While any Presidential election holds innumerable issues, factions, and motivations, the following excerpts provide a sample of the immediate fallout after the election of Donald Trump as the 45^th President of the United States.

From The Boston Globe on November 15, 2016:

CHARLESTON, W.Va.

The mayor of a West Virginia town has resigned amid the fallout from a racist Facebook post about first lady Michelle Obama.

Clay Mayor Beverly Whaling earlier apologized for her response to the post, which she said wasn’t intended to be racist.

Clay County Development Corp. director Pamela Ramsey Taylor made the post following Republican Donald Trump’s election as president, saying: ‘‘It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady in the White House. I’m tired of seeing a Ape in heels.’’

Clay Mayor Beverly Whaling responded: ‘‘Just made my day Pam.’’

From The New York Times OP-ED of November 16, 2016 by Emily Bazelon:

At York County School of Technology in Pennsylvania, white students were filmed walking through the hallway with a Trump sign and yelling, “White power!”

At Maple Grove High School in Minnesota, racist graffiti, mixed with Trump slogans, made black students feel unsafe. “I went in and looked on the bathroom door and honestly was in shock,” said Moses Karngbaye, a junior. “That’s the first time I honestly felt like crying at school.”

At the University of Michigan, a man told a student that if she did not take off her hijab he would set her on fire with a lighter. At the University of Pennsylvania, black freshmen were added to a racist “lynching” thread on the text messaging service GroupMe, reportedly by three people, including a University of Oklahoma student who was suspended for being involved in the chat. “I am petrified and all I want to do is cry,” one Penn student tweeted.

From Time Magazine:

When the rector at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in Silver Spring, Maryland opened the church on Sunday morning, he found that a sign advertising Spanish services had been ripped and vandalized with the words, “TRUMP NATION WHITES ONLY.” The same message was written on a brick wall near the church’s memorial garden.

And closer to home…on the morning of Monday, November 14, my wife, a Speech Pathologist in a Massachusetts Public School, was working with an eighth grade boy who is Bi-Racial when he told her that he had something he wanted to talk about instead of working on their lesson of the day. He told her that when he was visiting family in New York State during the previous weekend he had seen graffiti on a mailbox that had upset him. It read: “AMERIKKKA.”

 

This brief essay is not meant as a political polemic to demean voters, nor to re-litigate the recent Presidential election, nor to heap aspersion on Mr. Trump. However, America seems changed, and clearly not because of a single mailbox in New York State.

Because of race-baiting language and a “wink and nod” indifference to xenophobic, anti-Immigrant, racist, misogynistic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic impulses, a far more sinister and destructive version of “White-lash” has been normalized into mainstream politics. Mr. Trump may be “the least racist person” you could meet as he claims and furthermore contends that Jewish grandchildren render him incapable of anti-Semitism, but he has used his White Male Privilege to deliver a divisive attack upon those whom he seeks to discredit as not truly “American.” Years ago, he started with our first Black President, and now the Swastika and the “Stars and Bars” are carried forth across the nation by White Nationalists in celebration of his election.

Friends of mine who are folks of color, LGBT, women, Jewish or Muslim may scoff at my privileged White male naiveté that some change has occurred. Perhaps, more accurately, ever-present racist and xenophobic rhetoric and action have increased and risen to the surface of the American consciousness as slogans of “Build the Wall,” “Extreme Vetting,” and “Lock Her Up” unleashed a wave of intolerance and hatred that is impossible to ignore. Those motivated by a xenophobic interpretation of Immigration, or a racist definition of American history, or a misogynistic justification for sexual molestation on one hand and hatred for a woman candidate on the other may be a minority, but they are an active minority to be sure. And they are predominantly White, Christian, and male.

And while Police officers, Immigration lawyers, school nurses, homeroom teachers, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center may bear the brunt of combating this resurgence of intolerance and hatred, Independent Schools must move to the forefront with an active and public rejection of racism, anti-Islamism and anti-Semitism, Homophobia, and Misogyny. Simultaneously, our schools must also put forth a robust reassertion of diversity, tolerance, and inclusion as publically stated goals and actively practiced norms.

Why must Independent Schools be expected to do more? We only educate a small percentage of the American school age population, and we already have Mission Statements that advocate various principles of altruism and inclusion. Independent Schools must strive to do more because our institutions were initially created for the exclusive education of wealthy White Christian young men and later women, and so our schools bear a special responsibility to denounce the prejudices that our institutions were literally and figuratively built upon. The Chapels and named libraries, the Euro-centric and American curricula that too often and too proudly swirls around the novels, inventions, and battles of White men, the admissions practices that once placed Blacks and Jews in separate piles from WASP families, the still powerful traditions and legacies created by race and wealth – all of these have contributed to an educational model marked by White Privilege.

