If the president-elect really isn't a bigot, he needs to put an immediate end to the orgy of hate violence

Viewed this morning from The Independent's website:

One group has collated more than 200 incidents of racist and sexist abuse YouTube

The stories have been pouring in from across America.
In Louisiana, a black woman reported by being abused by three white men as she waited to cross the street. “F**k your black life,” one of them yelled.

In Boston, a black student heard a white fellow student remark: “This is their punishment for eight years of black people.”


Reports of abuse have poured in from across the country (CNN)

Meanwhile, in Washington state, a teacher reported how “Build a wall” was chanted in the school cafeteria on Wednesday lunchtime. The teacher said the students also chanted: “If you aren’t born here, pack your bags.”

As communities of colour, and others frightened by Tuesday’s result, reel from the election of Mr Trump, reports suggest there have been a flood of incidents of harassment and abuse since Tuesday.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a watchdog group that tracks and monitors extremism in the US, said it had collated more than 200 such incidents in the three days since Mr Trump was elected. It said there also reports of misogynist incidents and abuse.

“Pulling from news reports, social media, and direct submissions at the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s website, [we] counted 201 incidents of election-related harassment and intimidation across the country as of Friday 11 November at 5pm,” the group said.

“These range from anti-Black to anti-woman to anti-LGBT incidents. There were many examples of vandalism and epithets directed at individuals.

“Often, types of harassment overlapped and many incidents, though not all, involved direct references to the Trump campaign. Every incident could not be immediately independently verified.”

The group said that one of the locations where such incidents were most commonly reported were in schools for pupils up to the age of 12. At one school, in Maple Grove, Minnesota, racist and pro-Trump graffiti was found in the school lavatories.

A report from Colorado detailed how the words “Death to Diversity” was written on a banner displayed on a school library. The report said that white male students were going up to women saying it was now “legal to grab them by the pussy”.

This was apparently a reference to the 2005 Access Hollywood video released shortly before the election in which Mr Trump was see bragging about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it because he was a celebrity. He later dismissed the comments as “locker rook banter”.

The Independent has also been compiling lists of assaults and harassment that have taken place since election night and asked people to forward details.

And so on and on . . . .

by Ken

I picked the above Independent report, now a day or two old, pretty much at random from a search of "racist incidents" since election. Of course I also wanted to include anti-immigrant and anti-woman and anti-everything-else incidents. The lists are large and growing rapidly.

We've been told often enough that Donald Trump is not a racist, and since the election that it wasn't racism (or any of the other anti-isms) that won him the presidency. Well, it's put-up-or-shut-up time, and the president-elect needs to act immediately to correct these supposed misunderstandings and to set the tone for his administration. He's great at talking tough, and about how we need to get tough, because we have to America great again. Unless he believes that this kind of behavior, this kind of thinking, has a part in America's greatness, he needs to make clear, not once but repeatedly, that none of this will be tolerated -- that he is dead set against these habits of thought and will throw the full weight of the law against any and all infractions of statute.

There's only one person who can make it clear that none of this will be tolerated, and the time for that person to begin doing so, as forcefully as he's delivered all his other messages, is now. And of course as he begins to announce appointments to the new administration, he needs to make sure that every one of them makes equally clear that he/she is equally committed to these policies. He needs to deliver a message to people who may have thought this was going to be okay, that no, it's not the least bit okay. It's that simple, and I don't see that there's any wiggle room here.

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