What’s Going On: “Partisan” Worries,and Desires to Discuss Trump-Era Events in School

Staying “Nonpartisan” in a Hate Spike Era: A Review of Related Literature

U.S. educators (as public employees) are typically expected to be “nonpartisan.” They are asked to encourage students’ critical thinking without encouraging students to “take their side” on politicians or initiatives up for a vote (Hess & McAvoy, 2014; Kahne & Bowyer, 2017; Levinson & Fay, 2019). Original proponents of U.S. public school expansion argued that schools should not be places for “party politics” (Rogers, in press). Yet, some have stretched the caution against nonpartisan teaching much further, suggesting that teachers must refuse to state a position about any issue debated by politicians (Levinson & Fay, 2019), or avoid mentioning any issue that local people deem “political” (Pollock, 2019; Rogers, in press). Often, as we discuss elsewhere, U.S. teachers remain at the mercy of local authorities, who decide what is acceptable to discuss in local schools. Unless educators arrange local “backup” supporting discussions locally contested, authorities might deem some locally contested issues off-limits altogether for their community’s classrooms, including even the most basic forms of inclusive teaching.

In contrast, a broader view of “democracy and democratic education” frames public schools as institutions explicitly “charged with bringing together young people from diverse backgrounds to learn from and with one another” about experiences in a shared, diverse nation, “with a certain degree of regard and respect” (Rogers, in press). Such work argues that educators should invite discussion about the nation, across lines of difference and divergent perspectives, to prepare students for participation in a diverse democracy (Pace, 2021). Scholars also indicate that schools should be places where students can engage questions about “national identity” and what “holds people together now” in a deeply multicultural society (Hall, 2000). An inquiry-oriented approach to teaching and learning national history, for example, would engage students’ critical thinking to complicate a single or simple story of one “American” identity, and invite students to engage diverse perspectives to make meaning of students’ current contexts (VanSledright, 2011).

Crucially, this more expansive view of democratic schooling also positions schools as places where students must not “degrade those who are culturally different” (Hall, 2000) while discussing diverse perspectives: That is, dialogue about diverse views must simultaneously involve a refusal to “degrade” others. Against the backdrop of rising fascism in Europe and reactionary politics in the United States in the late 1930s, Rogers (in press) noted, John Dewey, a famous proponent of “democratic” schooling, argued that “fascism and racial and religious bigotry,” “fear, and hatred” and “antagonistic sects and factions” threatened “treason” to the very “democratic way of life” and must be countered in schools “with more [emphasis added] dialogue and inquiry.” Thus, today’s scholars of “civic” education who would call discussing factual events, experiences, and controversies in the world unarguably educational (Hess & McAvoy, 2014; Pace, 2021) might also call school norms asserting the equal humanity of all students unarguably ethical (Levinson & Fay, 2019). Such proponents might also deem promoting inclusion and human rights to be part of the civic duty of schools, not a singular perspective to be debated (Rogers & Kahne, 2021). Indeed, U.S. civil rights laws require educators to denounce and prevent identity-based harassment and discrimination in schools in order to protect equal access to learning opportunity (Pollock, 2008, 2019; U.S. Department of Education, 2020), and school climate literature deems refusing bullying a timeless educator responsibility (Cohen & Freiberg, 2013). Long-standing traditions of multicultural education (Nieto, 1999), culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), and social justice education (Chapman & Hobbel, 2010) all deem it essential, normal, and nonpartisan teacher practice to include and value all communities in school while discussing with students their true diversity of lived experiences and perspectives. In such an approach, students are invited to critically engage current events, including issues of exclusion, bias, and injustice, while insisting on equal human value and saying that treating groups as inferior is wrong. During the years studied, national organizations echoed that the simultaneous tasks of welcoming all into schools, refusing bigotry, and inviting discussion of current events targeting or denigrating marginalized groups have always been educators’ job (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018)—and not partisan at all.

