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“For the next four years we need to make America smart������������!” —��Neil deGrasse Tyson, Physicist, Nov. 10, 2016

Because of my Southern experience in seeing injustice on a systematic scale, I became a civil rights attorney.

The constant and deep bigotry, the “whitelash” Donald Trump has stirred up, is part of the fabric of our country.

I grew up in the Deep South in New Orleans  at the time lynchings were still going on and saw the constant abuse of black men by the New Orleans Police Department. They absolutely had no rights.

Growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s and ’60s was like growing up in South Africa. If you were black you could not be seen in our neighborhood after dark; the segregated schools for black children were absolutely horrible. For example, when I was doing social work most of my clients could not read or even sign their name — they signed with an “x.”

There were no decent jobs for the regular black person; janitors and maids were abundant. Every white household had a daily maid, who was “lucky” to be paid a $1.50 an hour and could only enter your house from the back door and could only use the toilet in the washroom or garage.

Everything was segregated — the Catholic churches, the restaurants, the stores. When I was 8 years old, my Catholic parish put on a minstrel show. I was dressed in “blackface” and was a big hit falling off the stool every night for a week.

When I was 9, sixth-graders from my Catholic school completely surrounded a black janitor trying to mop the floor at the neighborhood drug store, threw pennies at him and taunted him for some time. As a black man he could do nothing but take it. I stood there crying, so afraid for him and felt his intense humiliation and distress.

When I was 10, I visited my paternal grandparents in northern Louisiana. My grandmother sat me down and, with a Bible in her lap, quoted Bible passages to “prove” to me that “n—–s” were monkeys. Then on Sunday on our way to their Southern Methodist church both grandparents pointed out to me the black folks walking and how they definitely looked like monkeys.

From the time I was 14 years old until I finally left New Orleans when I was 22, my father literally yelled at me every night at dinner, because of my civil rights activities (riding in the back of the buses, etc.) and demanded to know if I was either an FBI agent or simply a communist. I was neither. At Loyola University my brother was so ashamed of my civil rights activities and associations that he transferred to a state school out of town.

I came to Hawaii for a degree in community organizing and could not move back to New Orleans because I had married a Japanese national; the miscegenation laws in Louisiana were still in effect. My mother died that year and my father informed me after the funeral that she died because I had married a Japanese.

This white supremacist sentiment, which has been the religion of the Deep South and shown when standing when you hear “Dixie” or in waving Confederate flags, has risen again and been incited with vigor by Donald Trump. We are clearly headed back to 1865, when Andrew Johnson took office, determined to undo Reconstruction.

Under Trump’s leadership with his heralding call to “stop and frisk,” the continued murders by police officers of black men, like Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, these modern day lynchings, will escalate. Instead of lessening the interactions between the police and black men by changing the onerous drug law, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the nightmare of the adverse impact on black communities will only increase. The already high levels of incarceration, arrests and police presence will just get much, much worse.

It is clear that Trump’s KKK- endorsed “white power” is definitely bringing terror and fear to not only adult blacks and other minority groups, but their children. We are going through a very, very  scary “whitelash” that I haven’t seen for decades.

On the HateWatch section on the  website, at least 201 incidents of hateful intimidation and harassment since Trump’s election have been reported. Considering his volatile hate speech, encouragement to assault people who were not his supporters and his own criminal predatory example, I am actually surprised that the reported incidents are only at 201.

Here in the last two weeks we have been retained by two more black  employees — one who had a noose and a lynching rope put by his locker; the other was called “N…..” enough times and fired for his alleged incompetency.

Personally, I have recently seen the “white power” Trump movement in my neighborhood as a white woman. I was purposely rammed in the back by a young white woman, while I was dancing at a public Halloween party (there was 3 feet of space around us) with my partner of almost a decade,  a black man. At our home we have been seriously harassed by two different older white male Trump supporters. Racists hate black people; but to see a white woman with a black man makes them go in a rage. I am also very concerned about the travels of my own three hapa children and grandchildren on the mainland. Trump’s Nazi energy can only bring a very deep sadness to think that this is how far we have not come as Americans.

We must look ahead. I would encourage support and participation in organizations, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama that have helped me with civil rights issues in Hawaii. This way we can get through the five stages of grief, especially rage, and come out the other side and have a peaceful life, living our American truths.