The death chamber of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, California. Photo: Press Association/Eric Risberg.

Thank God, I’ve never had a child murdered. I hope I never do, and I hope that nobody else ever does. But tragically this is an occasional feature of our world, and of the people I’ve met who have lost children, the overwhelming sense I get is that it never leaves them. They learn to ‘live around it’, but they never ‘get over it’. And nothing, short of the impossible ask of bringing the child back, can ever fix it.

Which is just one of the reasons why the call by UKIP leader Paul Nuttall for the death penalty for child killers is wrong. Execution doesn’t take away the pain and it doesn’t provide closure. Speak to families of murder victims in the USA and, while different families want different things, one consistent thing is that the wrongs are not righted by killing a killer, even if justice is said to be done. For families who hoped it would be the end of their ordeal, the aftermath of execution can be bitter new stage of grief.

Many of the arguments about the death penalty have been repeated time and time again; prominent among them is the question of innocence. No justice system gets it right all the time, but you can’t release someone from death the way you can release them from prison. Indeed, of the three controversial cases that helped to end the death penalty in the UK, two of them involved men (Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley) whose were later found to be innocent, while in America, for every ten people executed since the 1970s (when new safeguards were put in place), one person has been exonerated. Less mentioned, but crucial for any victim-centred approach to the issue, is that wrongful executions mean the victim’s family will also have to live knowing that an innocent person died in the name of their loved one.

A central consideration of any issue of criminal justice, in fact of any issue full stop, should be: “What will do the most good and the least harm going forward, given where we are now?” The death penalty is not the least harmful response to murder, because of all the people it affects. The ripples spread far wider than just the killer, the victim and the victim’s family.

If you execute a child killer, then clearly somebody has to do the execution, but that also means someone has to carry the weight of doing it, of putting a fellow human to death. While there are some executioners who cope with their job (usually by focusing on it as ‘just a job’ that they try to do well), others do not. One former executioner in Kazakhstan, who was ‘initially chosen as an executioner because of his strong psychological coping capacity, reported frequent nightmares and deterioration into “a lonely and secluded life”’. American prison staff have developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because of their role in executions, while in Indonesia, prison guards who participate in executions get three days of mandatory spiritual guidance and psychological assistance afterwards, to help them deal with it. Prison systems come up with ways to try to stop people feeling like it was ‘their fault’: in Japan, three different staff press identical buttons to hang the prisoner, but only one button is live and they never find out ‘who did it’; in the USA, this diffusion of responsibility goes even further, with guards given apparently trivially small tasks such as tying down one leg of the prisoner to the lethal injection gurney. But when you have to work so hard to make something okay, maybe that’s a sign that it’s not okay.

Lawyers are also affected; as one from India put it in a report by Penal Reform International:

“I specialise in end-stage death cases … I dread these cases, and shudder every time a new one comes my way. Having taken it on, I feel I am living with a coffin tied to my back. It takes over my life, dominates my thoughts during the day, corrupts all pleasure and invades my dreams at night. I habitually have nightmares of executions, some of which I imagine are taking place in my apartment or just on the ledge outside the balcony where a scaffold has been erected, and the prisoner is being dropped from the balcony ledge with a rope tied to his neck. While preparing the case, I sometimes get so afraid that I am unable to work, and have to curl up under a blanket and go to sleep. Alcohol has a soothing effect on my nerves, and I have to stop myself from having more than one drink in the evening, or beginning the day with a gin and tonic. Ever since I started doing this work, people have been telling me that I age six years in six months.”

And then there is also the other family: the family and children of the person sentenced to death. Speaking to these children and the people who work with them, you get a sense of a group who are themselves innocent of a crime but suffer because of the crimes of others. They are traumatised, by the crime, by the death sentence and (if it happens) by the execution; they face the stigma of being related to a killer, which can remain long after the execution; and they have to live knowing that their parent will be put to death, and while they often recognise that the parent has done wrong, they still love them and would rather the parent was alive, even if in prison. When the child is related to both the killer and the victim (such as when the mother kills the father), it becomes even harder. A parental death sentence stays with a child for their whole life.

