‘Why We’re Afraid’ is a chilling account of how some people are living post-election
It has only been two and a half weeks since Donald Trump was elected president and seems like a lifetime ago! The world has been turned upside down since then.To document all this change, a Tumblr called “Why We’re Afraid” is documenting violence since the election. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center the amount of hate crimes has spiked to a dangerous count — over 900 in almost three weeks. It has gotten so bad that special task forces are being created to combat the surge.
While the mainstream media coverage of hate crimes has begun to fade, social media still tells the stories. The marginalized groups: the LGBT community, Muslims, Blacks and Immigrants continue to record the attacks on their social media feeds so that the larger community understands that this problem is not going to go away anytime soon.
Swastikas spray-painted at Burning Tree elementary school. https://t.co/O1gaqkbhF9#whywereafraid
— Why We're Afraid (@whywereafraid) November 13, 2016
Community planner and trans woman Adam Powers started the Tumblr, “Why We’re Afraid,” as a place to document the accounts and stories of those who have been attacked since the election. “I made it so quickly after the election because I believed that exactly this kind of harassment would happen,” she says in an interview. This response she received was immediate and overwhelming; she had to add new posts every fifteen minutes to keep up with the hundreds of stories she got in those first days.
Man tells U-M student to remove hijab or he'd set her on fire in Ann Arbor. https://t.co/aDTRDH9syM#whywereafraid
— Why We're Afraid (@whywereafraid) November 13, 2016
While she says that the submissions have begun to slow down, that doesn’t mean that the attacks have. Recently, Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights, New York was defaced with swastikas made by Trump supporters. The park, named after the Beastie Boys member is just one of many places to be defaced in such a way. The Jewish community has become one of the most strongly attacked given the rise of White Supremacy groups, especially in mainstream media.
There are stories of women getting their hijabs torn off their heads, teachers telling Latinx students they will be deported, university students cheering the KKK.
Powers said that she doesn’t fact check and verify every post on Why We’re Afraid, but she does link back to the appropriate sources. You don’t want to believe that all of these stories are real, but they are so disturbing that they almost have to be. To see more stories or to submit your own, see the site here. It’s worth it.
