Confronting public bigotry is hard, if not downright frightening. It means taking a risk—and admitting that human cruelty knows no bounds.

This visceral, overwhelming fear can make it difficult to remember that our collective survival often comes down to everyday moments like the one Melissa Forbis faced on a busy New York City intersection three days after the election.

While walking briskly toward the subway, she heard a man invoke the president-elect's name as he shouted at a Pakistani newsstand worker.

"Now that Trump is here," Forbis recalls him saying, "we are going to send you back to your sandcastle."

Forbis instinctively confronted the stranger: "What the [expletive] did you just say?"

The scene Forbis walked into is one that's all too familiar to countless victims of bias, intimidation and violence. It's also the kind of conflict Americans must now have a plan to safely disrupt. If one thing's become clear in the wake of Donald J. Trump's election, enduring his administration's proposed policies—and the blatant prejudice his victory encourages in some people—will require moral courage at every turn.

"People need to speak up ... We can't just ignore what's going on."

In the ten days following the election, a "national outbreak of hate" targeted women and immigrants, and Muslim, Jewish, black, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, according to a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Based on volunteer submissions and media reports, the SPLC found that 867 incidents of harassment occurred over those ten days. While the number of such cases peaked in the period immediately after the election and then began dropping, blatant discrimination and harassment in Trump's name—sometimes: literally—persists.

In New York City, police said the number of possible hate crimes reported since the election is more than double than last year during the same time period. Last week, three men attacked an 18-year-old Muslim woman on the subway, screaming Trump's name and trying to tear off her hijab. She told the New York Daily News that not a single bystander intervened.

On Pantsuit Nation, the volunteer-run private Facebook page that began as a network of Hillary Clinton supporters and now has nearly four million members, people regularly post anecdotes about being harassed by Trump supporters, or detail how they've intervened in those conflicts.

"People need to speak up," says Lecia Brooks, outreach director for the SPLC. "People don’t need to put themselves in harm’s way, and [they should] assess any threat for danger. At the same time we can’t just ignore what’s going on."

Silence normalizes harassment, makes other potential victims more vulnerable, and lets bystanders feel comfortable in neither condoning nor condemning what they've just witnessed. White nationalists in particular are exploiting attacks on political correctness and challenging social norms under the guise of making prejudice more acceptable. Cruelty becomes less taboo, of course, when it's met with quiet downward gazes.

Forbis is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at a New York state university and describes herself as an anti-racist feminist. She's confronted strangers espousing hate in the past, when it felt safe to do so. (Her confidence lately, she says, is helped by self-defense classes and power lifting.)

When Forbis questioned the shouting man, others took notice and he responded by quickly walking away. The newsstand worker, who declined to speak to Mashable on the record because of safety considerations, said he couldn't remember this particular incident a few weeks after it happened. Part of the challenge, he said, was that passersby shout similar slurs and insults at him daily. It was a singular moment for Forbis, who reported it to the SPLC.

"If I stand by and allow that to happen," she tells Mashable, "I’m part of the problem."

Destabilizing bigotry

The outbreak of hate may surprise those who haven't previously grasped the depth of American bigotry, but author and social justice facilitator adrienne maree brown sees cause for hope. (Brown styles her name using lowercase letters.)

"I also wonder if we’re not seeing a rash of people who are engaging in morally courageous acts for the first time," says brown, who is author of the forthcoming book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.

I feel hopeful because I am embedded in movements of people actively working in a million ways to address root causes of current condition. — adriennemaree (@adriennemaree) December 3, 2016

Turning that newfound righteousness into something enduring and meaningful, says brown, is tough work. And while injustice may spark moral courage in our hearts, acting on it takes planning and practice.

The SPLC's comprehensive guide to handling everyday bigotry includes dozens of scenarios, including how to respond to comments made by family members, coworkers, neighbors and strangers. Hollaback, the anti-street harassment organization, offers its own bystander intervention recommendations and training.

