Before he heard from neighbors about the confrontation at his subdivision swimming pool, Jovan Hyman saw a shaky video of it online, where it was quickly going viral.

He clicked the link, which opened on turquoise water and a white woman walking quickly toward three black teenage boys, one of whom is filming her with his cellphone.

The Reminisce subdivision's gated pool facility in Summerville, S.C. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

“Get out!” the woman yells, slapping at the phone in the teen’s hand. “Get out now!”

As the three boys head for the pool exit, the woman follows and takes another swing at the boy and his phone.

Hyman called his wife, Tameka, over and played it for her.

“PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me this was NOT where I think it is,” she typed in a Facebook post that linked to the video. At that point, the video, shot in late June, had been online for only about 10 hours.

“In my neighborhood!” her husband added on Facebook a few minutes later. “This is totally uncalled for and downright embarrassing!”

The video rocketed around the country and the world — one of more than a dozen online clips from the summer that captured whites accusing blacks, often improperly, of trespassing, loitering and, in one instance involving an 8-year-old black girl, selling bottled water without a permit. At least six of the videos took place at neighborhood swimming pools in places such as Indianapolis, Winston-Salem, N.C., Pasadena, Calif., and the community pool in Summerville just a few hundred yards from Jovan and Tameka Hyman’s house.

People walk along bucolic streets in the Reminisce subdivision in Summerville, S.C. A video filmed at the subdivision swimming pool caused a rift among white and black residents.

President Trump’s critics have been quick to blame the incidents on emotions unleashed by his derisive rhetoric, often aimed at minorities. “The Trump effect strikes again!” blared a Facebook post from the group Occupy Democrats that featured the Summerville pool video and was played more than 4 million times.

Such videos predate Trump’s presidency and have proliferated this summer in places where he’s popular and reviled. Race, however, has been an overt component of Trump’s ascendance. On the campaign trail and in the White House, he has spoken about race in ways that would have been disastrous to almost any other politician. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has defended the president as an “equal opportunity” insulter, but his gibes follow a pattern — forgiving toward whites and unrelenting when it comes to minorities.

President Trump insulted NBA player LeBron James's intelligence in a tweet Aug. 3. It's not the first time Trump has taken this approach. (Elyse Samuels /The Washington Post)

Nearly 20 months into his presidency, Trump’s insults are changing the way neighbors see each other, treat each other and talk about one of the most sensitive issues in American life.

In Summerville, white and black residents have fought, often angrily, about the video and the woman’s actions that day. At the core of their disagreement is an argument over what constitutes racist behavior at a time when Trump and others are rapidly scrambling social norms.

Hyman’s first post, reacting to the video, had been online for only 20 minutes when he received a private message from Stephanie Sebby Strempel, the woman in the swimming pool video. The video was rapidly piling up views and Strempel’s Facebook inbox was filling with threats and insults from around the country.

“You’re a hot headed racist,” read one that she forwarded to Hyman. “Love to see y’alls getting your lives ruined.”

“I’d beat the [expletive] outta you and your kids,” read another.

Hyman and Strempel had never met, though Hyman and his wife had hazy memories of seeing her around the subdivision and at the pool. She lives less than a block away from him. Now she had an important message: “Jovan if you live here. You don’t know what happened. . . . Please let me explain. I need someone to know what happened. . . . This is out of hand.”

Tamanu Lowkie sits with her son, Malaki Wanamaker, 18, while working from home at the Reminisce subdivision. The entrance to the Reminisce subdivision in Summerville. People ride bikes and play on Scrapbook Lane in the Reminisce subdivision.

TOP: Tamanu Lowkie sits with her son, Malaki Wanamaker, 18, while working from home at the Reminisce subdivision. LEFT: The entrance to the Reminisce subdivision in Summerville. RIGHT: People ride bikes and play on Scrapbook Lane in the Reminisce subdivision.

The Summerville video, filmed in late June, spanned only 19 seconds. Darshaun Simmons, 15, who was holding the phone that day, waited 24 hours before he showed the video to an adult. The confrontation at the pool had taken place on the same day that his great-grandmother was rushed to the hospital. She died the next morning.