Unsurprisingly, people want the harshest sentence for the worst crimes. But that doesn’t mean the sentence should be as harsh as you can possibly imagine. We don’t need to kill to show how much we disapprove or how sad we are that a child has died. We should be asking for sentences that allow something better to come out of a horrible, tragic situation. We cannot undo what has already happened, but we can work to make a better future, to try to ensure there are no more crimes and no more victims. 

(Oliver Robertson is a Quaker working on issues of peace and human rights. He specialises in criminal justice matters, particularly the death penalty and children of prisoners, and on climate change).

This story was first published on openDemocracy.

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Let’s hope that Donald Trump is the political version of syrup of ipecac.

The American system has been sick to its stomach for some time. Then along comes Donald Trump, America swallows him (hook, line, and sinker), and the system experiences gut-churning convulsions ever since. According to the most hopeful medical prognosis, America will eventually expel Trump from its system and feel so much better afterwards.

Reminder: The whole world is watching. How we deal with this president’s fundamentally anti-American policies will have tremendous international ramifications. In fact, the rest of the world is already dealing with the “Trump effect.”

After all, while Trump is our emetic, he’s the rest of the world’s smelling salts. Some key countries around the world are already coming to their senses about the threat of dangerous populists. The test cases will be France and Germany. But a progressive backlash appears to be building elsewhere as well.

Against Le Pen

Marine Le Pen is the smiling face of the new fascism.

She’s a twice-divorced Catholic who supports a woman’s right to choose. But she’s also a dangerous populist with virulently anti-immigrant, anti-multicultural, anti-EU views.

She’s more law-and-order than Rudy Giuliani. And her anti-globalization rants appeal to some on the left, which means that her National Front party is doing well in areas that once voted for the French Communists.

Marine Le Pen is also a front runner in the presidential race slated for later this spring. She leads her rivals in the latest polls with 27 percent. It’s enough to generate predictions of a Trump-like upset.

Until recently, her major challenge came from someone with views nearly as abhorrent as hers. Francois Fillon, the candidate of the conservative Republicans, was clearly hoping to steal votes from Le Pen, the New York Times reported, when he “positioned himself as a staunch defender of French values, vowing to restore authority, honor the Roman Catholic Church, and exert ‘strict administrative control’ over Islam.”

Yet the upright Fillon hasn’t turned out to be as scrupulous as he pretended. A scandal involving alleged payments to family members for parliamentary work has caused Fillon to slip considerably in the polls.

This would ordinarily represent an opportunity for the left. But the socialist and left parties haven’t been able to reconcile their differences and unite against the center-right and the National Front.

Which leaves independent politician Emmanuel Macron as the most appealing candidate who can go up against Le Pen. Macron isn’t an easy politician to pin down. He was the economy minister in Francois Hollande’s Socialist government, but he’s infuriated the more obdurate of the French left by embracing free trade, challenging union privileges, and speaking out against the 35-hour workweek (at least for younger workers). On the other hand, Macron is EU-friendly, pro-immigrant, a fan of Germany over Russia, and committed to the full progressive agenda on social issues.

Despite his establishment credentials, Macron is presenting himself as an outsider. He’s channeled Trump by railing against the elite — those who take advantage of their entrenched economic and political privileges — and he wants to shake up France with En Marche! movement. He’s also channeled Obama by emphasizing his own youth and dynamism.

Macron isn’t afraid to make waves. He took a hit in the polls recently when he argued that French colonial policy in Algeria amounted to a “crime against humanity” and refused to back down from implicating the French state in these acts.

However you define him politically — and he himself avoids labels — Macron is the best bet that French progressives have of defeating Le Pen in a second round of voting. As long as Le Pen doesn’t secure an outright majority in the first round, most of the French electorate will have an opportunity to gang up against the neo-fascist threat — just as they did when her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made it to the second round in 2002.

Macron can also ensure that France doesn’t end up with Fillon’s only slightly less repugnant version of National Front politics (the equivalent of defeating Trump only to elect Ted Cruz).