Practical strategies are key to empowering bystanders, but social media can also play a critical role in helping others vicariously witness bigotry and what it means to intervene. Since the election, Pantsuit Nation has become a platform for people to share their own experiences as well as attempts to protect victims of harassment.

"It sounds cliche, but you defeat the forces of darkness not through darkness but through kindness."

Posts from victims and bystanders regularly receive tens of thousands of reactions and thousands of comments. Then, more members step forward with new accounts of their own interactions, explaining that they were inspired to act by previous stories.

Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, has studied groups similar to Pantsuit Nation. She says that their dynamic magnetically draws people into the fold, helping forge a sense of collectivism. Reading through posts that often end with the hashtag #lovetrumpshate is an emotional, galvanizing experience. It's a reminder that—amidst hatred—many do, in fact, refuse to watch the most vulnerable among them suffer.

"It sounds cliche, but you defeat the forces of darkness not through darkness, but through kindness," says Phillips.

When Debra, a photographer based in New York City, posted her own story of helping stop the harassment of a woman on the subway who appeared to be Muslim, it elicited nearly 80,000 reactions and thousands of comments.

The incident, which took place a few days after Thanksgiving, began when a white man on the train started calling a woman wearing a headscarf Islamaphobic and sexist slurs. "Go back to your own country," Debra says he shouted at the woman. Again, there was silence.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, its not.- The Lorax #pantsuitnation #StandWithStandingRock — Pantsuit Nation (@pantsuitnation) November 27, 2016

Debra suddenly recalled an intervention tactic a friend shared with her the previous day. Instead of confronting the harasser, the strategy suggested showing solidarity with his target. Debra moved across the train and pretended to know the woman being attacked; she played along, as did another stranger. The man left the train at the next stop, and Debra got off the next stop, feeling shaken for hours.

Debra, who didn't want to use her full name because she feared the professional repercussions of being seen as anti-Trump, says reading similar stories on Pantsuit Nation can be a powerful experience: "I think that not only gives people the knowledge of what to do, but the strength to do it."

'I couldn't not do this, I couldn't go home'

Libby Chamberlain, the founder of Pantsuit Nation, says that while she believes stories can be transformative when helping people find and act with moral courage, she wants to ensure the group doesn't become self-congratulatory or self-satisfied with the feel-good nature of communing online to the exclusion of taking action in real life. And there are moments when posts or comments reveal implicit or explicit bias, and spark intense debate over, for example, race and white privilege.

Chamberlain and the group's moderators are working to highlight stories from people who experience harassment firsthand so that members can listen first and learn how to help. The point of the platform isn't just to encourage safely disrupting public bigotry when it happens, but to insist on inclusivity and equal rights in every way possible.

"If we can be driven to care about the stories of others, we can be driven to care about the policies that affect them," says Chamberlain.

When ordinary people dedicate themselves to fighting injustice, it's often because they feel compelled, says Joel R. Pruce, assistant professor of human rights at the University of Dayton.

"If we can be driven to care about the stories of others, we can be driven to care about the policies that affect them."

Earlier this year, the University of Dayton Human Rights Center partnered partnered with the nonprofit organization PROOF: Media for Social Justice to interview 35 people in Ferguson, Missouri, and better understand why they marched for police accountability and racial justice over nearly 100 consecutive days. None of them were "career activists." Instead, they mobilized after the police-involved shooting death of Michael Brown in 2014.

Despite the financial, personal and professional risks their newfound activism posed, Pruce says many of them spoke about how a "switch flipped."

"I couldn’t not do this, I couldn’t go home," Pruce recalls them saying.

He believes fighting bigotry unleashed by Trump's presidency will require a similar instinctive response and should be grounded in such efforts already led by people of color, immigrants, Muslims and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

"The vigilance we’re all going to have to face up to is very real," he says. "Pushing back and challenging aggressive behavior and discriminatory behavior ... is something we’ll have to deal with. It’ll either become intolerable, or we’ll show tolerance to it."

Additional reporting by Katie Dupere.