Because his parents were busy with family and the funeral arrangements, Darshaun first played it for his aunt. His phone screen shattered when Strempel knocked it from his hand, he said. So it was hard for his aunt to make out exactly what was happening.

She could hear Strempel screaming “Get out,” threatening to call 911 and disparaging the three boys as “little punks.” She could see Strempel draw back her hand to slap Darshaun two times.

“Is this you?” his aunt recalled asking her nephew. He replied quietly that it was.

Darshaun’s aunt said she noticed that none of the adults at the pool seemed to be doing anything to help him. She called over Darshaun’s mother to watch. Darshaun told them that he and two friends had been invited to the pool by a family that lives in the subdivision. They were just sitting down at a table and kicking off their shoes when Strempel approached them, asked them if they lived in the subdivision and then accused them of trespassing.

Darshaun’s mother took him to the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office to file an assault complaint.

His aunt looked Strempel up on Facebook and dashed off a quick message.

“Good evening, Stephanie. Is this you in the video?” she asked.

After four hours passed without a response, Darshaun’s aunt posted it to her Facebook page, tagging local activists, two television news stations, the NAACP and the Coast Guard unit where, she had learned, Strempel’s husband was serving.

“This kind of behavior is unacceptable and we WILL NOT TOLERATE IT!!!! PLEASE SHARE!!!!” she wrote. “. . . Racism at its best.”

She hit post at 11 p.m., flipped off her computer and went to sleep.

Online, Strempel would soon be dubbed “Pool Patrol Paula,” joining “ID Adam,” “BBQ Becky,” “Permit Patty,” “Coupon Carl” and others branded as exemplars of racism and white entitlement.

It was 10 the next morning when Strempel, who declined to comment for this article through her attorney, sent her first message to Jovan Hyman. She denied hitting Darshaun — even though the video showed her doing so — and defended herself as an involved member of the community.

“I have children,” she wrote. “My husband is a respected coast guard officer. I have a special needs son. . . . My husband and I are being threatened and slandered all over social media [and it] is not okay.”

By this point, Hyman had watched the video several times, and he had no doubt that Strempel had targeted the boys at the pool because of the color of their skin.

Jovan Hyman, a resident of the Reminisce subdivision, counsels a student at North Charleston Elementary School in North Charleston, S.C.

He and his wife had moved to Summerville after serving together in the Navy. They bought their first home in the subdivision, known as Reminisce in the gauzy feel-good language of newly created communities, five years earlier. He taught English at a local elementary school and coached high school football in nearby North Charleston. Together they were raising a 3-year-old son.

Hyman said he didn’t want to come across as “a bitter African American person.” But as he watched and re-watched the video, he thought of all the times he had seen white teenagers from outside the subdivision use the pool without being questioned by residents. He imagined someone, someday, confronting his son at the pool.

“Hello, the video is very damaging!” he messaged Strempel. “I understand your concern, but you have to understand the points of view of others!”

Strempel replied that she had been trying to help the boys by telling them to leave before someone at the pool called the police.

“No one knows what the kids said to me or did,” she wrote. “They only see me looking like I’m beating him up. Not the case but it’s disgusting.”

The next day the Reminisce Homeowner’s Association sent out an email to the subdivision residents urging the homeowners to call 911 or the sheriff if they spotted trespassers. “We hope this incident will allow us to come together as a community and work with law enforcement to provide security for your community as you might need it from time to time,” it read.

To Hyman, the email missed the main point. Like Strempel, the homeowner’s association had assumed that the teens were not guests. “That was not the case,” he said.

Even worse, the language about providing “security” suggested that the boys posed a threat to the subdivision’s residents, Hyman said. In fact, they were just boys trying to escape the summer heat in South Carolina and didn’t harm anyone. Hyman showed the email to his wife.

“Piss poor,” he said.

FROM LEFT: Emma Gregoire, Lilliana Holladay, Theresa Powers, Brittainy Holladay, Chrissy Pfeiffer, Koda Seymour, Elizabeth Gregoire, Ellie Seymour and Ella Seymour hang out on a summer evening along Scrapbook Lane in the Reminisce subdivision. A town mural in downtown Summerville. Tameka Hyman’s daughter, Tia Green, stands with Amir, her 15-month-old, at the Reminisce subdivision park.

