According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, hundreds of hate incidents have been reported since Donald Trump was elected president. Last week, the SPLC began tallying election-related instances of harassment and intimidation by pulling from news reports, social media and direct submissions on its website; the organization told NBC News yesterday that there’ve been more than 300 incidents thus far, and that number continues to climb.
“Anti-Black and anti-immigrant incidents were far and away the most reported, with anti-Muslim being the third most common,” the nonprofit civil rights organization reported on its website.
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Among the slew of incidents verified by NBC News were vandalizations of church property, with graffiti like “Trump Nation, Whites Only” and “Heil Trump” painted on buildings; reports of a Muslim college student in Michigan being told to remove her hijab or be set on fire with a lighter; and the discovery that someone had placed “colored” and “whites only” signs above drinking fountains at a Florida high school.
Most people are not surprised. Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC, told the New York Times in September he didn’t “have the slightest doubt that Trump’s campaign rhetoric has played a big part” in the rising number of attacks against marginalized communities.
The FBI also released its annual “Hate Crimes Statistics” report yesterday, which indicated hate crimes had indeed increased in 2015. According to the report, there were 5,850 incidents last year, an increase of 6.8 percent since 2014. A majority of those offenses, the FBI found, stemmed from bias based on race and/or ethnicity.
Brian Levin is the director of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. He says the SPLC report offers “a very good barometer about which groups are being attacked and what the general trends are.” While he notes that last year saw an epidemic of hate crimes as well—according to him, the country averaged 16 a day in 2015—this report does reflect an alarming “increase in volume” in violent acts motivated by prejudice.
In September, Levin’s Center for Study of Hate & Extremism released a study analyzing official hate crime data in 20 states. In addition to discovering that hate crimes had overall increased and there had been a rise in conflict across the ideological spectrum, the report also found that anti-Muslim hate crimes had surged 78 percent in 2015.
“While there have been very few incidents of actual hate crime where Mr. Trump’s name was uttered since his candidacy,” Levin writes in his report, “the increase of 87.5 percent in anti-Muslim hate crime in the days directly following his announcement is a troubling development and worthy of concern.”
Next year’s report should be interesting.
