Social media was rife with accounts of sometimes violent incidents of hate crimes targeted at Muslims, Latinos and African Americans after the election

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

There was a spate of claims of hate crimes in the US on Thursday made on social media and to police, in which the alleged victims said abusers had in some way cited Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

Social media was rife with accounts of sometimes violent incidents of hate targeted at Muslims, Latinos and African Americans.

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Muslim students in campuses across the country reported incidents of hate. At San Diego State University, a Muslim woman who was wearing a hijab told campus police that two men pulled up next to her and jumped out of a car, then made comments about Muslims and Trump before robbing her of her purse, backpack and car keys. The woman could then not locate her car.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center who monitors hate in extremism, said that he’s seen a spike in hate crimes including attacks on women wearing hijabs and racist graffiti – and that suicide prevention hotlines were receiving high numbers of calls.

“I think this is absolutely clearly a result of Trump’s election,” Potok told the Guardian. “Donald Trump has ripped the lid off Pandora’s box.”

I think this is absolutely clearly a result of Trump’s election. Donald Trump has ripped the lid off Pandora’s box Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center

Muslim women tweeted that they or people they know are considering not wearing a hijab so they could not be visibly identified and targeted.



Twitter also painted a picture of divided high schools across the country as students shared incidents that ranged from African Americans being called cotton pickers to Latinos being told to leave the country. Last week, one principal at Southern Lehigh high school in Pennsylvania held a special assembly after reports of students yelling homophobic slurs, calling black students cotton pickers and using Hitler salutes.

Trans Lifeline, a national hotline for transgender people in crisis, told the Guardian it saw its normal call volume triple on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. According to the Tennessean, a transgender woman reported on Friday that her truck was set on fire in her driveway, and the word “Trump” had been spray-painted on its scorched back.

Potok compared the spike in hate crimes to the one felt in the UK following Brexit. Britain’s most senior police officer told a court hearing in September that Britain had experienced a “horrible spike” in hate crimes after it voted to leave the EU.

Trump’s campaign has also emboldened white supremacist groups. A Ku Klux Klan newspaper endorsed Trump, and the former KKK grand wizard David Duke was one of the first people to congratulate Trump on Twitter following his victory. Potok said that Klan members have been distributing literature in Alabama since Trump’s victory, and one local Klan group is organizing a celebratory rally.

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Hate crimes against Muslims in particular have risen significantly over the past year. Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative, a group that studies Islamophobia, found that 2015 saw the most incidents of hate crime in any year against Muslims since 9/11.

Jordan Denari Duffner, a research fellow at The Bridge Initiative, warned that it was difficult to draw precise causation between Trump’s campaign and spikes in hate crimes.

“It’s been hard up until now to say that Trump is the sole reason for this,” she said. “What will be interesting is how often racist attacks are accompanied by explicit support for Donald Trump.”

In his victory speech early on Wednesday, Trump said he wanted to heal divisions in the country and be a president for “all Americans”.

•This article was updated after a University of Louisiana student who told police she was attacked by two men acknowledged to police that she fabricated the story. This section of the story was removed