TOP, FROM LEFT: Emma Gregoire, Lilliana Holladay, Theresa Powers, Brittainy Holladay, Chrissy Pfeiffer, Koda Seymour, Elizabeth Gregoire, Ellie Seymour and Ella Seymour hang out on a summer evening along Scrapbook Lane in the Reminisce subdivision. LEFT: A town mural in downtown Summerville. RIGHT: Tameka Hyman’s daughter, Tia Green, stands with Amir, her 15-month-old, at the Reminisce subdivision park.

For much of its history, Summerville was a quiet vacation town, about 30 miles from Charleston. Its main square is crammed with antique stores, art galleries and Victorian homes. “We are the cute, little town where everyone wants to live,” said Mayor Wiley Johnson. “They ride across the railroad tracks and see hometown USA.”

Johnson did not see a racial incident when he watched the video. “There were a lot of folks trying to make it a racial issue,” he said. “She overreacted. But, is there more to the story?”

Of late, the mayor’s version of Hometown USA has been changing fast. Since 2000, the surrounding county’s population, fueled by an influx of auto and airplane manufacturing jobs, has surged by more than 60 percent, to about 156,000 people. Much of that growth has happened in such places as the Reminisce subdivision, which was built a decade ago on farmland and today consists of about 275 vinyl-sided homes, designed to resemble the houses of historic Charleston.

Today, Reminisce is reminiscent of a typical Southern suburb, where blacks and whites live side by side but usually avoid sensitive topics such as race and politics. It’s a precinct where Trump took nearly two-thirds of the vote, is mostly white and made up of schoolteachers, police officers, and employees of the nearby Air Force base and Boeing plant.

Many of the residents are families who sought out the subdivision for its inexpensive homes, quiet streets and good schools.

As the video was taking off online, several black families in the subdivision tried to post a link to it on the homeowner’s association’s closed Facebook group account, hoping that it would generate a discussion about exactly what happened and the role race may have played in the incident.

Each time, an administrator for the page would remove it. Eventually, the black residents quit trying. Tamanu Lowkie, a black Reminisce resident, complained on the page that the censorship was absurd.

“I posted [the video] because it was shared with me from someone that doesn’t live in the neighborhood,” she wrote shortly after her first post was taken down. “It’s all over Facebook. You can delete it from this private page, but it’s on Live 5 [News] and everyone’s page. . . Just saying.”

To Lowkie, the message from the white residents was clear: “The subject is very uncomfortable to them.” They didn’t want to discuss it.

Instead, many white residents fretted about the effect the video might have on their property values and complained about the reporters who were converging on their neighborhood.

“Hopefully if everybody just ignores them they will leave,” one resident wrote in the Facebook group.

“That’s the thing,” another added. “People are stopping” to talk to reporters.

“For Jesus sake, WHY??” a third exclaimed.

In an adjacent neighborhood to the Reminisce subdivision, a home displays an American flag and Confederate flag near a sign that prohibits trespassing.

No white Reminisce residents were willing to discuss the incident on the record, out of what they said was fear their remarks would be miscast as racist. A few discussed it in public Facebook posts, such as Carly Honea, a white Reminisce resident, who wrote that the real issue at the pool wasn’t race, but trespassing, which is “an enormous problem,” and the teens’ conduct.

“So sad a grown up can’t ask a simple question and [have] it be answered respectfully,” she added. “If you live here, why would you be offended?”

Many of the white residents assumed that the teens bore some responsibility for provoking Strempel. To prove it, they circulated a photo on Facebook that had been taken that day of one of the teens, standing poolside with a towel around his neck, flashing his middle finger at the camera.

“Only so much a person can take till they snap,” wrote a Reminisce resident.

“Kids seem to get away with behaviors that I would have my ass beat for,” added another.

The sentiment exasperated the black residents on the page, who saw in the comments a tendency among whites to portray all African American boys as menacing. “I will try and post in a more elementary fashion so an obvious dumbass such as yourself will understand!” one black resident wrote. “If the kids became disrespectful AFTER she invaded their personal space, then SHE was wrong period!”