We launched #USvsHate in 2017 to offer an explicitly nonpartisan “anti-hate” frame to invite proactive inclusion efforts in schools and to support educators seeking help in demanding respect and inclusion for all, in response to a sharp contemporary increase in incidents of harassment and bigotry on campuses nationwide after the 2016 election (Becerra, 2018; Hassan, 2019; Human Rights Campaign, 2017; Rogers et al., 2017, 2019; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2019). A social media survey of 50,000 teens by the Human Rights Campaign found in January 2017 that “high school students described bus rides bristling with homophobic and racist epithets and attacks on student groups” (Thompson, 2017, para. 7), with 70% of respondents “witnessing bullying, hate messages or harassment during or since the 2016 election.” A nationally representative survey found that 27% of 1,535 teachers surveyed in May 2017 “reported an increase in students making derogatory remarks about other groups during class discussions. This included sexist as well as racist and anti-Muslim comments” (para. 7). Hate examples nationwide included swastikas and n-words scrawled on bathroom walls, taunts to peers about deportation, and other messages like “Kill the [N-word]” and “F–k Jews,” with some students literally repeating the president’s name when taunting. Teachers described students’ increasingly cruel and disparaging remarks as “emboldened”—including never-before-encountered explicit statements of white supremacy (Rogers et al., 2017). By January 2019, Teaching Tolerance reported, “There is no indication that hate incidents at school are slowing down” (Dillard, 2019, para. 1). Teachers nationwide described “a noticeable increase in incivility overall and outright hostility toward minority groups,” with students “more and more willing to say outrageously racist, homophobic, ‘whatever-phobic’ things, believing it is their ‘right’ to do so” (Rogers et al., 2019, p. 10). A national Teaching Tolerance report in April 2019, based on media reports and questionnaires from 2,700 K–12 teachers, found that more than two-thirds of educators responding “witnessed a hate or bias incident in their school during the fall of 2018,” often without administrative response (Costello & Dillard, 2019, para. 23). Rogers et al. (2017) reported that 91.6% of educators surveyed said they needed help to “encourage and model civil exchange and greater understanding across lines of difference” (p. vi) in increasingly polarized school climates.

To meet this moment, #USvsHate leveraged what we thought might be a timelessly ethical orientation: Material we wrote on our website stated bluntly that “all people are equally valuable” and called for youth to say that “all community members are part of US!” Building on scholarship on racism and other oppression forms (e.g., Crenshaw et al., 1995; Pollock, 2008), we treated the recent spike in explicit bigotry as the newest version of long-standing bias and injustice harming the same communities, and we tailored the project’s definition of “hate” to prompt thinking about harm pervasive and enduring in society, including harm allowed passively or done unintentionally (usvshate.org/about). Overall, we called for students to unite against hate, not each other. The “US” frame attempted to unite fractured school communities around refusing cruelty to any subgroup. The “vs” asked students to refuse “hate” themselves as “upstanders” (Cohen & Freiberg, 2013).

Yet as a middle schooler said to a teacher we interviewed, “Why can’t I do it if the president can?” Indeed, during the same years, the president of the United States made public statements about “Mexicans” as rapists and “Muslims” as threats; his quote about “grabbing” women’s “pussies” echoed nationally. He deemed immigrants “invaders,” restricted and banned Muslims and refugees from entry, spoke derisively of “shithole” countries and sympathetically of Klan-supportive rioters, told legislators of color to “go back” to where they “came from,” spoke derisively of women, and called DACA recipients “hardened criminals.” He launched policies targeting transgender people and immigrants, even separating immigrant children from their families; he mocked individuals nearly daily on social media. Others in the government actively amplified and passively condoned this behavior (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2019). As we first drafted this article, his party’s representatives gave a standing ovation as the president gave a national Medal of Freedom to a radio host famous for denigrating people of color and women (U.S. Office of the President, 2020; Vigdor, 2020). And throughout, U.S. educators thus faced an extreme version of a timeless dilemma of “nonpartisan” teaching. Because the president and supporters were themselves denigrating populations, was standing up today against harm to marginalized groups and for basic “inclusion” of “everyone” partisan, and so somehow off-limits to educators? Or was refusing the denigration of marginalized groups in society and one’s school just the protective and ethical behavior required of any educator in a democratic society, at any time?

To position the project as a nonpartisan initiative possible in schools, we and fellow #USvsHate codesigners intentionally avoided naming political parties or individual political actors in describing the work. In fact, throughout our design and research, we were what Pollock called intentionally “Trumpmute” in all public discourse about #USvsHate: We did not mention the president’s behavior at all. We centered “hate” as the issue of concern and presented “anti-hate” as a unifying concept that all could presumably support, in the hope that such framing would allow the project initial entrée into K–12 public schools—particularly in politically divided schools and communities (Pollock & Yoshisato, 2021). In the #USvsHate project cycle, students and educators identify issues of concern, select lessons to prompt dialogue about those issues, and then create anti-hate messages in any media that will:

