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FOR BLACK AMERICANS, POST-ELECTION SPAM MESSAGES SIGNAL MOUNTING
THREAT  
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Nyki Duda
November 22, 2024
The Progressive
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_ In Denton County, Texas, and across the US, a string of racist
incidents raises fears white supremacists have been emboldened by
Trump’s victory. _

Racist mass texts were sent to Black Americans around the country
following the election of Donald Trump, (courtesy Nyki Duda)

 

“Has anyone else’s child received this text message? I’m
thinking it’s a prank, but there’s nothing funny about it! I’m
livid!!”

That was the message one Paloma Creek, Texas, resident left on a local
Facebook group on November 6, 2024, hours after Donald Trump was
elected President of the United States. The resident also shared an
image of a text they said was sent to their child from an unknown
number, asking them to report to “pick cotton at the nearest
plantation.”  

One staff member in the Denton Independent School District (ISD),
which serves more than a dozen Dallas-Fort Worth area municipalities
including Paloma Creek, tells _The Progressive_ they heard from
colleagues that students reported receiving similar messages. While
the staff initially assumed the texts were sent by other local
children as a bullying tactic, news outlets across the US soon began
reporting on a number of similar incidents. 

Nearly identical versions of the racist mass text have reportedly been
sent to Black Americans in at least thirty states, including to
children as young as thirteen. In addition to Dallas-Fort Worth
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the messages have been received in regions with significant Black
populations, including Detroit
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D.C [[link removed]]., and
Gary, Indiana. CNN reported students of at least three historically
Black colleges
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universities received versions of the  message.

Middle school theater instructor Carrie Stephens, who teaches in the
Denton ISD, says she learned about the texts from a post on a
neighborhood social media page. After seeing a post about similar
messages from someone in a different state, she realized the scale of
the incident went far beyond Denton County. 

“I was in disbelief that anyone would have the audacity to do
anything like this,” Stephens says. “But immediately, my thought
went to, ‘Well, we did just elect someone who encourages that, or at
least doesn’t discourage it.’ And it’s making a lot of people
bold.  

Had the incident occurred when she moved to her current neighborhood
in 2018, Stephens says, she would have considered the spam messages
“very out of character” for the community. “But in the last few
years,” she says, “I’ve noticed a lot more people saying a lot
more outlandish things.”

Denton County, which is home to the University of North Texas, is a
“purple” area at the northwest edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth
metropolitan area’s Democratic bubble. The region has been a hub for
a vibrant Black community since the end of the Civil War, when
formerly enslaved people establish
[[link removed].]ed
freedmen’s towns. Today, Texas has the largest Black population in
the country, with much of the community concentrated around
Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. 

But the region is also known for its long history as a center for
organized white supremacy. In the early 1920s, Dallas was home to what
was supposedly the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in the world, with a
13,000-strong membership that, according to _Dallas Magazine_
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represented about one out of three eligible men in Dallas.” During
this time, KKK members held roles across all levels of law
enforcement, including district attorneys, sheriffs, police
commissioners, and judges. 

While it’s now clear that the campaign was nation-wide, some in
Denton County have described feeling unnerved by such an open display
of racism close to home. Stephens doesn’t only teach in the
Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs—she also has two children enrolled in the
Denton ISD. “My girls go to the high school,” Stephens says,
“and they came home the next day, and they were telling me about
kids who had gotten the messages. They asked why anyone would do that,
and I told them that some people don’t understand how this affects
the people receiving the message, and some people know exactly what it
will do.”

Amber Sims, the CEO of a Dallas-Fort Worth racial equity organization
called Young Leaders, Strong City—one of just two major
organizations of its kind in the area—urges parents to check in with
their children and discuss the racist messages, to affirm “their
right to be here like everyone else . . . [and] the reality of the
increased racism and bullying we are seeing directed at certain groups
simply for existing.” 

“Parents can also model this behavior isn’t okay by countering the
racist messages,” Sims says, “and ensuring their children know
there is no place for bigoted words or actions. There is room to
disrupt this behavior at all levels.”  

William C. Anderson, an activist who has written extensively on Black
history and liberation, says that people like the ones who sent the
text messages “are going to be emboldened and feel more protected by
the current administrators of the state. And they’re certainly not
wrong to feel that way. White supremacy and Christian nationalism are
being made explicit in ways this country often tried to downplay.” 

Despite statements from area residents who received texts, as well as
national news reports confirming others had received the spam messages
in North Texas,  a spokesperson for Denton County Sheriff’s
Department said there had been no reports of the messages to their
office. Another official with the Denton Police Department said “no
police reports have been filed” with the department regarding the
spam texts, though they encouraged affected residents to do so. In
fact, none of the other local police departments that are served by
Denton ISD and could be reached for comment had received reports
related to the incident, though at least one media report indicates
the Dallas FBI office is involved in the investigation. 

