TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — It was a quiet afternoon for Kari Wilson, a bartender at The Virginian Bar in Twentynine Palms, a desert town of about 26,000 people on the edge of California’s Joshua Tree National Forest and the vast Mojave Desert.

Retirees and Marine Corps pilots from the nearby Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base are the usual patrons, but on this day, it’s four journalism students on a road trip examining “Hate in America.”

Wilson, 26, joined the U.S. Navy four years ago. The Navy showed her the world, including to Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan and Syria, so she’s been around. She said she now loves working at the desert town bar and visiting with the people that stop by.

She greeted customers with a smile, but the conversation quickly turned serious when she was asked about her thoughts on the current state of America — politically and racially.

“We’re divided and anyone who thinks otherwise is really out of the loop,” Wilson said. “It’s really sad.”

Maybe the rest of America could learn from bars like hers, she said.

“In the big picture, we’re all divided and then you go to a bar and suddenly everyone is talking to each other,” Wilson said. “Why can’t that just happen big picture-wise? Everybody just needs to grab a drink and meet up or something.”

Wedda Warrick and Laurette Rogers, customers that day at the bar, overheard Wilson’s responses and chimed in.

“Sweetness,” as Warrick addressed this reporter, “the states have always had this bias” when it refers to people of color, she said. “You see bias all the time.”

She said bias turned to violence in 2015 when 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. It deeply upset her because it reminded her that hate still exists in the country.

She recalled traveling through Alabama in the early 1960s, about the time of the civil rights movement. Her family pulled up to a gas station and she remembered seeing two water fountains – one for white people and the other for black people.

“The black fountain had mucus and spit in it,” she said. “It was disgusting.”

Warrick said she grew up “old-school” as a kid in the 1950s and ‘60s, with her mother staying at home and her father working full-time. When Warrick joined the workforce, she said she was hired by companies and places that needed to meet a “diversity quota.”

“If you were a woman, they were hiring you,” Warrick said. “If you were black, they were hiring you. If you were of ethnic heritage, they were hiring you because they had to fill quotas. And, yes, I was one of the ones they had to fill a quota with.”

Rogers was at first quiet, but then she spoke up.

“I was raised on the East Coast by my parents and grandparents,” Rogers said. “If you ever said the ‘n’ word, you got your mouth washed with soap because that’s not the way we were raised.”

Warrick is hopeful there will be more love than hate in the near future. Rogers agreed with her friend, but had a final thought on the state of the country.

“It’s all about how you were raised,” Rogers said. “If you were raised by bigoted parents, you’re bigoted. If you’re not raised by bigoted parents, you take people as they are. And that’s all it’s down to.”

News21 fellows Catherine Devine, Penelope Blackwell and Lenny Martinez Dominguez contributed to this report.

Follow the News21 blog for updates as the team reports on the road.

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“The State of Hate” road trip is part of a larger reporting project called “Hate in America,” examining how hate is changing the nation.

The fellows on the three-week road trip will talk to Americans from all walks of life and across the fault-lines of political, economic and racial differences.

They are part of a 38-member team of News21 reporters, based at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. While other News21 fellows are mostly traveling this summer to major cities for interviews, the eight road-trip fellows have a different purpose: to explore the off-beaten paths and examine the state of hate in more secluded American towns and at some of the nation’s most iconic places.

Journalists Jim Tuttle and Alex Lancial are leading the three-week, 7,000-mile trek.

Fellows Catherine Devine, Brandon Bounds, Lenny Martinez Dominguez and Penelope Blackwell will cover the first leg of the road trip. They will travel through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois. In Chicago on July 5, fellows Rosanna Cooney, Storme Jones, Shelby Knowles and Brittany Brown will take over the tour, doing interviews in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Side trips are likely.

Follow the News21 blog for updates as the team reports while on the road.

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The incident launched a national debate about the treatment of Muslims in America, and if schools were being overzealous.

That case troubled two Rhode Island teachers who were determined to take action in their own community, especially after a local mosque was vandalized.

Stephanie Griffin, a special education teacher at Davisville Middle School in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, said incidents like the one in Texas signify a larger problem in the education system: a general lack of compassion, diversity and understanding. Griffin, along with social studies teacher Sandra Makielski, are hoping to combat hate in the classroom through a professional development day for teachers they created, called “Understanding the Muslim American Experience.”

The first day-long workshop held in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, on April 5 was open to all teachers from all levels and disciplines. It was the first in a series of professional development days aimed at educating teachers about the Muslim experience in America and how to integrate Islam into their classrooms, according to Makielski.

“It was really a tutorial of the basics of Islam,” Makielski said. “Before we can debate the ‘hot topics’ of Islam, we needed to understand Islam.”

