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Melissia Hill was eating crepes with her 5-year-old son, Phoenix, at a Brooklyn cafe this summer when he asked her, “Is Donald Trump a bad person? Because I heard that if he becomes president, all the black and brown people have to leave and we’re going to become slaves.”
Next he wanted to know, “What is a slave?” and, “Where are we gonna go?”
Hill was taken aback, and well aware of the wide-eyed interest Phoenix’s questions attracted from neighboring tables. She asked him where he’d heard these things. His answer: from another child at his local YMCA day camp.
“I was very interested in talking to the parents of this child. I was wondering whether they were supporting Trump or were they against him. ... I would literally stake the mother out at drop-off in the morning, but I kept missing her,” Hill, who is black, told Vox.
Camp staffers dismissed Hill’s concerns. Meanwhile, Phoenix cried every day when he was dropped off. So Hill pulled him out of the program and continued to reassure him of his safety.
“I told him we’re not going anywhere, we’re going to live here,” she said. “I just reaffirmed this is home and we’re not going anywhere, Trump is not going to deport us. He is not going to become president.”
Given Phoenix’s age, Hill chose not to delve into the Republican candidate’s expressed positions, correct the demographic breakdown of whom exactly he suggested should be prohibited from immigrating, or parse the differences between deportation and slavery, which had been lost somewhere in the other camper’s interpretation.
After all, she intentionally hadn’t yet exposed her son to the idea of racial difference or bigotry at all, up until that point. Deliberate about controlling the flow of information to him, she rarely even allows him to see anything other than children’s programming on television. “It was just hard for me to even think about explaining what slavery was to him,” she said. “His grandmother is white, his auntie is white. ... We have all different colors in our family, and I wasn’t really ready to open that topic up in him.”
Phoenix is no longer scared, she said, but the episode “just stole a piece of his innocence.”
He isn’t alone.
If Trump wins the election, first lady Michelle Obama said In her now-famous speech about his leaked comments bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, “We're telling all our kids that bigotry and bullying are perfectly acceptable in the leader of their country.”
Yet many children have already received that message loud and clear. They haven’t been protected from Trump’s attacks on racial and religious groups in anywhere near the same way as much as they have from his X-rated “hot mic” remarks.
Trump’s most infamous assertions about race, religion, and identity — that many Mexican immigrants are rapists and “bad people,” that a judge was incapable of doing his job because of his ethnicity, that Muslims are a danger to America, that “the blacks” (a phrasing that linguists say serves to identify African-Americans as “other”) live in a virtual hellscape with nothing to lose and no standing to critique his platform — were all made publicly.
These messages, though, have not been softened, omitted or redacted by the media for the protection of young ears in the same way his so-called “locker room talk” about women has. And kids like Phoenix aren’t waiting to see what happens on November 8 before they absorb these views, repeat them, and integrate them into the set of perspectives that combine to make up how they see themselves and others. Many, according to a recent survey of teachers’ perceptions of their students, are using them as fodder for bullying. Others are anxious and scared as a result of the taunts and the real-life threats to their families.
Nobody — not even those who study the development of racial attitudes in kids or the impact of racial trauma — can say with certainty what the long-term effects of this unprecedented dose of high-profile animosity will be on the young people who are steeped in it.
Marginalized kids are terrified and saddened
This spring, Teaching Tolerance, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm, took an informal poll of educators to gauge how this campaign had affected schools so far.
Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, said the organization’s interest in the election’s effect on school-age kids was piqued by news reports about high school sporting events where chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump” and “Build a wall” were used against predominantly Latino teams.
“We wondered, is this the tip of an iceberg? Is there something beneath this?” she said.
The organization sent queries to the teachers who subscribed to its weekly newsletter. “We weren’t trying to be scientific. We were trying to find out, ‘Is there anything going on?’ I compare it to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] asking doctors to report if there are measles outbreaks,” Costello said.
The organization’s conclusion from the thousands of comments it received: Yes, something is going on. More than two-thirds of teachers reported that students — mainly immigrants, children of immigrants, and Muslims — had expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election:
Teachers used words like “hurt” and “dejected” to describe the impact on their charges. The ideas and language coming from the presidential candidates are bad enough, but many students — Muslim, Hispanic and African-American — are far more upset by the number of people, including classmates and even teachers, who seem to agree with Trump. They are struggling with the belief that “everyone hates them.”
There were reports of tears shed in classrooms from second grade to high school. Concerns about being “sent back” transcended immigration status, as in Phoenix’s case, to affect African-American kids:
African-American students aren’t exempt from the fears. Many teachers reported an increase in use of the n-word as a slur, even among very young children. And black children are burdened with a particularly awful fear that has been reported from teachers in many states — that they will “be deported to Africa” or that slavery will be reinstated. As an Oklahoma elementary teacher explains, “My kids are terrified of Trump becoming [p]resident. They believe he can/will deport them — and NONE of them are Hispanic. They are all African American.
