But there's going to be a party when the wolf comes home

[sovay]

So the morning after the election there were confirmable reports of Trump supporters harassing students at Wellesley and now there is racist graffiti on the MBTA. I don't care what it's doing there. I don't care if it was written by someone emboldened by Trump's election to express their truest private feelings or someone encouraged by Trump's example to commit a publicly hurtful act and rationalize it as joking or provocation; you can't ironically punch someone in the face. One of the young men involved in the Wellesley incident has since appeared to apologize; I agree it would be nice if neither he nor his compatriot actually spat at black women on campus, but since the Trump campaign was neither race- nor gender-neutral, tooling around Clinton's alma mater with a Trump flag while shouting "Make America Great Again!" was not exactly an innocuous act on its own. I was glad to read of the volunteers cleaning the racist and anti-Semitic graffiti from Mount Tom in Holyoke and Easthampton, but it should never have been there in the first place. I'm sure there are many more incidents I know nothing about: I am spending much less time on social media than most of my friends and I'm still seeing many more photographed swastikas than I normally run into when I'm not doing historical research. So that's my city and my state. I had no illusions that they would be immune to the wave of released and confident bigotry, but it's a sharp reminder: I don't get to pretend, yes, it's happening here, but not really here. I don't get to make it someone else's problem except on the internet. I know those "see something, say something" posters that have decorated our trains and buses for years were designed against terrorism, but they had better be able to accommodate reports of white supremacy. Dammit, Boston. Most years when something politically stupid happens I want the cranky dybbuk of John Adams to haunt the administration responsible, but lately I want to grab him by the ectoplasmic lapels and yell, "Alien and Sedition Acts, John? Really?"

In things that feel like small victories, I found the first box set of TCM's Forbidden Hollywood at a yard sale this afternoon—that's the one containing Red-Headed Woman (1932), James Whale's Waterloo Bridge (1931), and the original uncensored cut of Baby Face (1933). The DVDs are in startlingly good shape for being in a milk crate of mixed media. The yard owner sold it to me for a dollar. This does nothing to make the wider world a better place, but reminds me that our culture has tried to set the clock back on social justice issues before and while its efforts did great damage at the time, they also long-term failed. Also I will enjoy watching these movies and right now that's not negligible.

Comments

[sovay]

Unfortunately that sounds like precisely the same effect we saw post-Brexit.

That's what people were talking about the night of the election. How is it being handled in the UK? Or are the situations not comparable because you didn't just elect a morally retrograde white supremacist on top of Brexiting?

[davidgillon]

Half the press is going 'WTF is wrong with people?' The other half would be cheering them along if it thought it could get away with it, and is contesting itself with claiming the Supreme Court and MPs are committing treason if they don't wholeheartedly back Brexit, even when the Brexit team seem intent on national economic suicide. Law enforcement is confirming there's a real spike in the data and has kicked up monitoring to monthly stats instead of yearly. Meanwhile the relevant government departments is wringing its hands uselessly and issuing action plans that forget to cover disability hate crime*.

* I've not heard that there's a particular post-Brexit spike in disability hate crime, it's non-zero, but targets mostly lie elsewhere, and I probably would hear. OTOH, forgetting it in an emergency action plan would be bad enough, forgetting it in one you've spent months developing before you knew there was an increased problem and when the release of the plan and the problem just happened to coincide, that doesn't give any impression of competence in high places. And as it's the department formerly run by our new PM...

[sovay]

Law enforcement is confirming there's a real spike in the data and has kicked up monitoring to monthly stats instead of yearly.

I'm glad it's being monitored. Are they intervening?

I've not heard that there's a particular post-Brexit spike in disability hate crime, it's non-zero, but targets mostly lie elsewhere, and I probably would hear.

I haven't heard much about disability hate crime here, but it's a six-of-one situation because one of Trump's campaign promises was to destroy our current healthcare system and that would risk the lives of many of my friends. (I don't think it would kill me outright, although it would kick my health into the toilet and then I might starve from not being able to hold a regular job. I know more people where losing their medications would endanger them immediately.) So it's not like you need to harass people in the street; you just need to be willing to wait for them to die. I am hoping that the people who tell me that Trump legally-logistically cannot dismantle the Affordable Care Act for a full fiscal year are right.

[davidgillon]

Second try - accidentally swiped back to the previous page with a near complete post this morning, grr!

I think there was some increased patrolling in areas where there had been issues, and they brought a couple of Polish cops over to liaise with the Polish community after a Polish man was killed in Harlow - they arrested six teens for that straight away, but there was a cluster of incidents in the town. The problem is it's very difficult to police the stranger on stranger element that makes up so much of hate crime.

Apparently the stats were a 60% rise immediately around the referendum, falling back to 14% above normal in September, so hopefully it's a short lived phenomenon.

one of Trump's campaign promises was to destroy our current healthcare system and that would risk the lives of many of my friends

Yeah, hearing a lot of concerns aroud that either directly or indirectly. There are parallels with the UK situation, though given the NHS our situation was more based on harassment of vulnerable disabled people by the benefits system leading to deaths (even the responsible government department admits to 60). Sustained campaigning did seem to get our message across, though the UK is probably more receptive to that message even when swung to the right.