Feature photo by Hannah Carley
Story by Alyssa Williams
On Thursday, Nov. 7, following the results of the 2024 presidential election, MTSU Student Government Association Senator Autumn Gray posted a Snapchat story of her Black friend from Tennessee State University receiving a message from an unknown number. The message read that a brown van would pick her friend up to take her to a plantation to pick cotton.
Black Americans across the nation received similar messages, prompting an FBI investigation.
“When I posted it, someone said, ‘Oh, that’s not true. That’s fake. You’re making it up,’” Gray said. “I don’t think that [the message] would have happened, period, if [Trump] wasn’t elected. People started receiving it the day after the election. It’s no coincidence.”
It is because of situations like these that many minority communities feel unsafe due to the reelection of President-elect Donald Trump. Hate crimes rose 20 percent in 2016, fueled by the presidential campaign, according to an article from NBC News in 2017.
Many people in minority communities fear the same thing will happen again.
“People just don’t want to listen,” Gray said, talking about her experiences as a Black woman. “I talk about a Black issue or something, and someone would be like, ‘Oh, that’s not going on. Y’all fine,’ especially now that a lot of Black people are saying that we are scared. And, people are just saying, ‘Oh, y’all are just overreacting. Y’all are just fear-mongering.’”
Gray specifically mentioned her fear now that she lives in a predominantly conservative location. The environment is completely different from her home in Memphis, which is predominantly Black and is one of the only remaining blue counties in Tennessee. Because of the election, she cut off a couple of people who voted for Trump in fear for her safety.
“Of course, people that I knew voted for him was also speaking in hate speech,” Gray said. “And, I was like, how are you going to be my friend? I’m a Black woman, and you’re already supporting someone who supports racial inequality and is also a racist. One person I knew since freshman year, he called me a slur.”
Gray is not the only one who cut off friends because of the most recent election.
Rio Martinez, a queer student and a first-generation American citizen, follows a policy to not be friends with “people who vote against [his] human rights.” Martinez’s parents immigrated from El Salvador, and he experiences discrimination because of his queerness and his race.
Martinez voted for independent candidate Jill Stein because of her stance on the Israel-Gaza War. He knew that because he lived in Tennessee, the state would automatically slide to Trump for the presidential election. As an act of resistance against the Democratic party, he voted third party.
“If I lived in a swing state, I probably would have voted for Kamala Harris, just knowing the stakes at hand with the electoral college,” Martinez said.
Martinez is the new vice president of MT Lambda, which serves as a safe space for the queer community on MTSU’s campus. He described his experience with confronting Trump supporters in the club and how it jeopardized the community that the organization built.
“[As] someone who has a position of power at MT Lambda, I’ve had to comfort a lot of students and their fear of being outwardly queer,” Martinez said. “I’ve had people talk to me about issues with people they know saying slurs or anti-trans sentiments because they see these people every day. It’s their roommates. It’s their family. It’s their coworkers, and it’s just something they have to deal with at this point.”
Martinez expressed concern about the polarization of the nation and how people automatically make assumptions based on someone’s appearance. For people of color and the trans community, this paints a target on their backs.
“You’re not protected under the law,” Martinez said. “You know, you’ve seen time and time again that the government doesn’t care about you. The election definitely had an impact on these issues and the safety of a lot of marginalized communities.”
Martinez said the low voter turnout was partially caused by people losing faith in the Democratic Party, with which MT Lambda president Elizabeth Cannan-Knight, a trans feminine non-binary individual, agreed. This loss of faith particularly affects the queer community.
Cannan-Knight used to work as an official in the Montgomery County Democratic Party, and she said that there was an “internal party directive to not talk about trans issues.” She worked as a graphic designer, creating advertisements to support candidates and specifically target Republican candidates on the issues they lacked. Eventually, she resigned.
“The Democrats have fallen very, very short on protecting queer people,” Cannan-Knight said. “They told me not to do anything about trans issues because it’s a losing issue. This is one of the main reasons I left because it seems like the only times they’ll support queer struggle is when the queer struggle is helping elect them.”
In the days following the election, Cannan-Knight noted that she has seen a rise in racist, homophobic and misogynistic rhetoric on social media, such as the quote “Your body, my choice,” posted by Nick Fuentes on X. She said that it is all interconnected. With a rise in racism, there is a rise in homophobia and misogyny.
The day the election results were announced, Nov. 6, the Trevor Project – a nonprofit suicide and crisis hotline for LGBTQ+ young people – saw a 700 percent increase in services from the previous week. They also saw a 5200 percent increase in mentions of the election across their crisis services that day.
“You have to live. You have to live as a trans person, as a person of color,” Martinez said. “You have to live. The biggest act of resistance is to just keep on living and keep fighting.”
Alyssa Williams is the Managing Editor for MTSU Sidelines.
To contact the News Editor, email [email protected].
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