Taking Back Germany

For Angela Merkel, it’s the best of times and the worst of times.

The rise of Donald Trump and the retreat of the United States from international affairs have placed Merkel and Germany at the moral center of the “West” because of their acceptance of refugees and non-acceptance of Vladimir Putin. Domestically, however, while Merkel’s immigration policies have infuriated the German right, the economic policies that have impoverished Greece and threatened the cohesion of the European Union have angered the German left. The Christian Democratic Party is consequently slumping at the polls.

Despite all the press that Franke Petry and her far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party have gotten in the Western press — including this almost admiring piece in The New Yorker — the anti-immigrant party only polls around 10 percent. The real beneficiary of the Trump victory in Germany has been Martin Schulz, the head of the Social Democratic Party. Schulz has effectively used the threat of nationalism and Trump-like politics to bring his party neck and neck with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Writes Anthony Faiola in The Washington Post:

In a country that stands as a painful example of the disastrous effects of radical nationalism, Schulz is building a campaign in part around bold attacks on Trump. He has stopped well short of direct comparisons to Adolf Hitler, but Schulz recently mentioned Trump in the same speech in which he heralded his party’s resistance to the Nazis in the lead-up to World War II. 

Schulz is the former president of the European parliament, where he also served as a member for two decades. As such, Schulz has become the face of the new MEGA campaign: Make Europe Great Again. Having been active at the European level for so long, Schulz is also something of an outsider to domestic German politics. Like Trump, he prides himself on being self-taught. Unlike Trump, he actually reads books.

The Social Democrats might not succeed in dislodging Merkel. But they’ll help keep the extremists out of power and may just manage to get enough votes to necessitate a grand coalition. With the European Union threatening to implode, such an example of trans-partisan governance at the heart of the continent could reassure those fed up with political polarization that compromise — and indeed, politics as we know it — can still thrive in modern democracies.

Less optimistic is the situation in the Netherlands, where the party of extremist Geert Wilders is leading the polls. Wilders, whose mother’s family came from Indonesia and whose wife is Hungarian, has built his career on anti-immigrant fanaticism. If he becomes prime minister, he’s promised to guide his country out of the EU, close borders to immigrants, and close all mosques: Trump on steroids.

The Dutch elections take place in mid-March. Even if Wilders wins a plurality of the votes, it’s not likely that he’ll be able to form a government. No other parties are willing to join hands with such a toxic politician. The Dutch might be crazy enough to vote for Wilders — but they’re not crazy enough to actually work with him.

Outside Europe

Closer to home, the Trump effect is providing the Mexican left with its greatest boost in years. Huge demonstrations have taken place around the country to protest the energy policies of Enrique Peña Nieto’s government and the immigration and trade policies of Donald Trump. Nieto’s popularity is embarrassingly low — 12 percent, lower even than Trump’s.

Veteran left politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador is the major benefactor of all this dissatisfaction. He’s a perpetual outsider to Mexico’s national politics. But, like Bernie Sanders, he acquired considerable experience as a mayor — of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005. “He ran a populist and popular administration which kept subway fares low, built elevated freeways and partnered with the billionaire Carlos Slim to restore the city’s historic center,” writes David Agren in The Guardian. “He also provided stipends to seniors and single mothers, initiatives initially denounced as populism but replicated by others including Peña Nieto.”

AMLO, as he is often called, is currently the presidential frontrunner, though elections won’t take place until July 2018. But he’s not holding his fire until then. “Enough of being passive,” AMLO said recently. “We should put a national emergency plan in place to face the damage and reverse the protectionist policies of Donald Trump.”

With Justin Trudeau in Canada and a possible leftist leader in Mexico, Donald Trump would be caught in a potential North American containment strategy. Perhaps, in a reversal of the Cold War dynamic, Europe would establish military bases in Montreal and Tijuana to make sure that the United States doesn’t overstep its bounds.

