Fallout!

When bullying and harassment is condoned it begins to run rampant and unchecked. With a wink and a nod evil is done.

After Nex Benedict’s death, LGBTQ youth group saw 200% rise in crisis contacts from Oklahoma
The Rainbow Youth Project, a national LGBTQ suicide prevention group, also said calls increased ahead of a protest in Owasso, Oklahoma, by Westboro Baptist Church.
By Jo Yurcaba
March 7, 2024

A national LGBTQ youth nonprofit group said crisis calls from Oklahoma more than tripled in the weeks after transgender student Nex Benedict died there on Feb. 8.

Lance Preston, founder of the Indianapolis-based Rainbow Youth Project, a suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, said the group’s crisis hotline for LGBTQ young people received 1,097 contacts, including calls and online messages, from Oklahoma in February — an increase of more than 200% from its monthly average of 350 contacts.

The group received just under 1,000 of those contacts after Feb. 16, when Nex’s death began to receive widespread media attention. Of the 1,097 contacts, 87% reported incidents of bullying in Oklahoma schools.

“The high volume of contacts underscores the pressing need for intervention and support services — support services that are far too often unavailable, especially in rural areas of the country,” Preston said at a news conference Thursday hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization.

Bigotry is a learned trait, it is passed down through generations, children of racist learned to be racists. The American Psychological Association wrote an article about how bigotry runs in families, it is taught from one generation to another.

Raising anti-racist children
Psychologists are studying the processes by which young children learn about race—and how to prevent prejudice from taking root
By Kirsten Weir
May 18, 2023

Racism occurs across a spectrum. It lives within individuals and between them, within institutions and across society. And at every level, children are affected by discriminatory beliefs and practices, said Farzana Saleem, PhD, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. “Racism is learned early on in development, and children receive many messages about race and racism from a young age.”

Kids pick up on what their parents and teachers say (and don’t say), who and what they see on TV, what their dolls look like, and how other people are treated in their schools and neighborhoods. “Humans are sponges for their social environment,” said Evan Apfelbaum, PhD, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. Over decades, research has explored how children come to understand race—and how they learn racism. Yet the science is a long way from prescribing a formula for anti-racism. “There’s a whole host of factors that can affect kids’ holistic understanding of race—and so much research that needs to be done,” he said.
Tell me what does it teach the when you “Can’t Say Gay?”
Race in early childhood

When do children understand race? It’s not an easy question, in part because “race” isn’t the rigid construct it’s often made out to be. “It’s well established that there’s no biological basis for race,” said Diane Hughes, PhD, a professor of applied psychology at New York University. “Race has meaning because we give it meaning—especially in the U.S., where our history is largely structured to uphold these ‘racial differences,’” she said. “We assume that there are unobservable underlying personality traits that correlate to certain physical characteristics.”

[…]

Within the first years of life, children are bombarded with messages from their environment that shape their beliefs and judgments about other people. It doesn’t take long for such messages to stick. By preschool, children begin showing both implicit and explicit bias toward members of other races. Kristin Shutts, PhD, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, found that at age 3, White children are equally likely to befriend Black or White children. But by age 4 or 5, White children are more likely to choose other White kids as friends (Child Development Perspectives, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2015).

You got to be carefully taught.

I asked Perplexity.AI:  “Is bigotry is a learned trait, that is passed down through generations in families?”

Bigotry is indeed a learned trait that can be passed down through generations in families. Children learn prejudice and discrimination from observing the society around them, including their parents, teachers, and peers. Research indicates that children start developing attitudes about various groups in society as early as ages three or four, and these attitudes become more difficult to change as they grow older. Social learning theory suggests that prejudice is learned through association, reinforcement, and modeling, primarily from the messages children receive in their environment.

Racism is learned early in development, with children receiving messages about race and racism from a young age. Children absorb these messages from what their parents and teachers say, media representations, toys they play with, and how people are treated in their surroundings. It's emphasized that no one is born racist; rather, individuals learn racism easily through societal influences but can also unlearn it with proper guidance and education.

Furthermore, racism can have transgenerational consequences, impacting health outcomes across generations due to the embodiment of inequality transmitted through epigenetic influences. The stress of racial discrimination can lead to alterations in gene expression with significant implications for bodily systems' healthy functioning. Racism affects children's health in various ways, including physical health risks like exposure to environmental hazards and limited access to healthcare, as well as mental health issues such as higher rates of depression and anxiety.

Parents play a crucial role in combating the transmission of bigotry by openly discussing race and inequality with their children, exposing them to diverse role models, helping them build a strong cultural identity, and teaching them to be agents of positive change against racism. By providing children with the language to address these issues and instilling pride in their cultural identity early on, parents can empower their children to recognize bias and contribute to efforts for racial equality and justice.

Just look at Trump’s family, his father Fred Trump was arrested twice, the Washington Post writes,

Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was arrested twice: in 1927 during a Ku Klux Klan riot, and in 1976 over code violations at a building he owned in Maryland.

[…]

This was not Fred Trump’s first arrest. Forty-nine years earlier, in 1927, he was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally that turned violent in Queens on a charge of “refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so,” according to a newspaper report at the time. He was 21 at the time of this arrest; his son Donald would not be born for another 19 years.

The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.