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Dennis Donovan

(18,770 posts)
Thu Feb 13, 2020, 10:48 PM Feb 2020

Trump's rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of children are harassed in American classrooms

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/local/school-bullying-trump-words/

By Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Perry Stein Feb. 13, 2020

Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country."

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period.

Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.

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I knew this would happen - a trickling-down of the hate.
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Trump's rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of children are harassed in American classrooms (Original Post) Dennis Donovan Feb 2020 OP
Ugh. TwilightZone Feb 2020 #1
Trump is directly responsible for this particular batch of hateful racist assholes dalton99a Feb 2020 #2
The truth and tragedy of this phenomenon is heart wrenching for me. MFGsunny Feb 2020 #3

MFGsunny

(2,356 posts)
3. The truth and tragedy of this phenomenon is heart wrenching for me.
Thu Feb 13, 2020, 11:57 PM
Feb 2020

MF45 hasn't yet begun to consider to which bottom-level of hell the poet Dante would banish him.

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