Further afield, South Korea will be holding an election this year after a decade of conservative rule. The current president, Park Geun-Hye, has popularity figures even lower than Nieto or Trump. She’s been embroiled in an impeachment process over corruption charges, her conservative party has changed its name to escape any associations with her reign, and no truly viable conservative candidate has emerged to extend the right’s hold on power. Ban Ki-Moon, the former UN general secretary, was briefly the Hail Mary candidate for conservatives before dropping out of the running.

The current front runner, Moon Jae-in, is an establishment progressive who used to work in the Roh Moo-Hyun administration. He would resurrect some of Roh’s policies such as a more balanced approach to the United States and China as well as some form of principled engagement with North Korea. But he’s not the only progressive alternative.

There’s also the mayor of Seongnam, Lee Jae-Myeong, who styles himself the Sanders of South Korea.

The election is officially scheduled for December, but if Park is impeached, the date would be moved up. No doubt many in the United States wish the South Korean electoral rules pertained here: impeachment followed by new elections. Impeachment is still an option, of course, but the prospect of President Pence isn’t reassuring.

In November, Donald Trump’s victory seemed to be part of a global rejection of liberal internationalism — from Russia to the UK to the Philippines. Certainly many in the Trump administration, most notably strategic advisor Steve Bannon, hope to use their newly acquired juice to help their compatriots, like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, take power as well.

But threats have a marvelous mobilizing effect. Donald Trump may be an inspiration to some. For many others, however, Trump is a whiff of something evil-smelling that jolts progressive politics all over the world out of its swoon.

(This article was first published on Foreign Policy in Focus).
 

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Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

Demonstrators march on international migrant day 2016. EPA

On December 31 1937, Cambridge classicist and man of letters F L Lucas embarked on an experiment. He would keep a diary for exactly one calendar year. It was, as he put it: “an attempt to give one answer, however inadequate, however fragmentary, to the question that will surely be asked one day by some of the unborn – with the bewilderment, one hopes, of a happier age: ‘What can it have felt like to live in that strange, tormented and demented world?’”

Lucas sought to preserve an affective archive, and to write about how it felt to live in an era of spiralling crisis.

As someone who wasn’t born in 1938 I cannot help but feel that Lucas’ solemn hope that his generation was living through the worst of it – and that lessons would surely be learned – have been well and truly dashed. Has 2016 been 1938 all over again?

Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

At present, as in the “Devil’s Decade”, we are experiencing the capricious convergence of historical forces: the fall-out of economic crisis and the extreme polarisation of the political spectrum from far-right to hard-left – the centre doesn’t hold. A tidal wave of refugees is being met by proportionately more xenophobia than compassion. Militant isolationism is thriving. Doors are being closed and walls built. Culture wars are punctuated by attacks on “experts” and intellectuals. 2016 has even seen open an unashamed airing of anti-Semitism.

The historical parallels between 2016 and 1938 are abundant. There are important differences in detail, in time and place, but the pattern of events, and of cause and effect, is striking.

Civil war raged in Spain then – as it rages in Syria today. Then as now, these internecine conflicts provide mirrors to existing fissures in international relations and deepening ideological antagonisms. By the end of 1938, and after Abyssinia, Spain, Anschluss, and Kristallnacht, not much faith was left in the ideal of internationalism or in the League of Nations – and this too sounds all too familiar.

The aftermath of the Kristallnacht. Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA

The rescue of refugee children through the Kindertransports was just as symbolically important, yet as negligible, a solution to an immense humanitarian and moral crisis as has been the response to lone children refugees holed up in Calais this year. And what of Aleppo? Shame was, and is, a dominant feeling.

Where next?

The Munich Agreement of September 1938 was perceived by many of its British critics as an act of national suicide. The Brexit decision has likewise, again and again, been described as an act of self-harm, even of national hari-kari.

Writing at the end of the year, contemporary historian R W Seaton-Watson had no doubt that 1938 had “resulted in a drastic disturbance of the political balance on the Continent, the full consequences of which is still too soon to estimate”. Treaties weren’t worth the paper they were written on in 1938 – and at the end of 2016 it is worryingly unclear where Britain will stand after triggering Article 50.