To support teachers in inviting such student work, Pollock invited national education organizations to contribute their “top lessons on inclusion,” then curated these lessons into two lists: “building an inclusive school community” and countering “specific forms of hate, bias, and injustice.” Lessons explored empathy, rejected bullying, and invited relationship-building, per research on school climate (Cohen & Freiberg, 2013), called for valuing all identities (Cohn-Vargas & Steele, 2013), and invited discussion of history and current events (Hess & McAvoy, 2014) related to what we called “specific hate forms”: “racism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, sexism, or other forms of hate, bias, and injustice in schools and society.” Pollock also sourced and curated a collection of national organizations’ free professional development resources as “Tools for Productive Anti-Hate Dialogues.” While some critics might argue that these proinclusion organizations or their chosen lessons (usvshate.org/our-lessons) highlighted differences versus similarities, lessons explored identities amid universal inclusion frames, and the overall #USvsHate frame emphasized unity repeatedly. No lessons on our resource lists asked students to take sides on government actors or actions; lessons instead attempted to support fact-based reflection about achieving inclusion for all, today and historically. The sole hint of the president on the site was a red, white, and blue image of the Statue of Liberty, reading “Hate Never Made America Great”; we and a diverse team of 10 San Diego educators helping with initial design decisions hoped that the image would be seen as “true” and “American” across political lines and give the project contemporary currency and a timeless feel. Over the two school years of our pilot, almost no student anti-hate messages submitted to #USvsHate contests named politicians or political parties.

Methods

As ethnographically trained researchers, we spent winter 2017 to spring 2018 and the 2018–2019 school year studying experiences of #USvsHate’s lessons and messaging across San Diego County, feeding input continually back into project design in a participatory process (Barab, 2006; Penuel et al., 2011; Pollock, 2013). Pilot participants came from 12 districts in our region, including 53 teachers and 427 students who submitted anti-hate messages to contests, with more than 3,300 students participating overall in the pilot based on teacher reports. Of these, a rotating subset of 10 teachers spanning elementary, middle, and high school grades, and doctoral students (including Yoshisato) and professional development practitioners from Pollock’s university center also served as project codesigners and champions of the work, while several engaged students in #USvsHate lessons and message-making themselves. As a team, we met monthly to discuss and document project design and implementation decisions based on ongoing research.

Unlike more structured interventions, #USvsHate’s core shared experience is its open-ended invitation to anti-hate teaching and messaging. All educators joined #USvsHate voluntarily, with individual teachers electing to engage their students in the project how they saw fit, at any point in the school year. Teachers heard about #USvsHate via informal recruitment through regional professional networks, conferences, and social media. We also invited teachers to information sessions about #USvsHate, and we presented about #USvsHate to school district officials and academic colleagues who shared the opportunity with K–12 educators they knew.

By design, while the outcome of student-created public messages rejecting “hate” remained consistent across all #USvsHate participants, each engagement with the project looked different, ranging from a grade-level advisory team collectively teaching one #USvsHate lesson with their classes, to a single English teacher threading lessons from usvshate.org through preexisting units on the Holocaust, to a physical education teacher leading one lesson during gym class, to teachers who skipped the lesson lists and just invited students to look at the website and create “anti-hate” messaging as part of their own curriculum. Teachers submitted favorite messages to four contests over the pilot’s course.

In the research layer of the project, teachers and students joined interviews and focus groups voluntarily, after an invitation to join us in designing the project through commenting on their experience of it (Barab, 2006; Penuel et al., 2011). All teachers who submitted students’ work to contests received an invitation to become a research participant themselves and to extend the research invitation to their students. Therefore, like #USvsHate participation overall, interviews and focus groups tapped those motivated to join and inform the pilot, leaving us knowingly less informed about teachers who chose not to join; as designers, we made the decision to prioritize interested educators’ input. Similarly, focus groups engaged students who appreciated the project enough to get parent approval for focus group participation; often these were middle and high school students who won our contests, or their classmates (no elementary teachers took us up on our pilot invitation to organize student focus groups). Since #USvsHate itself was a fully voluntary project, participating teachers also tended to be motivated to teach the material even if they worried about it. As one student put it, “If they’re picking it up that means they obviously care. Which is already good in my eyes, because I know that not every teacher would pick this project up.” As we saw in public gatherings, educators who joined were a diverse group of K–14 professionals (with several community college instructors), teaching in settings ranging from mostly Latinx schools near the border to predominantly white, Asian, and middle-class schools on the coast, to schools serving low-income students of color almost exclusively, including immigrants and more Black students.

As we studied the pilot of #USvsHate, we asked research questions, including:

We took field notes to document project design meetings (Emerson et al., 1995) and taped/transcribed educator and student interviews and focus groups (Mishler, 1991) about the #USvsHate experience. Adult interviews focused on experiences of instruction, “successful” and “difficult” moments in lessons and messaging, and supports needed “to discuss these issues with more people at your school.” Interviews were held during teachers’ prep periods, after school, and on weekends, and lasted about one hour. In focus groups, students discussed experiences of “hate” and #USvsHate lessons and messaging. We also asked questions such as, “Do you feel like there is a place for addressing these kinds of topics in school?” and “What do you think about the anti-hate messaging piece of the project?” Focus groups were held during students’ advisory period, during lunch, and after school, and lasted 40–60 minutes. We typically did not ask questions about “politics” or being “partisan”; as seen next, participants raised these issues themselves.