According to the report, even children who did not face, or did not believe they faced, direct threats as a result of Trump’s policies, perceived the same pattern as the white supremacists who support Trump: that the candidate’s vision for a return to a “great’ version of America was dismissive of people of color. A teacher at a predominantly black school in Ferguson, Missouri, told Teaching Tolerance, “We do not have the language and hate of any candidates repeated at the high school where I teach. … However, I do hear students wonder if they are being let in on what all white people truly think and feel.”
The nonprofit called the results “the Trump effect.” The findings resonate with teachers who didn’t participate in the survey, too.
Brian Moss, who teaches eighth grade at a Northern California middle school where he estimates 80 percent of students are Latino, told Vox, “In really looking at Trump’s policies specifically, and looking at the reforms he’s suggesting, I’ve witnessed kids in discussions expressing concerns, if not downright fear.”
He’s teaching an entire unit on the election, as he puts it, “covering the debate and using news sources to objectively present policies from each candidate.” So Moss can’t avoid Trump’s positions, like his proposed ban on Muslim immigration (which evolved into “extreme vetting”), his insistence that he’ll deport “millions,” and his promise to end birthright citizenship.
Moss can’t, in good conscience, give his students the kindergarten-level “He won’t win, and our family isn’t going anywhere” speech that Hill gave Phoenix, either. They’re old enough to know that much of what Trump has proposed could affect their families, and they know he’s not guaranteed to lose — it’s part of their curriculum to understand this. So Moss tries to balance reassurance with honesty.
“A lot of students have undocumented parents or are undocumented themselves, so it’s very understandable that they would feel these ways,” he said. “I do try to suggest to them that there’s no immediate threat and there’s not going to be people knocking on doors necessarily, even if he does win. But I also, to some degree, think they might need to be a bit afraid. There needs to be awareness, and if fear comes with that, it seems justified.”
Some kids have broadened and weaponized Trump’s rhetoric
Moss says he hasn’t observed kids attacking or antagonizing each other based on views and policies Trump has expressed. That could be because Latino students are the dominant population at his school, or because his classroom has a clearly stated nondiscrimination policy. “At the beginning of the year, I generally do a big piece on diversity and respect,” he said. “Almost the only way to get thrown out of my classroom is to attack someone based on ethnicity gender preference or identity. Generally, students are highly respectful of that.”
Not all students adhere to such boundaries. According to the Teaching Tolerance report, while some kids are afraid, others feel empowered to bully each other, in particular with the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments that have had so much airtime during the presidential campaign.
“Students seem emboldened to make bigoted and inflammatory statements about minorities, immigrants, the poor, etc.,” a high school teacher in Michigan wrote in response to the survey.
There are reports of students repeating and exaggerating Trump’s positions, to the point of advocating for violence:
Teachers in New Hampshire — where the first primary was held — reported some of the greatest increases in disturbing behavior. One high school teacher from Westmoreland wrote, “A lot of students think we should kill any and all people we do not agree with. They also think that all Muslims are the same and are a threat to our country and way of life. They believe all Muslims want to kill us.
Bullies have targeted Muslim students and those who they confuse with Muslims with particular aggressions:
Muslim students — along with the Sikh and Hindu students who are mistaken for Muslims — have endured heightened levels of abuse. According to reports from around the nation, Muslim students regularly endure being called ISIS, terrorist or bomber. These opinions are expressed boldly and often.
Students target classmates of Mexican descent for taunts and threats about immigration. And, as in the case of Phoenix’s day camp friend, kids aren’t particularly detail-oriented about this bullying, and expand it to cover children of many different backgrounds:
Teachers in every state reported hostile language aimed at immigrants, mainly Mexicans. A Wisconsin middle school teacher told us, “Openly racist statements towards Mexican students have increased. Mexican students are worried.” A middle school teacher in Anaheim, California, reported, “Kids tell other kids that soon they will be deported.” Regardless of their ethnic background or even their immigration or citizenship status, targeted students are taunted with talk of a wall or threats of forcible removal.
Neither are the slurs limited to schools with immigrant populations. “At the all-white school where I teach, ‘dirty Mexican’ has become a common insult,” a Wisconsin middle school educator said. “Before election season it was never heard.”
Costello points out that this climate can impact kids of all ethnicities — even those who aren’t directly attacked. “Teachers have said it’s not just the marginalized kids who are being hurt,” she said. “Their white or Christian friends and allies feel for them and want to stand up for them. “
Kids haven’t ever been naive as adults like to think they are when it comes to racism
Joe Feagin, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M University who focuses on racial and ethnic studies and the co-author of The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, told Vox that the Teaching Tolerance survey’s findings are a reminder that school-age kids are much more aware of race and racism than adults often like to believe.
In fact, he says his research demonstrates that children as young as 2 to 5 years old understand and reinforce racial hierarchy. It’s actually quite common for kids to be each other’s first teachers when it comes to bigotry and stereotypes.
“Much of the literature suggests that children learn racism from parents, relatives, and media,” Feagin said. “The other big source of learning is that children learn from other children. One child comes to school, has discovered the n-word and what it means; by the end of the day, that knowledges has spread across the school. It’s quite possible for [kids in] child care to learn racial thinking from other children.”
