Laura Yuen: Vile texts received after the election reveal a bolder brand of racism

MINNEAPOLIS -- The racist texts that have pinged the phones of Black Americans after this election show that not even the children are safe.

Middle-school kids at Hopkins Public Schools are among the cellphone users who’ve been targeted by a vile hoax: a message telling the recipient to report for slavery. Think about that. Children perhaps as young as 11 or 12 are being targeted directly on their personal devices with undisguised racial hatred.

Other Minnesotans, like Tawonda Burks of Rochester, woke up Thursday morning to read a text ordering her to show up for cotton picking. The 47-year-old mom is relieved that her youngest daughter, who swiped to play her mom’s phone the previous night without Burks knowing, didn’t read the message.

But Burks’ 11-year-old daughter came across the trend on TikTok, and now Burks is having to explain to her child what a plantation is.

If you haven’t heard the news yet, here’s a painful recap: Black men, women, college students and children in several states received text messages, often identifying the recipients by name, directing them as if they were slaves. It’s not clear who is sending the texts — a kid in his basement? A Russian hacker intent on sowing more distrust and division?

Some of the messages cited the recent win of president-elect Donald Trump, according to the Associated Press. The FBI issued an alert late Thursday, saying it was aware of the messages and that the agency has been in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.

In Burks’ case, the text told her she was “selected to pick cutton [sic] at the nearest plantation. Be ready at 12PM SHARP with your belongings.”

“My first thought was, “I’m glad my 6-year-old can’t fully read and comprehend what this was,’” Burks said. “Then I immediately went to, ‘What is this? Was this really sent to me? Is this a joke? I was just trying to figure out who would send something like this.”

The message came from a 612 area phone number that no longer works. Burks, director of operations at Rochester Area Economic Development Inc., initially assumed she was targeted because she had just run for public office as a Black woman. She lost her bid Tuesday to become an Olmsted County commissioner. But after she shared the text on social media, others piped in with similar stories. She learned that the racist hoax appeared to be vast and coordinated, directed also at Black people in New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

“My other daughter, who is 11, she saw this all across TikTok. She asked me, ‘What’s a plantation?’” Burks said. “She knows about slavery. I had to explain to her what a plantation was. I had to explain that no one was going to take me, and that we’re OK. I told her it sounds like a joke, but it’s not funny at all.”

It was already a brutal week. She was saddened to see that voters chose to give a second term to a man who called Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to run for president on a major-party ticket, “lazy,” “a stupid person,” “slow,” “having low IQ,” and suggesting she was on drugs. These are all tropes used to denigrate Black people, and Burks told me she identifies with others underestimating her abilities because of her race and gender. (”I don’t parade my titles,” she says, even though she earned her MBA and is in the final stages of completing her doctorate degree.)

After receiving the text, one of the first people Burks called was her friend, Walé Elegbede, president of the Rochester branch of the NAACP. Like Burks, he fears that Trump’s win is encouraging other Americans to show their racism more freely.

“I suspect some groups will be emboldened to think this is carte-blanche to spew hate,” Elegbede said. “Now is going to be the time to protect vulnerable communities, to protect Black communities, because they are going to be the ones hit by this.”

Were these texts part of a nefarious campaign by a foreign entity to make us in America more fearful of each other than we already are? That could very well be. But Elegbede says we must not ignore the hate in our own backyards. Just this year, a racial slur was spotted on a pedestrian bridge in Rochester. Authorities later identified four teens as suspects in their investigation.

Months later, a DFL legislator in Rochester, woke up to swastikas and racist graffiti on her property.

Elegbede and Burks demand accountability. They want to see repercussions for these revolting acts of hate. Burks said she plans to report the text to law enforcement. “I’m tired of the town hall meetings, the kumbaya, the ‘let’s all be friends,’” Burks said. “Those are nice, but I’m tired of it.”

“It’s going to be up to our community to have a strong response and say, ‘Not in our town,’” Elegbede said. “We need to go from ‘not my business’ to ‘this is everyone’s business.’”

On Thursday night, I was saddened and outraged to hear that these toxic texts had invaded my kids’ own school community. “We have learned that Black students at one of our middle schools received racist text messages referencing slavery and plantations, coming from an unidentified source,” read the email to parents from Hopkins superintendent Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed. “After connecting with the Minnetonka Police, we confirmed that similar incidents have been reported in K-12 and college settings across at least seven other states, including Minnesota.”

Mhiripiri-Reed encouraged us to talk to our kids about what they may be feeling, hearing or seeing on their phones, and to report them to a teacher at school or another trusted adult.

State Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, said a constituent informed her that her college-age daughter received a similar text. And Maye Quade shared with me a screen shot of another Minnesotan who was told in a text to report to an address in Columbia Heights to be picked up in a brown van for picking cotton in a plantation in Monticello, Minn.

Maye Quade herself received a tweet Thursday from a troll who said he wanted to buy her from her wife, asking how many cows he needed for the dowry.

While accustomed to hearing from trolls (she is Black and biracial), the level of hate she’s observed since the election is more intense. “What I’ve seen in the last 48 hours is wildly different,” she said Friday. “It is far more brazen, far more sexist, and far more racist. It’s more horrible.”

As for Burks, she noted that the text message she received are just words, but given how much they sting, she imagines the depths of mental and physical abuse her ancestors must have endured. We all need to denounce it: Not in our schools, not in our towns, not in our state, not in our country. You don’t get to come after our neighbors or their children.

Burks said on the campaign trail, she didn’t face racial discrimination, except from locals who trolled her online. “Black girl from the ghetto,” they’d call her. And now the text.

“Something like this cuts to the bone,” she said. “It hurts.”

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