In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s Election Night surprise victory, college campuses across the country have experienced incidents of racial aggression directed at nonwhite Americans.
At Baylor University, the morning after Election Night, Natasha Nkhama said that a student bumped into her on her way to her morning neuroscience class. According to an interview with the Washington Post, Nkhama said, “He sort of shoved me off the sidewalk and he said … ‘no niggers allowed on the sidewalk.’ And I was just shocked.”
Nkhama, who was born in Zambia and raised in Texas, said another male student came to her defense, but the assailant responded with “I’m just trying to make America great again.”
Two days after the incident, when Nkhama walked to class, she was joined by 300 people including teachers, school administrators and some of her fellow classmates. The crowd had formed after a #IWalkWithNatasha hashtag trended amongst the Baylor community on Twitter.
“The ‘Walk with Tasha’ this morning was an amazing experience for me,” said Baylor University Interim President David Garland in a statement. “When we love others like this, we make ourselves so much greater. It means one walk in solidarity is not enough. Walking with our brothers and sisters must become a daily walk on and off this campus.”
Elsewhere, at the University of Michigan, a Muslim student said that she was forced to remove her headscarf after a man approached her on campus and threatened to set her on fire if she didn’t oblige him. This came after a post-election vigil conducted by students upset at the results. University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel told students at the vigil to take solace in the fact that the majority of the campus voted for Hillary Clinton.
This sparked a backlash from conservative students who called Schlissel’s statement and the vigil “anti-Trump.” A university spokesperson told the Detroit Free Press that both the vigil and the statement weren’t disparaging of the President-elect.
At Ohio State University, student Shane Michael Stanton was arrested and suspended after shoving a speaker at an anti-Trump rally down a set of steps mid-speech. In the video, which was posted online by the campus newspaper The Lantern, Stanton screams “you idiot” as he runs down the stairs to push Timothy Adams. According to court records, authorities charged Stanton with a misdemeanor count of assault.
Incidents around campuses aren’t just of the physical variety. At the University of Oklahoma, Kathleen Crowther (a professor) put on Twitter a flyer she found on campus that purported to state “facts” on race and intelligence. Another flyer that Crowther tweeted was titled “Why White Women Shouldn’t Date Black Men” and claimed that Black men were more likely to have a sexually transmitted disease and be abusive towards women. According to the campus newspaper the OU Daily, the flyers were inserted into print editions of their newspaper unbeknownst to them.
“These are absolutely not the views of The Daily, and there should be no inserts in today’s print edition,” read part of their statement posted on Twitter.
Another incident involved a University of Oklahoma student who was suspended for sending racist messages to Black freshman students at the University of Pennsylvania. According to the Washington Post, the group-message thread directed at students included a “daily lynching” event on the calendar.
With incidents like these, and several others like it, happening around the country, everyone has looked to the president-elect to say something to his supporters. He did. During an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Trump said “Stop it.” Some of Trump’s surrogates, like KellyAnne Conway, have demanded that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton denounce anti-Trump protesters.