Did you get a racist text message after the 2024 Presidential Election?
Many children, students, and working professionals received derogatory text messages.
Just hours after the Nov. 6 election, at least 30 states from New York to California were targeted.
State and federal authorities have been working on trying to find where the text is coming from and who’s sending it.
Robyn Patterson, White House spokesperson, stated, “Racism has no place in our country, period,” according to the New York Times.
SHS student, Giana Cuesto, ’27, received a racist text saying that she had been “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.”
“I received the text on election day around 12 am. I thought that at first, it was my brother, so I went into his room and yelled at him, but it wasn’t,” Cuesto expressed. “I thought it was some type of joke. I was in shock when I realized that others were receiving the same text messages.”
Another student, Nana Aidoo, ’27, also received that same text.
“At the beginning, I thought that it was just one of my friends pranking me with a fake number, but then I saw that it wasn’t a joke and that it was actually something more serious and I felt disrespected,” Aidoo explained. “I was confused about how my phone number was found and how the person who sent it knew that I was [a person of] color.”
How many other students received this message?
These racist texts are an ongoing investigation and have left people across the United States with many unanswered questions: How did the sender know to whom to send the text? How did the sender get cell phone numbers?
There are many theories as to why this is happening, but with data breaches making headlines nearly every month, it makes you wonder, how safe is our information?
According to CNN US, some of these theories may connect to former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign. A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Steven Cheung, stated in an email that the “campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.
The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), Derrick Jonson, released a statement about how the messages “reflected how racist groups had been emboldened after Mr. Trump’s victory, and represented a sharp increase in “vile and abhorrent rhetoric,'” as stated by the New York Times.
“These actions are not normal,” said Johnson. “And we refuse to let them be normalized.”
If anyone receives a threatening message, tell a trusted adult. This is a serious matter that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