For many whites in the subdivision, any suggestion that race had played a role in the incident was offensive. Such charges were one piece of a broader effort by black activists, liberals and the “fake news” media to cry racism to gain advantage, they suggested, often at their expense.

These tactics, many white residents said, had been a central element of President Barack Obama’s divisive eight years in office, and they were exactly the kind of anti-white, politically correct bias that Trump had been elected to stop.

“This shit is sooo yesterday,” a white Reminisce resident wrote as the online argument grew more heated. “Hasn’t Trump done something recently, like making America great again!!!”

“Nope! He has done what he normally does — make a few nobodies feel important by posting dumb remarks, such as “make America great again,” a black resident replied.

The white resident responded by posting a Trump “Make America Great Again” meme.

A black resident responded with a photo of Obama.

TOP: Two guests, Tony Rice, 15, and Dominic Rice, 12, from Kutztown, Pa., swim at the Reminisce subdivision gated pool facility. BOTTOM: Tameka Hyman’s son, Rio, 3, and grandson, 15-month-old Amir, explore the playground at the Reminisce subdivision.

As his neighbors argued, Corey Grant, who is black, grew frustrated with the debate. He, his wife and their three children had moved to Reminisce one year earlier in search of good schools and a “certain level of peace,” he said. He thought he had found it. “Most of my neighbors are nice. Some aren’t,” he said. “I love where I live.”

Still, he couldn’t understand how his white neighbors could suggest that the teens and Strempel shared equal blame.

“Did the kids touch her?” asked Grant on the Reminisce Facebook page. “She is the adult!”

Grant was one of a small percentage of blacks who had voted for Trump in 2016. He couldn’t forgive Bill and Hillary Clinton for supporting a 1990s crime bill that had put tens of thousands of black men in prison for nonviolent drug offenses.

Since then, he had come to regret the decision. “Trump has opened racial wounds,” Grant said. The upheaval on the homeowners’ association was further proof. To him, the “Make America Great” meme that his white neighbor posted during the pool argument was intended to remind the blacks in the subdivision of their secondary status in the nation’s racial hierarchy.

“I know what it means,” he said, “and I don’t believe it includes me as an African American man.”

Reminisce resident Corey Grant has a family discussion with his wife, Amaris Grant, and two sons, Kaylon Johnson, 17, and CJ Grant, 6, at their home in the Reminisce subdivision.

Today, the 19-second snippet from the swimming pool has faded from the online discussion, usurped by other videos. Trump has continued to talk about race in ways his supporters find refreshing and his critics view as inflammatory.

Back in Summerville, Darshaun and his two friends have returned to their normal lives: basketball practice, video games, bike riding and swimming. Strempel faces a third-degree assault charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.

In the Reminisce subdivision, black and white residents have given up on reaching an understanding about the pool incident or other issues that touch on race. The tensions dredged up by the pool video, though, still rumble beneath the surface.

Grant was at a backyard barbecue with a few of his white Reminisce neighbors recently when talk turned to the upcoming National Football League season. During a speech in Alabama last year, Trump referred to NFL players who knelt during the national anthem as “sons of bitches.” Last month, he suggested in a tweet that the football players, most of them African American, didn’t know why they were demonstrating.

“The deeper we got,” Grant said, “we almost got to the NFL protests.”

Grant considers the neighbors from the barbecue as friends. “Our families do things together all the time,” he said. But they seemed uncomfortable talking about the protests with him. “The conversation stopped,” he said. “That’s a rough one for my neighbors because it means they have to pick a side. . . . We never touched on it.”

Hyman and his wife similarly avoided talking about the pool video with white neighbors, beyond Hyman’s initial brief exchange of online messages with Strempel. “If there was an open discussion, it would shine a light on racist neighbors,” Hyman’s wife, Tameka, said. “I’d rather not know — especially if it’s someone living this close.”

Hyman agreed. Shortly after it went viral, Hyman asked his white next-door neighbor if he had seen the “crazy” video.

“Must be the hot weather,” the neighbor said, offering his explanation.

“Global warming,” Hyman joked.

The two men said nothing more about it and retreated to their air-conditioned homes.