Interviews and focus groups were conducted by the authors, known to participants as #USvsHate codesigners. The first author, Pollock, is a white woman who is a university professor of education focused on K–12 antiracism and equity work with educators. The second author, Yoshisato, is an Asian and white woman who is an equity-driven education researcher and former K–12 public school counselor focused on student experiences. For the pilot data reported here, both of us conducted educator interviews and focus groups with 18 teachers. We did not ask adults to self-identify in these sessions, but four identified as men and 14 as women, with seven educators identifying as Black or other people of color. We talked with dozens more teachers in design sessions and recruitment gatherings, which we documented with ethnographic field notes. These participants taught at traditional public schools and public charter schools located in small and large racially and socioeconomically diverse districts throughout the region. Yoshisato conducted 10 student focus groups at several of these schools, with 30 participants across Grades 6–12. Many students self-identified their gender and race unprompted; we noted five young men, 23 young women, and two gender-nonconforming individuals, with 27 students who identified as Black or other people of color, and three white students.

We used discourse analysis techniques piloted in studies on race talk (Pollock, 2008; Pollock et al., 2015) to conduct a grounded analysis identifying trends in participants’ responses and across individuals (Boyatsis, 1998; Charmaz, 2006); we did not formally compare sites because educators joined #USvsHate individually. Insights on potential improvements to the project were discussed throughout with participants and project leaders as member checks (Richards, 2005).

In open coding of our pilot data (Lofland & Lofland, 1995), we noticed a key phrase repeated in focus groups: across schools, students stated #USvsHate offered a necessary chance to discuss “what’s going on.” “What’s going on” (and the parallel phrase, “what’s happening”) became key search terms in focused coding. We verified that we had not “led the witness” by planting these terms (Briggs, 1986); almost always, we had not. Students used the phrases repeatedly to reference current harms to marginalized populations, in schools and communities, ranging from slurs and daily denigration to broader experiences of threat and harm—and they framed such experiences as topics that teachers obviously should discuss in school. Yet, in their own interviews, educators indicated that silence on such issues was actually the norm in their schools. Although they agreed that educators of course should address harms experienced by marginalized groups inside and outside schools as a basic moral and professional responsibility, some noted that today, critics might deem such work “partisan” or “anti-Trump”—and so off-limits. All participants indicated that often, then, most teachers refused to host discussion of “what’s going on”—potentially muting both students’ and fellow Americans’ real experiences of harm. In indicating the rarity of the discussions that #USvsHate invited, then, participants demonstrated just how easily the fear of “partisan” teaching could mute discussion of actual life in a shared nation—what some scholars might deem the antithesis of democratic education (Rogers, in press).

Findings

Students Insist on Discussing “What’s Going On”

Winning messages from the pilot included these examples (Figures 1–9). Each became a poster or sticker distributed to participating classrooms. (See usvshate.org for in-color originals and more examples, such as videos, art installations, and poems.)

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Figure 1.

“We Are All Human”.

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Figure 2.

“Everyone Belongs”.

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Figure 3.

“Be Whatever Gender/Color/Sexuality/You Want to Be”.

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Figure 4.

“We the Women Deserve Rights”.

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Figure 5.

“Anti-Police Brutality”.

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Figure 6.

“Stand Strong With Others Instead of Bringing Them Down”.

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Figure 7.

“Keep Us Safe”.

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Figure 8.

“Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime”.

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Figure 9.

“We’ve Got Your Back”.

Messages offered timeless human rights perspectives (“We Are All Human” in Figure 1; “Everyone Belongs” in Figure 2; “Be Whatever Gender/Color/Sexuality/You Want to Be” in Figure 3; and “We the Women Deserve Rights” in Figure 4), while emphasizing present-tense topics (“#BLM” in Figure 5). In focus groups, students spoke of needing to “bring to light” current examples of what they deemed “hate” right now. Students referenced slurs and disparaging “jokes” as routine current “hate” at school (“Stand Strong” in Figure 6 shows slurs against the people pictured). Students also described harms targeting groups in their communities and society as “hate,” naming, for example, police brutality against Black people (“Anti-Police Brutality” in Figure 5), deportations and family separation in our border region (“Keep Us Safe” in Figure 7; “Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime” in Figure 8), and homophobic and transphobic violence, and threats against Muslims (“We’ve Got Your Back” in Figure 9) and Jews as current forms of “what’s going on.” One fourth-grade class created a video of slurs children heard recently at school from peers, all of which they deemed unacceptable:

Multiple students (quoting in video): You’re fat! I don’t like Mexicans. You’re poor as hell. You’re gay. You’re a piece of shit. Asians, ching chong! You’re so stupid. You’re a bitch. You’re ugly. At least I’m not the Black one.

