Young Americans and How the Trump Years Changed Them

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This year's presidential contest will feature-for the first time since 1912-two general-election candidates who have served as commander-in-chief: incumbent Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, whom Biden defeated in 2020.

At 77 and 81, they're also the oldest presidential candidates in history, and age is likely to be an issue in the 2024 race, alongside their respective records on the economy, immigration, and health care.

By contrast, significantly less attention will be paid to Americans at the other end of the age spectrum-children under the age of 18-because they can't, of course, vote.

For her new NYU Press book, Children of a Troubled Time: Growing Up with Racism in Trump's America, Hagerman interviewed 10- to 13-year-old children in two contrasting political landscapes: ruby-red Mississippi and deep-blue Massachusetts. In speaking with kids who identified as liberal and conservative-and were from different racial groups-she found similarities in the ideas they expressed.

NYU News spoke with Hagerman about the work-as well as her previous NYU Press book-and why recognizing, in the words of David Bowie, that children are "quite aware of what they're going through" is crucial for our democracy.

You write that adults "at almost every place I have visited have told me stories about the impact that politics has had on their local community." This could apply to many periods in history. What's different now?

Certainly 2016 was not the only politically explosive moment in history. But I think what makes the Trump moment different is that his election completely disrupted many people's sense of racial progress in the US. Before his election, even if people didn't agree about how much progress has been made and what still needs to happen, I think that there was still an overwhelming commitment to [Martin Luther King, Jr.'s idea] that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice and that things were getting better-and even if it takes a long time, we're making progress.

Despite former President Trump's claims that he's the least racist person in the entire world and no matter what you think about him, you cannot deny his long-standing use of racist words or his actions. And so I think this was at least part of why some people were so shocked when he won the election.

I saw evidence of this when I spoke to the children that are the focus of this research. These were children who had grown up with a really loud narrative of racial progress. This 12-year-old student named Paige, who lives in Mississippi and identifies as White, told me that her teacher asked them to draw a picture, the day after the election, of what they thought the future with President Trump would look like.

She said that she drew Trump behind a wall of fire and told me "I just felt like we were making so much progress with Obama-like on everything, on women's rights, gay rights, racism…global warming. Now we have the new president-it's, like, a million steps backwards…he will just burn it all down."

So I think that what made this moment different was new awareness of, wow, maybe the United States still has a lot of racism to deal with.

How did these findings vary from what you'd encountered in your previous work?

This was quite different from the research I conducted with kids during the Obama era-I interviewed kids between 2011 and 2013. All of those children, regardless of how they felt about Obama, thought that racism was bad. Some of them thought that it was still a problem in the US and some of the kids thought that racism was over. But regardless of what they thought, they all believed that racism was bad-a social problem.

Image courtesy of the White House, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What I think is really striking about my new research is that while some of the White kids thought racism was bad and were shocked to realize that the US still had racism, some of the other kids did not believe racism was bad. Some said things like Trump stood up for them and he knows how to handle people who threaten us. Those are things that some children said in defense of Trump and said that, ultimately, racism is fine-they literally said that.

My mother used to say "More is caught than is taught" when it came to parenting. Is that true of racial learning?

I think your mother's ideas are absolutely accurate. I've really been so confused as to why I get asked by White parents and White teachers and all kinds of White adults, "How do you talk to White kids about race?" And I understand the desire to know how to have conversations about this topic with young people. But I think what's frustrating to me is that when we focus so much on what is said, we forget about the things that we do. We forget about all of the ways that people are modeling behavior to children. It's the neighborhoods that you choose to live in, the schools you send your kids to, the media you consume, the friendships that you encourage or discourage. All of that is sending really powerful messages about race to children, no matter what you say about it. I think racial learning is ultimately about what people do-and kids are paying attention.

You observe that studying kids' perspectives is "imperative because we know that the ideas they form in childhood are important for the rest of their lives." Your focus is on the impact of one president. Historically, have there been other presidents or public figures who've had such a significant influence on young people in the US?

I can't really answer this historical question based on the data that I have. But one of the most exciting parts about doing this research was that I really was forced to pull together ideas from different fields outside of sociology. One of the fields that I drew upon heavily was political science. And of course, political scientists are very interested in this kind of question that you're asking.

More broadly, I think we haven't, as sociologists, spent enough time thinking about the relationship between racial learning and political learning-that these two things are happening at the same time. I think the Trump moment is a good case study to examine this, but I'm not trying to make an argument exclusively about Trump. I'm trying to make an argument about how people learn about race. And I think that we have underestimated the role that politics has played in all of this. That's really what I'm trying to explore in this book-the connection between how kids learn about politics and then how kids learn about race. And I find that they're very connected.

You recount some sobering and troubling viewpoints that your research surfaced, but also write about a mother whose son's "righteous anger motivates him to pay attention to the news and to act in ways that will create change." Is that sense of motivation the silver lining to all of this? The Civil Rights movement, for example, was led in large part by young people who were fed up with what they'd experienced.

Personally, it would be great to see kids motivated by the Trump presidency, or presidencies, to join together and create a new era of civil rights. But I'm actually more worried about the opposite being true. I'm more worried about an anti-civil rights movement. And I say this because of what the kids told me. Some of the things that they said really illustrated to me that they were in the process of potentially being drawn into the peripheries of far-right movements. Just some examples of that are the kids who told me about playing games at recess, where some of the kids would be ICE agents and some of the kids would be immigrants, and the ICE agents would try to shoot the immigrants. Others were kids chanting "Build a wall" in the face of their Latino peers. And they told me about their friends laughing together about racist jokes on the bus, without any concern that I might be judging-they just didn't care if I thought that was bad. I think one of the most striking examples was when a child said that he thought the United States should "drop an atomic bomb" on "Middle Eastern countries...so they wouldn't, like, come at us again."

So while I do think it's important to not lose sight of the righteous anger and the motivations of many of the children of color as well as some of the White kids in this research, I also think we cannot lose focus on the concerning nature of what some of these other White children told me. Listening to young children, ages 11, 12, and 13, express dehumanizing, racist ideas and think it's fine and normal-that's really concerning to me.

What can parents and educators do to address this?

I think actually taking kids seriously and understanding that children are paying attention to things that are happening around them is vital. A lot of adults think that kids are completely unaware of politics-that they don't know anything about current events and that they don't care. While that might be true for some children, that was certainly not the case with the kids I spoke to. For the kids in this book who were concerned about what they saw as this backlash to progress, they were drawn to action. And I think that the reason that they were able to do that is because they had parents and teachers and other adults in their lives who recognized them as political participants and social participants. They provided them with opportunities to learn the things they wanted to learn. I was particularly struck by the Black children who wanted to learn more about Black history-it was like Trump being in office made them want to learn more so that they could be better equipped to handle what was coming their way.

Photo credit: Tyler Merbler, via Wikimedia Commons.

I conducted some additional interviews with parents right after the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. On the one hand, it was heartbreaking to listen to parents describe how disillusioned their kids were about American society and specifically our political system. But on the other hand, parents told me stories about how motivated their kids were to join with other people and protest what they thought was not the kind of country they wanted to live in. Throughout this book, there are examples of children enacting agency, and when they are met with adults who respect them and understand that they are thinking about these things, the children seem to be even more motivated and encouraged to pursue those goals.

We need to realize that children are not unaware of what's going on around them. They are paying attention. I don't have all the answers, but I think there's reason to believe that if we take children seriously as social actors and political actors that will be beneficial for our democracy in the future, regardless of what our individual politics are.