Griffin agreed, adding: “One of the questions we were asked [at the professional development day] was: ‘Do you have a sizable Muslim community in your school?’ And, the truth is, we do not. But we don’t want our students to leave our school and act ignorantly because they weren’t given the education that taught them that Islam isn’t anything to be fearful of. We don’t want to be the teachers that continue to make this racism a problem.”

Over the course of the day, teachers from around the area met leaders from the Muslim community to get their thoughts about how to incorporate Islam into the curriculum – from teaching more in-depth about world religions to reading books featuring Muslim characters.

Angela Boisclair, a seventh-grade literary teacher who attended, said the workshop made her feel rejuvenated and re-energized as an educator.

“I can now incorporate more of the Muslim world into what I teach,” Boisclair said. “[The workshop] helped me to understand more about other cultures and appreciate that everyone is different.”

The workshop was held before the start of Ramadan – the holy month of fasting, introspection and prayer for Muslims – and Boisclair said the information she learned helped her at school. When a student in her class was observing the holiday, she now understood why he would want to spend his lunch period in the library instead of the cafeteria.

“Before the workshop, I may not have understood Ramadan to the extent I do now and the significance of fasting… Just like if I had not been brought up Christian, I wouldn’t fully understand Christmas,” said Boisclair. “What it comes down to is that Islam is a religion much like other religions that I have learned about or grew up practicing. As different as we all are, we are all the same.”

Makielski and Griffin are hoping to expand their initiative to other school districts around the state and throughout New England. But, the expansion goes beyond the Muslim experience as well.

“The workshop is helping to support people who feel that they have been ostracized in some way or another,” said Makielski. “Our focus happens to be Muslim, but much of what we’re going to be talking about is not limited to Muslims. We encourage teachers to be aware of social emotional learning.”

Makielski and Griffin’s workshop was funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Teaching Tolerance project, which has a wide variety of teacher-led initiatives around the country dedicated to reducing prejudice, improving intergroup relations and supporting equitable school experiences for our nation’s children.

While a day-long professional development day won’t solve racism in schools, it’s a stepping stone in the right direction, according to the Rhode Island teachers.

“We have to be responsible for our own learning communities,” said Griffin. “Because we are the first line of defense on ignorance.”

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Hate crimes have increased since the November 2016 election, according to reports from the FBI.

Thirty-eight fellows are spending this summer examining nearly every aspect of hate for this year’s Carnegie-Knight News21 investigative journalism project titled “Hate in America.” The team is partnering and working with ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate” project, which collects, researches and reports incidents.

The fellows, top students from journalism programs across the U.S. as well as Canada and Ireland, are reporting on racial and religious-based hate and taking a deeper dive into hate perpetrated online, on college campuses or against Native Americans and those in the LBGTQ community.

Fellows also are looking into hate crime laws in every state and analyzing public perception and tolerance of certain races and religions over time through data.

The newsroom is based in Phoenix, at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, but fellows will be on the road this summer, reporting across the U.S. They are talking to those who have experienced, witnessed, perpetrated and reported hate.

Veteran journalists Len Downie Jr. and Jacquee Petchel, the top editors for News21, selected this year’s topic, Hate in America, saying it was both important and timely.

“Much of the coverage of this subject has been localized or has been focused on one aspect of racism or prejudice,” said Downie, the former executive editor of The Washington Post.

“What we’re trying to do is something that’s national — both national in scope and national geographically — and encompassing the project as a whole,” Downie said.

The political atmosphere also makes Hate in America a timely topic, said Petchel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and executive editor of News21.

“We went in this direction because there was so much controversy and turmoil among politicians, voters, advocacy groups about the tenor of the recent election,” Petchel said. “There were aspects of the election that polarized people who are extremely to the right or people who are extremely to the left.”

While the on-the-ground reporting takes place this summer, the project has been in the making for almost a year. Downie and Petchel chose the topic last fall. Fellows began their research and reporting in January, meeting weekly during the spring academic semester with Petchel, a professor at the Cronkite School, and Downie, the Cronkite School’s Weil Family Professor of Journalism.

News21, which launched in 2005, has won numerous awards in journalism competitions.

Downie said he and Petchel look for topics “where our investigative reporting is likely to bring up something new — original, enterprising investigative reporting by News21.”

Last year’s News21 investigative project was the safety of drinking water, in part because of problems with clean water in Flint, Michigan. Previous projects have looked at guns, food safety, voting rights and veterans’ issues.

“We’re always trying to shed light on a topical subject, in which there is more than one view on it,” Downie said.

Downie also sees News21 as having an advantage that many news organizations don’t have today.

“News21 can have somewhere between 20 and 40 reporters working on an investigative project in a concentrated effort,” he said.

Individual fellows are supported by their universities as well as by participating news organizations and philanthropists.

The fellows’ work on “Hate in America” will be published at hateinamerica.news21.com at the end of the summer, and by dozens of news organizations.

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