In focus groups, students also referenced national events. Regarding the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, ninth graders called for discussion of current events “in classes”:

Student 1:

I think we should do this in classes. Just . . . have tables do a discussion that’s led by someone, led by someone from #USvsHate –

Student 2:

Yeah, I think that always unites classes, I think.

Student 3:

Just sit in a big circle and just talk about what’s happening because then it brings light to everything that’s going on.

Students also discussed the importance of hearing peers’ perspectives on “what’s happening” and shared optimism about helping to improve on “what’s going on” in their #USvsHate messaging work. After their advisory teacher had explored the Anti-Defamation League’s “Pyramid of Hate” (a graphic that links everyday denigration to societal discrimination and even genocide), ninth graders who created messages on transphobia and homophobia emphasized that classrooms should “shed some light on the specific kinds of hate that is happening”:

Of course you could be saying, “Let’s not hate,” but then kids are like, “Okay, but what exactly does that mean?” . . . If you’re giving examples. . . . It sheds some light on the specific kinds of hate that is happening, and makes kids more aware, and then they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t know that that was hate. I thought this was a normal thing. Wait, that’s also part of it? Okay.”

Students said #USvsHate allowed them the rare chance in school to discuss the “hate that is happening” to individuals and groups in their school, region, and society and to deem such events unacceptable, not “normal.” Messages circulated across the region also helped peers recognize harms “happening” locally, if not to themselves personally, “hitting home” and raising awareness. As one student put it, “I feel like if it’s towards your community . . . or happening in your community, it hits home more than examples that don’t relate to you that much.” An example was this ninth grader’s message in Figure 10, about a recent “true event in my life,” depicting the local harm from ICE experienced by children.

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Figure 10.

“He Wasn’t a Criminal, but They Treated Him Like One”.

In our border region, youth expressed the need to discuss events and facts of immigration and animosity toward immigrants “right now,” in part to counter ignorance about such crises:

(10th grader): People just need to know what’s going on. . . . I just heard this girl that sits near me—we are having a border crisis right now—and she was asking, “Where are the caravans coming from?” She doesn’t even know what country they’re coming from. . . . It kind of irritated me . . . that’s why I think these kinds of things are important, especially when you do have the chances in your English classes, in order to be able to talk about it and analyze it, because when people just know nothing, it’s really frustrating.

Students also said classes must discuss “what’s happening around you,” and that silence left people hurting without support from anyone who “cared”:

(Ninth grader): You need to know what’s happening around you because it’s not going to affect you if it’s not. You won’t care. That’s just the reality of it. You’re not going to care if it’s not affecting you in any way.

Across identity lines, students called it problematic if people were “not being educated,” “not knowing,” “not discussing,” and, accordingly, “not caring” about pain experienced by others. As one student summed up, “It’s really easy to avoid when it doesn’t seem like it’s an issue.”

Students called to discuss topics ranging from current events of targeted harm or violence in society to school-based bullying. Seventh graders who did an “ally or bystander” lesson in advisory (which asked how they would intervene if peers were denigrated) argued that teachers also helped by explicitly taking the time to address “hate” as “things that can go on in school”:

Student 1:

Because we did this, we are learning about hate and things that can go on in school. . . . So it really shows if the bully does this, what you can do to help and support the person being bullied.

Student 2:

It’s really useful to be able to use the skills that we learned like this early on.

Youth also critiqued teachers for not inviting such “learning.” One noted, “Teachers can do a big part of [the dialogue] because I feel like a lot of hate just stems from not being educated on the topic.”

Students praised knowledgeable teachers’ efforts to support discussion of school-based or societal harms in more depth. In a classroom where an English teacher embedded #USvsHate in an extended unit on the Holocaust and speaking up against human suffering today, a 10th grader noted, “[In other classes, too,] I think it would be really helpful to have a lot more resources . . . like . . . historical backup, to help people understand why something might be a problem or try to fix it.” Yet students also indicated that all teachers could help by staying aware of “what’s going on” with those experiencing bigotry (here, versus LGBTQ+ people), and “spread[ing] the love”:

(Ninth grader 1):

There was no hate [at our previous school].

(Ninth grader 2):

Because Ms. J was very aware of it, right?

(Ninth grader 3):

Right. We had a great teacher figure who was very aware of what was going on—because I think she had a kid who was trans—but who sort of spread the love in a sense.

Students thus critiqued educators who were silent about or not “aware of” “what’s going on” for a basic ethical failure to “spread the love.” One student wished “adults kind of took responsibility” to address “hate” incidents in both schools and society: Like parents, they said, all “teachers can do a big part” in “how they raise kids.”