Meanwhile, George Orwell’s assessment of the disarray of the political left post-Munich could just as well apply to Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. As Orwell saw it:

Barring some unforeseen scandal or a really large disturbance inside the Conservative Party, Labour’s chances of winning the General Election seem very small. If any kind of Popular Front is formed, its chances are probably less than those of Labour unaided. The best hope would seem to be that if Labour is defeated, the defeat may drive it back to its proper ‘line’.

Full circle

One could go on seeking coordinates but the sum total would still be the same. The rug has been pulled out from under the assumed solidity of the liberal democratic project. A delicate tapestry of structures and ideas is coming apart at the seams.

Even more specifically, it is the psychological experience, the search for meaning, and the emotional cycle, the feelings – collective and individual – of 1938 that are uncannily familiar.

Post-truth politics is anti-rational. Emotion has unexpectedly triumphed over reason in 2016. Love and/or hate has beaten intellect. That’s true for Hillary Clinton’s “love trumps hate” slogan as much as it is for her opponent.

The referendum result shook many. PA

New political technologies render older ones obsolete. In both Britain’s referendum campaign and in the American election, traditional opinion polls failed to capture the emotion being expressed across social media platforms.

Back in 1938, it was British Gallup and the rival Mass-Observation that were the innovative political technologies. Using very different techniques, each offered fresh insight into the psychology of political behaviour and tried to unseal the stiff upper lip of the British electorate.

Mass-Observation tried to get into people’s heads, and diagnosed an increasing occurrence of “crisis fatigue” as a response to nervous strain and “a sense of continuous crisis”.

Almost immediately after the EU referendum, therapists reported “shockingly elevated levels of anxiety and despair, with few patients wishing to talk about anything else”. And the visceral nature of the US election campaign contributed, tragically, to the exponential increase of calls to suicide helplines. National crisis is inevitably internalised.

Reflecting on the psychological fallout of the Munich Crisis, novelist E M Forster observed that: “exalted in contrary directions, some of us rose above ourselves, and others committed suicide.”

As 1938 drew to a close, serious conversations were dominated by the verbal and physical expressions of fatalism, anxiety, sickness, depression, and impending doom. Lucas wrote in his diary:

The Crisis seems to have filled the world with nervous break-downs. Or perhaps the Crisis itself was only one more nervous break-down of a world driven by the killing pace of modern life and competition into ever acuter neurasthenia [shell shock].

It is too simplistic to say that history repeats itself. And yet, throughout this past year I could not escape the feeling that we have been here before. We share with those who lived through 1938 overwhelming sensibility of bewilderment, suspense, desperation and fear of the unknown. I can’t help but wonder what future historians will make of 2016.

It’s probably sage advice to go see a good movie over the holidays – and La La Land, already tipped to win an Oscar, may provide just the kind of escapism that is needed. However, when someone comes to make the movie of 2016, the soundtrack will probably be the late Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker. It certainly feels like 1938 all over again. Time to start keeping a diary.

(Julie Gottlieb is Reader in Modern History, University of Sheffield).

(This story was first published on The Conversation).

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Alright with the alt-right? PA

Far-right movements are clearly on the rise throughout Europe and the US. Winning elections in the US and campaigns to leave the European Union are providing an effective boost to charismatic public figures clutching a populist ticket and claiming to be outside of the establishment.

And in two major events of 2016 – Donald Trump’s election and Brexit – far-right movements have leveraged social media far more effectively than their opposition.

The “alternative right” or alt-right, has made expert use of blogs, tweets, hashtags, memes, and trolling to provide a legitimised voice to far-right ideas – and to use that voice to speak to huge amounts of people.

A nebulous collection of internet-savvy individuals who came to prominence in support of Trump’s presidency, the alt-right represents various right-leaning ideologies including white supremacy, Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and opposition to immigration.

