It’s been less than two weeks since Donald Trump won the election, and we’ve already gotten a glimpse of what America might look like over the next four years. And yes, it’s scary. A sobering report from the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that 701 “hateful harassment attacks have been reported since the election, according to The New York Daily News.
The report—which the civil rights advocacy group compiled by scouring news and social media in addition to sourcing submissions via its #ReportHate hashtag—found that the majority of those targeted were minorities, immigrants, women, and people from the LGBT community. As for where these hate crimes have been taking place, SPLC President Richard Cohen pulled no punches in his assessment. “This represents a big increase in what we’ve seen since the campaign, and these incidents are far and wide: we’re seeing them in schools, we’re seeing them in places of business, we’re seeing them in museums and gas stations,” he said. “White supremacists are celebrating, and it’s their time, the way they see it.”
If there’s any good news to be gleaned from SPLC’s report, it’s that the majority of the attacks were reported in the three days following the election, when tensions in the country were at an all-time high. Since then, the organization has seen what they called “a steady drop-off” of incidents.
Still, it’s clear that a significant portion of the country feels emboldened by the election of a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed president. One person fighting back is Daily News writer Shaun King, who has teamed with the software company Ushahidi and begun cataloging the thousands of incident reports he’s received since Trump was elected with the hope of raising awareness and helping people stay safe, the New Yorker reports.
Trump himself has yet to openly condemn the attacks, save for a brief acknowledgement on 60 Minutes.