Some students also acknowledged that addressing harms to marginalized populations took educator courage. One student said they hoped that student anti-hate messages could “empower adults too” for such conversations. And in discussing the conversations necessary, students also noted that discussing current experiences would include discussing some “politics.” The 10th-grade creator of “Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime” (Figure 1) explained that the invitation to make an “anti-hate” message had her thinking about “all the stuff happening in the government,” including the “government’s” targeting of her own community of “Mexicans” for disparagement:

I created a piece that was specific to the Mexican culture and what’s going on. So I created a poster that was like a presidency poster when people are running [for office] . . . I did a cultural Mexican woman with the colors of the American flag, to say that we can be American as well, and all the stuff happening in the government and against Mexican people.

Although no lessons on the website invited direct analysis of the “presidency” or asked students to directly critique “all the stuff happening in the government,” the president’s “government” was in fact disproportionately targeting “Mexican people” and nonwhite immigrants for denigration, deportation, and exclusion. A ninth grader from another district said the “Being Mexican” poster on her classroom wall inspired her own message about the “political situation that’s happening with Trump” and “what’s really going on”:

In my project, I did the political situation that’s happening with Trump against Mexicans or people who are immigrants . . . ‘cause I’m Mexican and I saw the “Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime” poster, and it hit me because that’s what’s really going on right now. Like, he’s trying to take out a lot of people from the U.S. who were actually not doing anything bad but he’s labeling them thinking they’re drug dealers.

Some #USvsHate messages thus spurred students to think about the current “political situation” and events that people experienced as threats from politicians. But students argued that a failure to discuss any “politics” in schools meant allowing students to “avoid” “current events” altogether:

(10th grader):

I personally know a couple of people who say, “Oh, I’m not really interested in politics,” or they’re not really aware of a lot of the things going on . . . I think that having it in classrooms makes it kind of unavoidable, and it really does educate people on current events, and I think that’s really important.

Students thus argued that as a basic professional and ethical task of “educating,” educators should help students understand “current events,” “the news,” and “politics,” including events where groups were being denigrated, disparaged, or hurt. One student insisted that educators should “tell kids what’s going on in society” to help students “form their own opinions”:

(10th grader):

I think #USvsHate is such a good way to open up and tell kids what’s going on in society. That way, instead of just kind of listening to what your parents always tell you, “You should believe this or this,” it kind of allows them to form their own opinions and find their own beliefs.

Yet it was precisely this vision of #USvsHate—one allowing teachers to “tell kids what’s going on in society” in order to “find their own beliefs” regarding current experiences of marginalized populations—that spiked educators’ fears that critics might deem discussions of harms today to be a “political” “agenda” off-limits to discussion.

Educators and Students Push Forward to Discuss “What’s Going On”

All participants in #USvsHate ultimately decided that in school, discussing “what’s going on” and refusing “hate” denigrating anyone on the basis of identity was a standard ethical and professional responsibility for educators, as well as a particular responsibility now. Indeed, most participating teachers, schools, and districts proudly amplified students’ “anti-hate” perspectives. The district whose student made “Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime,” for example, retweeted the student’s message as a statement of fact.

It was sporadic critics who framed “anti-hate” work as “anti-Trump,” ironically equating “Trump” with “hate” themselves. One critic argued on Pollock’s Facebook group that “Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime” indicated that students were force-fed “ideology” instead of being taught “both sides.” Another heard a ninth grader’s message in Figure 11, “There is No Right Way to Love,” as “yelling at President Trump.”

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Figure 11.

“There Is No Right Way to Love”

Ironically, the viewers’ own critique positioned Trump as anti-”Mexican” and anti-LGBTQ+. Pollock’s Facebook response was resolutely to repeat, “This is an anti-hate project.”

Educators steeled themselves for potential critics by preparing arguments that anti-hate work was simply their job. One 10th-grade teacher dismissed the notion of potential “pushback,” saying, “God, imagine that bad press, if you got fired for doing anti-hate lessons,” and, “Show me where in the Constitution I’m violating your students’ rights by telling them not to be racist. I think it’s a really easy argument to deflate.” Because she imagined potential pushback from a student on her mind, however, her next comment at first seemed unabashedly “anti-Trump”:

Day one, last year, a student walks out with a Trump-Pence shirt on. We definitely have students who are either, their religiousness contributes to . . . ideas of hate, or their politics do, their parents’ politics do. . . . I have definitely seen a divide there.

Yet this teacher explained that she heard in the campaign shirt the Trump campaign’s explicit denigration of “undocumented” people, including people in her school:

That campaign was built on hate, and fear, and inciting violence. So it’s accurate, I guess, reasonable, for someone to feel threatened by seeing this shirt. I worked with an individual who’s undocumented, so she felt threatened by that shirt.