Meanwhile the left’s social media usage seems to come across somewhat differently. Undoubtedly there are left-leaning campaigns gaining effective and vital support through social media – the Scottish National Party’s presence on Twitter for example, or the polished Facebook page of Pablo Iglesias (leader of the radical left-wing Spanish political party Podemos) which has compared Spanish politics to Game of Thrones.

But there are notable differences in how the social media usage of the left and right are reported and thought about in wider culture. There are innumerable reports exploring, in depth, Donald Trump’s Twitter timeline (which then adds to his social media presence, while a lack of coverage restricts social media growth).

Some say Hillary Clinton’s supporters even assisted her defeat by choosing to insult Trump supporters online rather than engage them in serious debate. British commentator Jonathan Freedland argued that Brexit Remainers have done little more than “exchange ironic, world-weary tweets, the electronic equivalent of a sigh, each time they read of some new hypocrisy or deception by the forces of leave”.

Given this imbalance, what might the left do to make better use of social media? Imitating the dubious strategies of the “alt-right” with an “alt-left” counterweight is probably not a positive move. (Remember that “alt-right” as a term and movement has its origins in the writings of Richard Spencer, president of white supremacist think-tank The National Policy Institute.)

Rather, what the left might benefit from is an examination of its own social media success stories.

One example is the @StopFundingHate campaign. This Twitter account (with 66,000 followers) encourages consumer pressure against companies which spend money advertising in right-wing publications such as the Daily Mail (which, it is argued, provide platforms for divisive social ideologies). So far its biggest victory has been Lego’s decision to end free giveaways through that newspaper.
 

Daily Mail and Lego not playing together any more.

To find out why the this particular Twitter account had sparked so much public interest, we analysed tweets featuring the #StopFundingHate hashtag with colleagues at Newcastle and Northumbria universities. As part of the CuRAtOR project, we work on investigating the cultures of fear that are propagated through online “othering” and how this can lead to subsequent mistrust and stigmatisation of groups or communities.

We found a large concentration of tweets around the sharing of a video produced by the campaign which plays on the British tradition of emotive Christmas TV adverts.

The seasonal ads usually attempt to associate positive traditional Christmas values – togetherness, goodwill, family – with the company’s products and services.

The @StopFundingHate video overlays clips from these adverts with text that juxtaposes their feel-good sentiment against the apparently divisive content of newspapers these same companies choose to advertise with.

Tweets that shared this video also often use a word, “brandjamming”, to succinctly describe the video’s aim in a single snappy term. That aim is to leverage consumer power against retailers by publicly pressuring them into cutting financial ties with sections of the news media.

One key element of the campaign’s success was its timing. It appeared in the lead up to Christmas, when emotions are stirred and consumers have power. Second, it seems that sharing visually engaging material is more effective than simply tweeting. The video had a simple message which realigned TV adverts we may have previously felt good about.

And while these strategies do not necessarily suggest a message with much longevity or depth, they do work to produce something that resonates with people and which people are motivated to share.

Social(ist) media campaigns

Building on these insights, we also collected the tweets produced by the @StopFundingHate account itself. These often referred back to the campaign’s own larger social media presence, with tweets containing terms like “Facebook”, “following” and “share” – regular reminders for followers to spread the message to non-followers and extend the reach of the campaign.

@StopFundingHate also regularly hijacks hashtags already in use by companies as well as more general Christmas-themed hashtags such as #goodwilltoall. This serves to place the message within more mainstream domains – somebody searching for heart-warming tweets about #bustertheboxer might happen across @StopFundingHate and question the validity of their feelings about the John Lewis advert.

@StopFundingHate uses its account to directly call out companies including @LEGOGroup, @JohnLewisRetail and @Waitrose. In mentioning these companies, the onus is thereby squarely placed on them to respond or, more typically, to be seen as failing to respond to critiques levied directly at them.

Yet it is important to remember that @StopFundingHate is not universally well-received. Just as the “alt-right” have been accused of dubious social media practices (such as trolling opponents, or using personal details in threatening ways), there has been a backlash against this particular campaign for encouraging press censorship.

