LAUSR

School bullying, or repeated power-based peer abuse and harassment, is a social pandemic in U.S. schools. According to Teaching Tolerance’s monthly series “Hate at School,” there have been 459 reported cases of bias and hate since January 2018, and that is with the full understanding that a vast majority of incidents against students with marginalized identities go unreported. Also worth mentioning is the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2017 report on hate crimes in America; 10.5 percent of them happened on school grounds. The purpose of K–12 education is to prepare students to be productive, thoughtful citizens; however, this kind of learning is interrupted in an environment subject to constant anxiety, stress, intimidation, and violence. After the 2016 presidential election, fueled by constant, vile political rhetoric, traditional school bullying morphed into something never seen before, both in frequency and intensity. Aggressive discourse in class discussions, directly rooted in current political storylines, can be traced to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and rallies where he regularly expresses actual hate speech as well as dog-whistle violent white nationalism. There are other ways to go about saying this, but put simply, Donald Trump is a racist, and has shown this to the American people since the 1980s. The tone of his presidency has affected many demographics, but the young adults in our schools trouble me most. The effect Donald Trump has had on young men and women who mimic his behavior is simply not something that school administrators and teachers were prepared to deal with.