To dispute that the Trump campaign was anti-undocumented-immigrant would be to dispute reality—yet to censor students’ “political” candidate choices would be the definition of partisan. Responsible under federal law to support undocumented immigrants too, this educator—herself a “government” teacher—was thus left trying to discuss the facts of the government’s anti-immigrant acts and policies in a nonpartisan manner as her professional responsibility. Her solution was to invite varying perspectives on the “government’s” policies, while drawing a line at accepting the denigration of groups. She said, “We’re going to agree on the same set of facts . . . [how we] interpret what they mean, that’s what’s different.” She called her goal “accurate disagreement,” adding that a teacher couldn’t ignore the facts of current events even if they exacerbated a social “divide.” To delete discussion of “government” altogether, she said, was to refuse to discuss actual life in her school and across the nation: “Everything. They’re yelling about it in Congress, or on Fox News, it’s manifesting in some way on our campus.”

Yet educators and students participating in #USvsHate indicated that most classrooms they knew did not navigate complex conversations about “what’s going on.” A high school teacher noted that without #USvsHate’s invitation to discuss current experiences, “I’m not sure those same comments would have been shared out loud otherwise.” As a simple call for students to share “what they’ve been living” and to say firmly that denigrating any group was wrong, #USvsHate in the Trump era felt both deeply “political” and not political at all. One high school advisory teacher simply called #USvsHate “a breath of fresh air.”

Discussion

Only in one pilot case was #USvsHate halted altogether as too “political.” A white family employed in the Border Patrol brought a lawyer to their child’s charter school to censor a teacher’s art projects exploring “the border,” calling them “too political and incredibly inappropriate.” The administrator and the principal literally removed images across the school related to the border, including the student-made #USvsHate messages in Figures 12 and 13.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 12.

“Build Bridges Not Walls”.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 13.

“Humanity Is Bigger Than Borders”.

“Build Bridges Not Walls,” made by a local high schooler, was indeed a current protest slogan in local rallies against family separations and bans on refugees. The other message, also by a local high schooler, articulated a perspective unarguable in some ways: Humanity is bigger than borders. Yet in a nation debating immigration and the denigration of immigrants, educators’ refusal to post messaging empathizing with immigrants’ experiences actually prioritized anti-immigrant voices because of “politics”—and, in that sense, was partisan.

In a Trump era, educators participating in #USvsHate thus sought a deeper democratic balance: to support students through critical discussion of complex social issues and actual pain experienced by other human beings, while not prioritizing any “party.” As Rogers argued (in press), key shapers of U.S. education have argued for such a balance for centuries, positing that to ready students for a diverse democracy, social issues must be discussed across divergent opinions even as educators avoid “party politics”—and as students are taught to avoid denigrating types of people. #USvsHate thus purposefully took “sides” not against particular presidents or parties, but against “hate” and harm to people and communities, historically and today. But in an era when government officials themselves were overtly denigrating populations and targeting groups for harm, “anti-hate” work felt somehow both nonpartisan and partisan—and teachers indicated that their colleagues most often stayed on the side of silence. A high school teacher noted that today, any talk of “hate” would inherently “raise some red flags” for people protecting Trump, saying, “Hate has been used so much against Trump, and the love versus hate and love trumps hate and so on. So that might immediately raise some red flags in certain parts of the country.”

Yet whenever educators avoided mentioning current events of harm in the quest to be nonpartisan, they actually made a partisan decision: They kept government actors particularly off-limits for discussion by youth and teachers because of their party, and so purposefully beyond any accountability for their part in “what’s going on.” In our own Trumpmuteness as project designers, we too protected one president particularly from critique for his own acts of denigrating populations. What was actually made off-limits in this quest to not be “partisan” was discussing this president and his party at all—and real experiences under his administration.

Indeed, some participants pointed out that refusing to discuss current harmful events (including government policies targeting groups) seemed more partisan than discussing those events. For educators who taught youth targeted most directly by the administration and by epithets or violence in school hallways or on local streets, a refusal to discuss such experiences of harm sanctioned the harm. Further, students indicated that ignoring current harm was perhaps tolerable only for those not targeted. As one student said, “I think if you can actively avoid it, you’re privileged to do so, because politics affects everyone. . . . So it helps to know what’s going on . . . [to] keep yourself updated.”

Educators also noted that deleting mention of “hate” events in the effort to not take “sides” would actually validate harm to groups targeted, not be “neutral.” One teacher said as much in spring 2019, two months before the president himself told several congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they “came” from:

I’m over this idea of being a neutral educator. It’s not a thing. . . . If you want to discuss finer details of macro-economics, that maybe has a more conservative [perspective], okay, we’ll talk about that. But when we’re talking about anything regarding [basic rights of] race or gender identity or religion . . . there’s not two sides. . . . So it’s like this fine balance . . . you can be who you are, but [denigrating] language can’t exist in my classroom.

