by David Brax
guest post by Professor Edward Dunbar
November 18, 2016
Here in the United States the results of the 2016 presidential election reveled once again the deep social and cultural divisions of the country. The shock waves of the election of Donald Trump, contradicting most all polling data, has been framed in terms of populist versus establishment and politics versus entertainment. For professionals working in the area of hate crimes and domestic terrorism, however, the defining characteristic has been the freely- employed use of ultranationalist or “Alt-right” rhetoric that has been employed to excoriate immigrants, persons of color, intellectuals, sexual minorities, and readers of the New York Times. Societally these ‘problems’ have been linked to arguments for building a wall along the border of Mexico, of racially profiling Latinos for deportation, and for the religious/cultural exclusion of Muslims.
This societal divide is well documented. In the week after the election results were in, the Southern Poverty Law Center collected 437 reports of hate-based intimidation and harassment between November 9 – the day after the presidential election – and the morning of Monday, November 14. We are witnessing a surge in racially-motivated assaults, property crimes, and incidents of hate speech as part of the shifting of the political axis. However, this process is also hitting many of us at a more personal level. As a clinical psychologist, my workplace is as much the consultation room as the crime lab. What I am witnessing is a social cleavage which is widening and that is falling under the radar of our macro-level media analysis of the fallout from the xenophobic-driven election.
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