A spokesperson for the school district also declined to confirm
whether any Denton ISD students had reported receiving text messages,
particularly in the hours before it was clear the incident was more
than simple bullying. The spokesperson questioned whether the Paloma
Creek Facebook post was real, and if the child who reportedly received
that message actually attended Denton ISD, though the same official
said they knew someone in the area who had received a message. It’s
relevant to note the post was almost the same as those reported across
the country and at least two staff said they had seen it before major
news reports of the incident. The district official did mention that
services were available to any students who may have been affected. 

On November 7, the Federal Bureau of Investigations said in
a statement
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it was working with federal authorities, including the Justice
Department, to investigate the incident and any potential for violent
acts associated with the texts. A week later, the agency
also confirmed
[[link removed]] Latinx
and LGBTQ+ community members had received similar messages, with some
recipients reporting “being told they were selected for deportation
or to report to a re-education camp”, and that some people had
received hateful messages via or email. Some texts also reportedly
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incoming Trump Administration, though a spokesperson for the Trump
campaign told media the campaign “has absolutely nothing to do with
these text messages.” 

The messaging app TextNow appears to have been used to send some of
the messages, which the Nevada Attorney General’s Office said
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statement it believed were likely “robotext messages.” Cori
Faklaris, an assistant professor of software and information services
at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told
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Associated Press that whoever organized the spam campaign likely
bought the recipients’ data online and used machine-learning
algorithms to predict individuals’ race or ethnicity. That
hypothesis would explain why one teacher in Gary, Indiana—which,
according to 2023 U.S. Census data, is 77.6 percent
Black—tells _The Progressive_ that dozens of students at their
school reported receiving the texts about being enslaved, including
many white children. One of those students even mentioned their cell
phone was registered in the name of a Black relative. 

But the national barrage of hateful spam texts has not been the only
incident of racist intimidation in the two weeks since the
presidential election. And it extends beyond the South, proving racism
and xenophobia are not bound by geography. In Howell, Michigan, a
group of five fascists recently waved Nazi flags
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of an American Legion, where a local theater troupe was putting
on _The Diary of Anne Frank_
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adaptation of the journal of a young Jewish girl who died in the
Holocaust. Local media reports said police “had no grounds” to ask
the demonstrators for identification as their protest was
“peaceful.” Another similar rally was reported in nearby
Fowlerville. 

One week later, just 200-odd miles south in the more liberal city of
Columbus, Ohio, a group of nearly a dozen masked neo-Nazis marched
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the Short North neighborhood carrying swastika flags. Zach Klein,
Columbus’s city attorney, released a statement
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media telling the demonstrators to “take your flags and the masks
you hide behind and go home and never come back.” He also said his
office would collaborate with law enforcement to monitor what he
called a “hate group.” (Police told reporters that some of the
demonstrators had been detained, but none were arrested.) 

Just fifty miles east of Columbus, a disinformation campaign
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Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio resulted in threats of violence
and local media reports of growing neo-Nazi activity, with one
Southern Poverty Law Center analyst calling
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state a “hotbed for hate groups.” And in northern Indiana this
week, the Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan reportedly said
it left fliers
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vehicles and at homes in several towns near Gary, including Michigan
City, Valparaiso, and South Bend, warning undocumented immigrants to
leave the United States before Trump’s Inauguration.

Like the once strictly segregated
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Worth area, many of the established communities of color targeted by
white supremacists in recent weeks have a complex history of systemic
racism. In Democratic-leaning Gary, Indiana, less than an hour south
of Chicago, once middle-class neighborhoods are now in substantial
decline after the federal and state governments abandoned
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steel mills, offshoring once well-paid union jobs and pivoting towards
automation. 

In spite of the history of racism, and the racist threats that have
emerged in recent weeks, Sims sees the mass text incident as a chance
to push for change. “I think this is an opportunity for our
communities to continue to organize,” she says. “Teach our
history, attend organizing trainings, follow your school board and
city council, and be in community to create processing spaces, spaces
for encouragement, planning and joy.”

As an educator, Stephens is hopeful those who organized the racist
messaging campaign targeting Black, Latinx and LGBTQ+ Americans will
be caught and brought to justice. But Anderson believes the answer to
overcoming the threat of racist violence lies with new generations.
“Young people need to learn their history and work together to build
popular education programs that aren’t solely reliant on the
state,” he wrote in an email to _The Progressive_, “so they can
build and spread awareness around resisting the increasingly hostile
racism of this society.”  

_Nyki Duda is a writer and editor focused on social movements and the
rise of the far right. Her work has appeared in Dissent, NACLA, and In
These Times._

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
nonviolence and freedom of speech. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we
publish on national politics, culture, and events including U.S.
foreign policy; we also focus on issues of particular importance to
the heartland. Two flagship projects of The
Progressive include Public School Shakedown
[[link removed]], which covers efforts
to resist the privatization of public education, and The Progressive
Media Project [[link removed]], aiming to diversify our
nation’s op-ed pages. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. _

* Racism
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* texas
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* Indiana
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