Another middle school teacher noted that ignoring harm to communities in an effort to be “neutral” let harm reign unchecked: “I know that as educators, we’re asked to be kind of neutral and not impress our ideology on our students. But I’m of the belief that this is unprecedented.”

As teachers attempted to hang on to basic ethics of human rights and inclusion while nurturing differing perspectives on the nation’s government and direction, participants indicated that classrooms typically stayed silent about harm to marginalized populations in a quixotic quest to stay “neutral.” And in deleting current experiences of harm altogether from discussion in schools, educators in essence let those being harmed suffer in silence.

#USvsHate participants ultimately decided that public “anti-hate” dialogue, teaching, and messaging upheld basic educator responsibilities and basic ethics—in this administration as in any other. Once her image was chosen for a public art show, the 10th-grade creator of “Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime,” the pilot’s most virally circulated “anti-hate” image, ultimately explained her intentions to broadcast a more universal morality, including during the administration “of Donald Trump.” Her statement indicated a type of experience otherwise silenced altogether in school for its seemingly “partisan” tone:

Since the candidacy and election of Donald Trump, many lies and stereotypes have been spread about my culture and race . . . we have been called criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. Seeing first-hand how people in my community really are, I decided to rise above this hate, and create my piece titled “Being Mexican Isn’t a Crime” . . . In this diverse nation of so many races, colors, languages, and cultures, immigrants learning, working, and raising their families to the best of their abilities alongside their neighbors is what “makes this country great!”

Conclusion

Some might argue that the quest to refuse harm to marginalized groups and to insist on rights and inclusion for all in our diverse nation (and, as debated furiously today, to teach the facts about inequality and injustice in our society, past and present) is fundamentally democratic and even anti-partisan. Yet the era studied put classic struggles over avoiding partisan teaching into overdrive. In an increasingly divided country, countless topics felt infused by “politics” and “partisanship.” Nationwide after the 2016 election, educators reported accusations of being “partisan” even for hanging signs generically welcoming “diversity” or saying “science is real”; in 2017, Pollock met teachers afraid of teaching entire subject areas debated in the current administration, such as environmental science. Some educators inviting critical thinking about the president’s rhetoric or policies were literally censured (Anderson & Zyhowski, 2018). National 2016–2019 studies (Rogers, in press) found that educators anxious about avoiding “politics” were even deleting the word “democracy” from public school goals as the president stoked partisan divisions while denigrating individuals and groups. In a “divisive climate since 2016” leading to a “heightened sense of fear and suspicion of others” (Rogers et al., 2019), educators reported division among students as young as kindergarten—and many teachers responded by avoiding classroom discussions of current events of harm (Costello & Dillard, 2019). At this writing, educators face legislation attempting to censor such teaching about harm to marginalized groups, present or past; such legislation is, ironically, pushed by one party (Kingkade et al., 2021).

In these years, we designed #USvsHate to protect educators’ and students’ ability to refuse hate, harassment, bias, and harm in schools and society in an explicitly nonpartisan manner. #USvsHate took a public stance against “hate” itself, insisting that all communities be valued as part of “US” while inviting analysis of actual events experienced by people as harmful—even if this meant critiquing the moments when the president himself fueled and modeled such harm. In our pilot of #USvsHate across the politically mixed San Diego region, students repeatedly described #USvsHate as an obviously necessary school-based invitation to discuss and address “what’s going on”—clearly an educator’s job. Participating educators framed “anti-hate” effort as educators’ timeless and current responsibility, even as some worried that such work might appear “partisan” to others. As one teacher summarized, #USvsHate was simply “an opportunity for students to speak out about what’s happening to them, their family, their community, and their country.” In this, educators shouldered a basic responsibility of democratic schooling: talking about real life in a shared nation, and making sure all students felt included in that nation’s schools.

The educators and students of #USvsHate thus kept current events and experiences of harm audible and visible, as if doing so was a basic responsibility of schooling in a diverse democracy. A student poster portraying immigrants sheltering behind the border fence, with the words “Keep Us Safe,” overtly kept this human experience in the room and in the mind. Statements like “Stand Up for Others Instead of Bringing Them Down,” or a third grader’s message, “Everyone Belongs,” seemed both timelessly true and packed with current urgency. Student voices carried in videos, poems, op-eds, songs, and art installations prompted ongoing awareness and caring for anyone being harmed as if less valuable, today and at any time. And from teachers, students demanded both a moral stance countering “hate” and the democratic chance to hear peers’ “perspectives,” “beliefs,” and “views,” framing such work as both obviously necessary and strangely unusual in schools. Because other than #USvsHate, students and teachers noted, schools often did not invite discussion of “what’s happening”—leaving many suffering in silence. In the end, participants concluded that “standing up against hate” was a basic and timeless requirement of U.S. educators’ work—and that standing up for all of “US” actually should be the domain of every “party.”