Respect Nashville, a coalition of community service organizations, plans to document occurrences of harassment
Seven Nashville-based community service organizations have banded together to form Respect Nashville, and it plans to collect incidents of hate, bias, harassment, and intimidation in the city.
According to a new website, "Respect Nashville is a diverse coalition of organizations that serve and/or advocate for a variety of communities in Nashville. Each participating organization has a separate mission, but they are joined by the core principle that all our neighbors are safe, welcomed, and respected."
We encourage all Nashvillians to report acts of hate, bias, harassment, and intimidation to our hotline or online reporting form. By creating a trusted reporting system, we can help people find appropriate resources, share important trends with the broader community, craft collective responses, and make appropriate policy recommendations. Collecting these stories will make Nashville stronger because our free speech has the power to defeat hate.
Each of the coalition members will educate their constituencies about their rights as residents in schools and in public places and encourage reporting via an online form and new hotline. The coalition hopes that by documenting and highlighting these incidents, more targeted policy and community-based responses can be generated.
The organization is clear to acknowledge that hate crimes need to be reported to the police directly. A nationwide definition of a hate crime, provided by the FBI, is "criminal offenses motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity."
Nationally, reports of incidents of hate, harassment, and violence have spiked since the November 8th election. Between November 9th and December 12th, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported more than 1000 bias-related incidents. Hearing anecdotal accounts of similar increases in Davidson County, the Metro Human Relations Commission convened a group of Nashville non-profits who work with communities most frequently targeted by hate to coordinate a city wide response.
In a Tennessean article, the community relations director with the Jewish Federation Abbie Wolf mentioned the two recent bomb threats to the Gordon Jewish Community Center in Nashville.
Like many of you, the Jewish community is greatly concerned that incidents like these are happening. Unfortunately, we're not surprised. Our history is full of embers of Antisemitism that quickly grew into flames that burned long and burned bright. What we have seen growing for the last year to us and to others is deeply unsettling.
Members of the Respect Nashville coalition include:
American Muslim Advisory Council
Tennessee Disability Coalition
Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Nashville
Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee
The committee is convened by the Metro Human Relations Commission