His conclusions come in part from a study of a multiracial daycare center in the 1990s, — notably, before the advent of social media and the accompanying additional access to information.
Thanks to kids’ increased exposure to news and information today, he says it’s truer than ever that “It’s impossible for even anti-racist parents to hide this from their children.”
Feagin suggests parents should admit to themselves that their children will encounter racist views from the media and their peers — and the current political climate has simply emphasized the things kids have always encountered and communicated to each other. “Once you start doing that, when these racist incidents do happen in your child’s life, you can use these as teaching moments, teaching events,” he said.
The good news: According to Feagin, research data on children shows that young children have a strong sense of social justice and unfairness and they see this unfairness whether parents point it out or not. Parents should take advantage of this, he said, and “use these instances to point out the unfairness of that language and how it hurts people.”
Immigrant children may be most at risk for short-term harm
Teaching Tolerance’s report linked the racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric children have been exposed to during the Trump campaign to traditional bullying. The organization warned that there’s evidence the impact could be similar:
Stressed students have a harder time learning, and we saw many reports that anxiety was having an impact on grades and ability to concentrate. In Washington state, a teacher told us about a 10-year-old boy who can’t sleep at night because he is worried his immigrant parents will be sent away. A California art teacher described a fifth-grader who had begun having “full-blown panic attacks.” After fellow students in Washington state had repeatedly shouted slurs from their cars at one Muslim teenager, her teacher reported, the girl expressed suicidal thoughts.
Feagin said the impact of race- and religion-based bullying at school depends upon how the bullied kids’ families are able to counteract it. That may depend on how long their families have been in the United States and the coping mechanisms that exist in their culture as a result.
“African-American people have developed an antiracist counter-framing from 20 generations of dealing with white people,” Feagin said. “Families that can draw on this tradition might go through an incident and explain to a child that there are racist, mean people who think like this and say things that are false. But recent immigrants from say, the Middle East, might not have as much of that --- children might not have parents who have developed an antiracist counter-framing for how to deal with white racism.”
Latino families, according to this line of research, typically develop an “anti-racist counter-framing” — a way of using home culture to push back against the racist messages of the outside world — by the second or third generation in the United States.
As a result, when it comes to the impact of “the Trump effect,” Feagin said, “My guess just from my own 50 years of research is it’s going to be even tougher on immigrant children,” with more recent immigrants suffering the most.
This is unprecedented, so long-term effects are unclear
In Costello’s view, it’s hard to accurately predict the impact of “the Trump effect” because it’s such a new phenomenon. Kids’ level of access to this type of rhetoric may be unprecedented in American society.
“I think it is fairly new,” she said. “When you think about the civil rights movement, the leaders of that movement had to depend on outrage on almost creating conflict — there’s a reason there were protests in Birmingham, because Bill Connor could be counted on to bring out the dogs and the fire hoses — that got the attention of the rest of the country. Today the quantity of the information, the access to the information, is so much more widespread. It’s instant and ubiquitous.”
But social scientists have little doubt that there will be an impact — at a minimum, to the psyches of individual kids who’ve dealt with fears like those expressed by Phoenix and Moss’s students.
- Increased vigilance and suspicion
- Increased sensitivity to threat
- Increased psychological and physiological symptoms (including risks for depression and anxiety disorders, and disruption to child development and quality of emotional attachment in family and social relationship)
- Increased alcohol and drug usage
- Increased aggression
- Narrowing sense of time
“This campaign has been particularly difficult and stressful for many individuals,” Turner said in an email to Vox, pointing to the American Psychological Association’s survey on techniques for coping with election-related stress. “As you might expect, if adults are stressed and having a difficult time this stress is magnified among youth. Children often model behaviors and emotions expressed by their parents or important figures in their lives. So when adults are distressed or bothered by comments by Donald Trump, similar behaviors may be experienced by youth.”
“There is a significant amount of research on the negative impacts of microaggressions (subtle racism and discrimination) and overt racism on individuals psychological and physical health,” he continued. “When children are the recipients of racist rhetoric it can lead to anxiety, depression, and concentration difficulties that might hurt their academic performance. In the long-term, this could lead to psychological symptoms or even health risk such as high blood pressure.”
Turner suggested that adults consult a a toolkit by Boston College’s Institute for the Study of and Promotion for Race and Culture to help children cope with race-based stress that results from campaign rhetoric, saying, “It’s particularly important for caregivers and parents to develop a plan of how to address these incidents.”
How the “Trump effect” will shape the way the kids affected by it operate as they grow up is an open question— but it seems clear that it’s not dependent on what happens November 8. In other words, much of the damage has been done.
Costello suspects that the effects will persist even if Trump doesn’t win the presidency. “Let’s imagine a scenario where Trump loses, Hillary wins, and no politicians are calling for these things or using this kind of language,” she said. “It’s still out there. Once kids are afraid, you just can’t turn it off.”