Who have we become, with tip lines for school mask scofflaws and abortion bounty hunters?

On the day after the 2016 presidential election, a steady stream of students lined up outside my campus office to talk about the future of our profession. 

These were journalism students, rightly worried. For months, Donald Trump had tried to demonize journalists as the “enemy of the people.” What a spectacle, watching Trump work a crowd into a jeering mob who yelled epithets and threats at journalists covering his rallies.

One young man who showed up in my office had a more personal concern. He was a DACA student, which is shorthand for a U.S. immigration policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It protects young, undocumented immigrants from deportation and gives them renewable work permits.

Like all DACA recipients, this student was a young child when his parents brought him here. After listening to Trump vilify immigrants for more than a year on the campaign trail, he was worried about his parents’ safety. Longtime neighbors, he feared, would report them as undocumented. 

I tried to reassure him. “But you said your neighbors like your parents. Why would they do this?”

His eyes filled with tears. “Because now they can.”

When making a difference means inflicting harm

I’ve thought a lot about that conversation in recent weeks. My early years as a columnist taught me that most people want to make a difference in the world and do so when they can. I’ve written a lot of columns about those good people over the years.

But there is a dark underbelly of citizen activism, and these days we are steeped in the slime of its steady crawl. Too many in this country greet the power to make a difference as an invitation to inflict harm.

Last year in Texas, for example, the governor signed into law a bill that outlaws abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, which is earlier than most women know they are pregnant. The law also empowers citizens to become modern-day bounty hunters. Anyone, regardless of their state of residence, can sue a person who helps a woman in Texas get an abortion after the six-week deadline. This includes those who help pay for a woman’s abortion or drive her to surgery.

The bounty hunters’ reward for conviction: $10,000 a pop. Finally, malicious gossip, monetized.

Columnist Suzette Hackney: Should race be an issue in the abortion debate? Anti-abortion activists are making it one.

After the bill’s passage last May, Right to Life, which opposes abortion rights, set up a website for people eager to ruin women’s lives. They call their minions “whistleblowers,” which I guess sounds nicer when you brag about it at Sunday worship.  

And now here comes Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin, with his “tip line.”

During his campaign, Youngkin ran an ad starring a white mother who aspires to a career in book banning. In the ad, she claimed her now-grown son found his assigned reading, Toni Morrison’s novel about the monstrous horrors of slavery, too “disgusting and gross.” Imagine that.

As I noted in an earlier column, this boy grew up to become an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee. So, he seems to have recovered from being forced to imagine life for people who don’t look like him, having chosen to work for the political party that targets them. 

More from Connie Schultz: Hiding from history, even the 'disgusting and gross' parts, doesn't protect us. It hurts us.

Youngkin, who was sworn in on Jan. 15, issued an executive order that day allowing parents to opt out of mask mandates for their children in public and private schools, in this pandemic. He opened a tip line for parents to share their concerns about these masks in schools.

And then he told radio host John Fredericks the tip line would be a handy-dandy way for parents to complain about other “divisive” topics, too.

Hmmm.

Virginia parents can opt out of mask mandates: But my kids' school barred the door to them.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a Virginia parent who voted for a man who thinks book banning is a great way to launch a white child into this wildly diverse world. What other grievance about teachers might you want to share with this new tip line?

I defer to my fellow Ohioan-by-birth, the aptly named John Legend, who tweeted this to his 13.8 million followers: “Black parents need to flood these tip lines with complaints about our history being silenced. We are parents too.”

We need to care about all of history, because it matters

I hate that this needs to be said, but we know that it does: White parents should care just as much about these ongoing attempts to whitewash American history. These are our stories, too, our history, and refusing to accept that is to compound the harm.

I am done with masks. We've been idiotic about them since the beginning.

Think about the hardest time in your life, when life picked you up in one place and threw you down somewhere else. We’re talking about the thing that changed you, when you became somebody different because of the hurt that you endured.

Don’t bother denying that moment exists. You’re not that boring.

Now imagine everyone around you demanding that you pretend this never happened in your life. No one wants to hear from you about what used to be. Besides, they didn’t do it you. Somebody else did. Ancient history. Move on.

This doesn’t come close to capturing how it feels to witness the erasure of what this country keeps trying to do to our Black citizens. But let’s not pretend we don’t understand why it matters.

Connie Schultz is a columnist for Paste BN. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, "The Daughters of Erietown," is a New York Times bestseller. Reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz