by Saawan Duvvuri ’26
December 17, 2024
The opinions expressed here are strictly those of the writer and do not reflect the views of University School of Nashville or the Peabody Press.
Since the election of Donald Trump in November, there has been an alarming rise in racially motivated hate crimes against various minority groups in America. Many Americans fear that Trump’s presidential election has allowed white supremacists to feel more comfortable spewing hateful rhetoric and committing atrocious acts against people of color.
The data and news stories on the issue paint a troubling picture. An article from PBS published on November 26 reports that there was a significant spike in incidents involving neo-Nazi marches and racist and hateful content emerging online following the 2024 Presidential Election.
NPR reported on November 15 that in the days following the presidential election, Black college and high school students across America received messages saying that they were “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” Asian American and Hispanic students also received text messages alleging that they were illegal immigrants and that they would be “deported right now and sent to the nearest concentration camp.” Several students of color at USN reported receiving these text messages.
Unfortunately, the rise in racist attacks has not been limited to the internet. In the week before Thanksgiving, fifty-year-old Indian-American and U.S. citizen Pervez Taufiq was traveling with his wife and three children from Mexico to Los Angeles. However, a white woman soon disrupted their journey when she began harassing the family on an airport bus, calling Pervez “tandoori,” “stinky,” and “not a real American.” NBC News reports that the attack began entirely unprompted, when the woman began screaming at Taufiq’s eight and four year old children, telling them to “shut up” as they talked amongst themselves.
More disturbingly, the women’s hate speech began on the flight before, when she repeatedly questioned Taufiq’s 11 year old son about his heritage, asking whether he was Indian and where he was from. Sadly, Taufiq reports that the hardest part of the experience was having to explain what racism was for the first time to his child.
This rise in hate crimes is not the first time racist attacks have risen since Trump was in office. Trump’s openly racist comments and remarks have sparked xenophobia across the nation in recent years.
Trump’s characterization of Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals” led to waves of anti-immigrant sentiment that contributed to the deportation of thousands of Hispanic migrants and the propagation of anti-Hispanic prejudice.
In 2017, following the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in which hundreds of white nationalists marched through the city protesting the removal of a confederate statue, Trump claimed that there were “fine people on both sides” of the rally, insinuating that many of the white supremacist pro-confederate marchers in Charlottesville were justified in their actions.
Antisemitic hate crimes are, unfortunately, on the rise as well. Data released by the FBI in September revealed that in 2023, anti-Jewish hate crimes increased 63 percent in just a single year to 11,862. This represents the highest number of antisemitic hate crimes in the United States since the FBI began tracking this data in 1991. The Antidefamation League’s own data suggests similar upticks.
Trump’s racism has even inspired widespread backlash movements, including those like #StopAsianHate, which emerged following the Covid-19 pandemic in response to numerous hate crimes across America targeting people of primarily East Asian descent. Trump repeatedly referred to Covid-19 with various anti-Chinese names, including the “Chinavirus” and the “Kung Fu Flu.”
Experts and academics in the fields of race, sociology, and political science attribute a rise in the support of political figures like Trump and subsequent hate crimes against minority groups to the belief that many white Americans have that they are losing power and social dominance in an increasingly diverse America with more and more institutions focused on justice and equity. In his book, White Fear: How the Browning of America is Making White Folks Lose Their Minds, American journalist Roland Martin argues that as America becomes less and less white, white Americans are developing a deep-seated fear that they are losing the economic, social, and political standing of superiority they once enjoyed.
A poll from NPR in 2017, nearly a year after Trump’s first election, found that over 55 percent of white Americans believe discrimination against whites is occurring today. The same poll and research from the Pew Research Center found that the very white people who believed discrimination against whites was rampant supported Trump at shockingly high rates.
Simply put, much of Trump’s presidency may have been built from the ground up on the fear that white Americans were losing their position of superiority that they had previously held in America; thus, Trump’s election emboldened many white nationalists to fight for what they believed was their rightful place in society. This “fight” has engendered hate crimes, neo-Nazi marches, and the formation of a growing number of white supremacist groups and organizations.
Looking ahead, it is vital that we as a society work to deconstruct harmful stereotypes promulgated by the media about various ethnic groups, such as the portrayal of Black Men as inherently dangerous or the depiction of immigrants as a drain on American resources. Instead, we must stand up to fight against hate crimes we witness in our day-to-day lives. These negative stereotypes not only perpetuate division but embolden those who commit hate crimes, as seen in the Charleston Church shooting or the attacks against Asian-Americans during the Covid-19 Pandemic. If we do not actively work to resist racism at its roots—through actions including activism, policy reform, and increased education—America may be remembered in 30 years as a nation akin to Nazi Germany.
