The 2016 report had asked educators whether they agreed with the statement “I have heard derogatory language or slurs about white students.” 20 percent said they had.
Following the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for counts that include wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering, it has resurfaced that the group failed to include reports from thousands of educators of anti-white language against students in the early days of the first Trump administration.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, released a report in 2016 titled "The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Presidential Election on Our Nation’s Schools." The report was based on a questionnaire that was circulated among the teachers’ union’s members in K-12 schools who subscribed to its "Teaching Tolerance" newsletter.
The report focused on the finding that 40 percent of more than 10,000 educators who had responded to the survey "have heard derogatory language directed at students of color, Muslims, immigrants and people based on gender or sexual orientation."
The takeaway from the report was that Trump-supporting white kids have harassed minorities in schools. That was later used along with a larger report on Trump-inspired hate crimes, titled "Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election."
The report, however, did not mention the results of another question it asked educators: whether they agreed with the statement "I have heard derogatory language or slurs about white students." The New York Post reported at the time that the SPLC initially said it was struggling to get the information about the data "from researchers" when asked to provide it. When pressed, then-SPLC spokeswoman Kirsten Bokenkamp revealed that "about 20 percent answered affirmatively to that question," equating to around 2,000 respondents.
The report released by the SPLC instead focused on "anti-immigrant sentiment," "anti-Muslim sentiment," and "slurs about students of color" in schools across the country. Former Education Department civil rights attorney Hans Bader said at the time, "They left that result out because it would not fit their ideological narrative. It was deemed an inconvenient truth."
The report has reemerged after the Department of Justice announced charges against the SPLC. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press conference on Tuesday, "According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups, as the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."
Among the allegations against the group is that it paid a member of the group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The DOJ said that this person got a total of $275,000 over the course of eight years, and that around $3 million had been paid out by the SPLC between 2014 and 2023 to at least eight people who were affiliated with various hate groups like the KKK and other neo-Nazi groups.
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