So for @StopFundingHate and the left generally, a careful balance has to be struck. They need to be seriously committed to social change without being considered as a branch of the thought police.
Nevertheless, to put up stronger opposition against an increasingly institutionalised right, the left needs to analyse and reflect on its use of social media. If it does, it will be able to strike that balance – and apply its successes elsewhere.

(Phillip David Brooker is Research Associate in Social Media Analytics, University of Bath. Julie Barnett is Professor of Health Psychology, University of Bath).

This article was first on The Conversation.
 

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President-elect Donald Trump "must repent, take responsibility, and challenge those who have been emboldened by his words, and he must also change the direction of his policies that undermine the cause of justice and civil rights," said Rev. William Barber. (Photo: Karla Ann Cote/flickr/cc)

President-elect Donald Trump "must repent, take responsibility, and challenge those who have been emboldened by his words, and he must also change the direction of his policies that undermine the cause of justice and civil rights," said Rev. William Barber. (Photo: Karla Ann Cote/flickr/cc)Facing increased reports of hate-fueled harassment, vandalism, property destruction, and assault in the wake of Donald Trump's election last week, more than 100 faith, labor, and civil rights groups on Friday sent a letter to the president-elect, urging him to "loudly, forcefully, unequivocally, and consistently" denounce such acts.

The organisations, which represent more than 10 million people across the United States, call particular attention to the number of incidents taking place at schools and college campuses

The organisations, which represent more than 10 million people across the United States, call particular attention to the number of incidents taking place at schools and college campuses—like in Michigan, where middle school students chanted "build the wall" at classmates, or in Pennsylvania, where parents received a letter about swastika graffiti in student bathrooms.

"There's no denying it—the election has had a profound and lasting impact on our nation's schoolchildren for the worse," said Maureen Costello, director of the Teaching Tolerance program at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which coordinated the letter along with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

"Many of these acts have been carried out in your name," reads the letter (pdf), signed by groups including the Human Rights Campaign, Badass Teachers Association, Muslim Community Network, and National Organization for Women. "Though you may not condone this behavior, your silence gives tacit permission to those who perform these acts."

And while Trump "spoke against bullying, intimidation, and hate crimes" during his "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday, his appointment of alt-right "hero" Stephen Bannon to chief strategist "sends the exact opposite message," the letter charges.

"The presidency is about many things," it concludes. "Chiefly, it is about setting an example through your leadership. You have said that you will be the president for all Americans, Mr. Trump. We ask that you keep your promise by loudly, forcefully, unequivocally, and consistently denouncing these acts and the ideology that drives them. We ask you to use your position, your considerable platform, and even your tweets to send a clear message that hate has no place in our public discourse, in our public policy, or in our society."

Added Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, architect of the Moral Monday movement and another signatory to the letter: "Mr. Trump's campaign has been one of unbounded vulgarity against people of color, immigrants, women, and people of different faiths. He must repent, take responsibility, and challenge those who have been emboldened by his words, and he must also change the direction of his policies that undermine the cause of justice and civil rights. Anything less than this will continue the deep distrust and apprehension we have regarding his presidency."

AFT president Randi Weingarten said her union plans to set up a support and resource hotline for people to report incidents and be directed to experts for guidance and counseling. She also said educators and others can find lessons and other materials on topics including bullying and grief, as well as the election and its meaning, for free on the AFT's Share My Lesson website.

And as Rethinking Schools noted in a recent newsletter, "racist and xenophobic celebrations were not the only response to Trump's election."

"In San Francisco, more than a thousand students walked out of class to join protest marches," Rethinking Schools editors and staff wrote. "As one student said, 'We're trying to inform people about white supremacy, racism, homophobia, everything.' And in the New York City high school where Rethinking Schools editor Adam Sanchez teaches, the art club hosted a 'No Allegiance to White Supremacy' t-shirt-making gathering, while the Feminism and Black Lives Matter clubs held a joint emergency meeting to discuss the election."

"These responses are also harbingers," the newsletter declared, "anticipating our schools and classrooms as sites of resistance to everything that Trump stands for."

This story was first published on commondreams.org.
 

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