Confronting public bigotry is hard, if not downright frightening. It means taking a risk—and admitting that human cruelty knows no bounds.

This visceral, overwhelming fear can make it difficult to remember that our collective survival often comes down to everyday moments like the one Melissa Forbis faced on a busy New York City intersection three days after the election.

While walking briskly toward the subway, she heard a man invoke the president-elect's name as he shouted at a Pakistani newsstand worker.

"Now that Trump is here," Forbis recalls him saying, "we are going to send you back to your sandcastle."

Forbis instinctively confronted the stranger: "What the [expletive] did you just say?"

The scene Forbis walked into is one that's all too familiar to countless victims of bias, intimidation and violence. It's also the kind of conflict Americans must now have a plan to safely disrupt. If one thing's become clear in the wake of Donald J. Trump's election, enduring his administration's proposed policies—and the blatant prejudice his victory encourages in some people—will require moral courage at every turn.

"People need to speak up ... We can't just ignore what's going on."

In the ten days following the election, a "national outbreak of hate" targeted women and immigrants, and Muslim, Jewish, black, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, according to a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Based on volunteer submissions and media reports, the SPLC found that 867 incidents of harassment occurred over those ten days. While the number of such cases peaked in the period immediately after the election and then began dropping, blatant discrimination and harassment in Trump's name—sometimes: literally—persists.

In New York City, police said the number of possible hate crimes reported since the election is more than double than last year during the same time period. Last week, three men attacked an 18-year-old Muslim woman on the subway, screaming Trump's name and trying to tear off her hijab. She told the New York Daily News that not a single bystander intervened.

On Pantsuit Nation, the volunteer-run private Facebook page that began as a network of Hillary Clinton supporters and now has nearly four million members, people regularly post anecdotes about being harassed by Trump supporters, or detail how they've intervened in those conflicts.

"People need to speak up," says Lecia Brooks, outreach director for the SPLC. "People don't need to put themselves in harm's way, and [they should] assess any threat for danger. At the same time we can't just ignore what's going on."

Silence normalizes harassment, makes other potential victims more vulnerable, and lets bystanders feel comfortable in neither condoning nor condemning what they've just witnessed. White nationalists in particular are exploiting attacks on political correctness and challenging social norms under the guise of making prejudice more acceptable. Cruelty becomes less taboo, of course, when it's met with quiet downward gazes.

Forbis is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at a New York state university and describes herself as an anti-racist feminist. She's confronted strangers espousing hate in the past, when it felt safe to do so. (Her confidence lately, she says, is helped by self-defense classes and power lifting.)

When Forbis questioned the shouting man, others took notice and he responded by quickly walking away. The newsstand worker, who declined to speak to Mashable on the record because of safety considerations, said he couldn't remember this particular incident a few weeks after it happened. Part of the challenge, he said, was that passersby shout similar slurs and insults at him daily. It was a singular moment for Forbis, who reported it to the SPLC.

"If I stand by and allow that to happen," she tells Mashable, "I'm part of the problem."

Destabilizing bigotry

The outbreak of hate may surprise those who haven't previously grasped the depth of American bigotry, but author and social justice facilitator adrienne maree brown sees cause for hope. (Brown styles her name using lowercase letters.)

"I also wonder if we're not seeing a rash of people who are engaging in morally courageous acts for the first time," says brown, who is author of the forthcoming book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.

I feel hopeful because I am embedded in movements of people actively working in a million ways to address root causes of current condition. — adriennemaree (@adriennemaree) December 3, 2016

Turning that newfound righteousness into something enduring and meaningful, says brown, is tough work. And while injustice may spark moral courage in our hearts, acting on it takes planning and practice.

The SPLC's comprehensive guide to handling everyday bigotry includes dozens of scenarios, including how to respond