Independent Schools cannot ignore or dismiss the connections of their pasts, the complications of their presents, and the tenets of their mission statements moving forward; staid indifference or a failure to address a rising tide of prejudice are merely more reticent forms of the White Privilege that our schools have sought to move beyond. Any silence on our part, any attempt to remain tepidly neutral in the face of this most recent outbreak of White Male Nationalism will be interpreted by African American, Muslim, LGBT, Latino, and women communities, both outside and inside of our schools, as tacit acceptance of a new, or perhaps more depressingly, an old American form of White Privilege and racial and religious intolerance.

What should we do? Independent Schools must immediately denounce, with unequivocal reproach, all forms of privilege and prejudice and also endorse even bolder goals of diversity in faculty, staff and student body, broader and deeper multicultural curricula, and new initiatives and traditions of inclusivity.

NAIS needs to lead with strong public statements that carry specific and measureable expectations regarding diversity and inclusion for all member schools; Heads of School need to mine Mission Statements and school history for usable rhetoric that will promote diversity and reject privilege based on religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation; administrators need to accelerate goals in financial aid, in inclusive admissions, and in fair hiring; classroom teachers need to place Ramanujan beside Euclid, Walcott beside Homer, Shaka beside Napoleon, Dr. Charles Drew beside Dr. Jonas Salk, and Red Jacket and Frederick Douglass beside Jefferson and Lincoln. Lastly White parents, alumni, teachers, and students need to know that past unspoken yet real institutional advantages based on race, religion, and wealth are either over or coming to closure through deliberate practice and ethical policy. In addition and most importantly, those adults and students, already within our schools, whose race, religion, heritage, sexual orientation, and/or gender have been singled out as somehow “other” or “un-American” must know that they are respected, appreciated, and safe on our teams, in our organizations, on our faculty, and in our classrooms.

For me, as a White, male, Christian, straight teacher, educated at an Independent School, this is both a professional and moral imperative. Because whatever the fallout of the next few years may be, the policies, laws, deportations, insults, and incidents will barely touch me on account of my identity. And I have to acknowledge this notable and familiar comfort as my ultimate White Privilege; for, if I choose to, I can silently ignore active and subtle racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia as the concerns and conditions of others. But if I do, then I am a “bystander” traveling smoothly upon Prof. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s White racist conveyor belt, complicit with those who spray-paint the Swastika, or fly the confederate flag, or tell a woman in a hijab or a Chicano high school student to “Go back home. This is America.”

Like Mr. Trump, I too aspire to have Jewish grandchildren, however, just because I married a nice Jewish girl from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the anti-Semitism that I learned in nearby Westchester County is not instantly expunged (nor is Trump’s I might add by having a daughter who converted to Judaism.). It is incumbent that I acknowledge that I can lean all too comfortably back into the various lessons of racism and homophobia and xenophobia and misogyny and anti-Semitism that I learned long ago in my town, at my Church, and at my Independent Schools. And while these never forgotten lessons might more likely result in casual indifference rather than active Hatred, they are related to a White Privilege that can still be found in me, and in Independent Schools.

Many if not all Independent Schools consider themselves “inclusive” and “tolerant” in their approach to students, parents, and staff of all faiths, races, genders, sexual identities, and abilities. But it is time to move beyond the assumed good will of our schools’ day-to-day experience; it is not enough. Maintaining a static and safe commitment to Diversity will result in a too passive and inconsistent response that trades upon a false assumption of universal good works doled out in equal measure to all. Instead Independent Schools, both individually and collectively, must stand up against the drumbeat, as well as the dog whistles, for a “greater” time that was never “great” for all Americans… and certainly not “great” for all of our students and faculty.

Now is the time for Independent Schools to prove their relevance and leadership by fighting against both the thinly veiled White Privilege in our schools and the overt hatred that seeks to reassert itself in our national discourse. In doing so, we will promote and model a truly better way forward for our students, our faculties, our parents, and the broader Independent School community. Armed with an honest acknowledgement of our schools’ pasts and with a renewed commitment to equity and equality, we must simultaneously take stock of the experience for those within our walls as well as engage in the discussion and fray beyond them. Who knows… others might notice.