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The day after the presidential election, LaToya Bufford’s 16-year-old daughter got a text saying she had been “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” The text came from a number Bufford’s daughter didn’t recognize, but it addressed her by her full name. The teenager told her mom that some of her friends had gotten the message, too, but only those who, like her, are Black.
Bufford said her daughter didn’t have much visible reaction to the text. But Bufford herself was left frightened and on high alert.
“I was just shocked and so angry,” Bufford, who lives in Sacramento, California, told me. “If this could happen to my 16-year-old child,” she said, “I’m just scared about what could also happen.”
Bufford’s daughter was one of the middle school, high school, and college students in more than 20 states who received similar racist texts in the days following the election. The attacks have continued and broadened in the weeks since, with Latino and LGBTQ+ recipients getting messages threatening them with deportation or being sent to “reeducation camps,” according to the FBI. Some messages purported to be from “the Trump administration,” though the Trump campaign has said it had nothing to do with the messages. The FBI is still investigating the wave of harassment, leaving kids and families wondering who got their names and phone numbers and sent them terrifying, personalized messages.
Meanwhile, other children across the country encountered hate speech and harassment at school immediately following the election, from a racist note left in a Wyoming high school bathroom to a spate of anti-immigrant and other discriminatory incidents in a Vermont district.
There’s not much comprehensive data yet on how many kids have been harassed in the wake of last month’s election, but experts and school officials say the incidents documented so far, like the texts Bufford’s daughter and others received, reflect a continuation of a disturbing pattern.
After the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants and other groups made its way to high school, middle school, and even elementary school campuses, and children began shouting “build the wall” and threatening their classmates with deportation. News reports between 2016 and 2020 document more than 300 incidents of students or school staff using Trump’s words or name to harass children, according to a 2020 Washington Post analysis.
I reported on hate crimes and harassment in 2016 and 2017. Schools, unfortunately, were a big part of the story, with swastikas and racist slogans defacing the places where children, one parent reminded me, are supposed to be safe.
Kids, especially teenagers, don’t always open up to adults about how harassment makes them feel. But hate speech can cut deep, particularly when the target is a child whose brain and sense of self are still developing. Kids can experience physical symptoms like stomach pain and headaches; others can have panic attacks or insomnia.
Harassment can also deprive young people of their legal right to an education, making them too afraid to stay in class or even to come to school at all, said Erin Maguire, director of equity and inclusion for Vermont’s Essex Westford School District, which experienced a steep increase in harassment reports the week of the election.
While complaints there have leveled off, some experts remain concerned about the impact a second Trump administration could have on kids across the country. Kids continued lobbing Trump-inspired insults at their peers throughout his first term, according to the Washington Post analysis.
Schools can make a big difference in supporting students who have been targeted and creating environments free from discrimination, experts say. But they may face an uphill battle in an administration that’s already broadcast its opposition to equity and inclusion initiatives, as well as its intent to dismantle government education agencies that enforce civil rights.
Now some parents are left preparing their children on their own for what they see as a new reality.
“There’s always been hate and racism in this country, but now people are feeling like they can come out from behind closed doors and show that hate,” Bufford said.
Hate speech at schools spiked after the election
Since the 1990s, hate crimes have tended to increase during election cycles because public dialogue becomes increasingly heated and divisive, said Nadia Aziz, senior program director of the fighting hate and bias program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a 75-year-old coalition of rights organizations. But the first Trump candidacy “empowered white nationalists” in a new way, she said. Since 2015, reported hate crimes have nearly doubled, according to a report released by the Leadership Conference Education Fund earlier this year.
Kids and schools have not been insulated from these larger trends. In Essex Westford, a majority-white district of about 3,800 students near Burlington, Vermont, reports of harassment jumped from the usual two or three a week to 12 the week of the election. Some of the incidents, which spanned age groups from elementary to high school, specifically referenced Trump’s proposed policies around immigration and gender identity, Maguire said.
At Arapaho Charter High, a small Wyoming school whose students are almost all Native American, a note written on a paper towel and hung on a bathroom mirror read “I hate” followed by a racial slur and a swastika, said Katie Law, the school’s principal. A few days later, a student used the same slur in class. “It was disheartening to see that it continued,” Law said.
The texts aimed at Latino Americans were also mostly sent to young people, Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights group, told the Washington Post. “Our expectation is that we’re going to see more of this as we get closer to Jan. 20,” he said.
Bufford, meanwhile, has had a conversation with all her children about “looking out for their backs,” she said. “We live in a very diverse neighborhood,” she said. “But you can never be too careful, especially now.”
How to help kids who have been harassed
Families shouldn’t be on their own to protect kids from hate speech; political leaders have an important role to play, experts say. “Any message that public officials send can trickle down to children,” Aziz said. “The more public officials that denounce hateful things,” she said, “the more examples our children have to look up to.”
Educators, too, “are looked to across communities to really offer a way forward,” said Liz King, senior program director for education equity at the Leadership Conference. “It is meaningfully important when they get up and say, ‘This is awful.’”
School leaders can also counter hate speech and discrimination by using curricula that are inclusive of all students, King said. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also offers resources for preventing and responding to discrimination in schools.
Trump has pledged to eliminate that department, but the laws that protect kids’ right to an education aren’t changing, King said. “These laws are not going anywhere, and so each of us has a responsibility to ensure that this administration meaningfully protects all of us from discrimination and enforces our civil rights laws.”
“Schools need to find ways to hold all students in a way that helps them feel safe and supported,” Maguire said. “It’s our job to figure that out.”
Schools and districts are preparing for what might happen if Trump is able to follow through on his promise to enact mass deportations. Leaders are worried that even the threat of such a policy could make kids too afraid to come to school.
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I’ll be doing an edition on kids’ podcasts soon. Do the kids in your life have favorite podcasts? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com.
