Posted by: metta March 13, 2016
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Trump supporters are quick to turn on protesters, especially those who don’t look like them. They point and holler. Sometimes they spit and kick and shove. A young black woman in Kentucky was pushed and called names, her sign ripped from her hands. A black man in North Carolina wassucker-punched by a 78-year-old white man, who later looked into a camera and warned that next time, “We might have to kill him.”
To witness the crowd turn on the protesters in its midst is to watch a feverish body, bucking and writhing as it tries to eject an invading virus.
I have talked to protesters who still don’t quite have the words to describe what they felt when they were singled out and turned upon, often by their communities.
Griselda Cardena Segovia, 20, a college sophomore, was part of a small group of young people who were removed from a Trump event on Monday in Concord, N.C., before it began, after they linked arms in silent protest.
She said she and her younger sister had come to peacefully observe the rally and support their parents, immigrants from Mexico whom they felt Mr. Trump was disparaging. But as soon as they entered, the crowd “looked at us wrong and you could feel the energy, that we weren’t wanted,” she said, adding that they found the scene — which included some of their high school teachers — to be jarring.
“We have never in our whole life, living here in Concord, we have never experienced racism until now,” Ms. Segovia said. “I never thought my town, that we contributed to, would treat us like this.”
After the rally, Ms. Segovia’s group stood on the grassy curb, holding signs. It was unseasonably warm for March — the sort of day when you might sneak out of work for a long lunch outside — and as cars exited, dozens rolled down their windows to shout obscenities and slurs at the young men and women. “Go back to Mexico,” someone hollered from an S.U.V. as it peeled away.
As a reporter, I always try to anticipate where the story is headed, so I can get there first, or at least right alongside the news. And I quickly began jotting down notes on scenes of violence and near-violence, and gathering voices of angry, frustrated Trump supporters. Sometime soon, I warned my editors, someone is going to be seriously wounded — or worse — at a Trump rally, and we’ll want to have a story ready.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/us/politics/covering-donald-trump-and-witnessing-the-danger-up-close.html