAY.
Not true. Just another jerk knee assumptive copy cat comment from fake news.
Kids are kids, and in so being they are easily manipulated by adults. Wars are fought by young people at the orders of older people.
But, gutless bullies make stupid mistakes and that is currently the state of our nation. Reading from a wide range of sources has proven to me that the every time a “right-winger” calls a “leftie” a “hater,” they are quoting simpleton talking points from Fox News and Hate Radio, which is consistently right-wing in politics.
I am tired of people saying it is both sides because there is overwhelming lying, deceiving, deflecting, money grubbing and, nowadays, blatant lawbreaking coming from the “Conservatives” and related media that have taken over the Republican Party. I am voting for justice and openness instead of these politicians who bury truth, cover up crimes and suppress legal voting as they snarl and lie through their nasty right-wing teeth.