The Austin City Council could take steps to ensure Austin doesn’t follow other communities around the country reporting racist incidents in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

At the end of Monday’s work session, Council Member At-Large Janet Anderson suggested the council take time at future meetings to discuss ways the city can promote a message of acceptance and inclusion.

Since Trump, a Republican, was elected president earlier this month, several incidents of harassment and bullying against people of color have been reported across the country.

With a significant minority population in Austin, Anderson argued the council needs to know if harassment is happening here so it can help address it.

“Seeing as how they make up 25 percent of our citizenry, I really think we need to think about how do we make some kind of statement or do some kind of outreach,” she said.

Some cities, Anderson said, are making statements about being inclusive.

“I think we need to spend some time talking about that and how we may want to respond,” she said.

However, Mayor Tom Stiehm questioned if starting such discussions could spur such issues and he argued Austin Public Schools and the Austin Police Department both do good jobs addressing such issues.

However, Anderson countered saying the council doesn’t currently know if there’s a problem locally.

“We don’t know,” she said. “Other cities are saying it’s happening in schools, it’s happening just on the street, it’s happening to people who have been here for generations where people are yelling at them to go back to where they came from when they came from here. So I think it could be a serious issue, and we have to be prepared to address it.”

She argued it would  be proactive to make a statement of inclusion before incidents are reported. She also suggested the city reach out to the League of Minnesota Cities or other groups for resources and advice.

The Austin City Council has a history of promoting a message of inclusion. Earlier this year, the council voted to join Welcome America, an Atlanta, Georgia-based membership program of about 75 to 100 members offering tools, resources, webinars and toolkits from other communities who have tried and had success with becoming a more welcoming community. That sparked the city’s first Welcoming Week in September, which was a time to discuss and embrace the community’s diverse populations.

The Associated Press and other media outlets reported on several racially-fueled incidents following the election, including students who chanted “white power” and called black classmates “cotton pickers.”

Such encounters, beginning on Election Day, involved people too young to cast a ballot.

A day after the election, minority students at a high school in Gurnee, Illinois, organized a meeting and protest after a “whites only” message was found scrawled on a bathroom door. The same day in Michigan, students at Royal Oak Middle school were filmed chanting “build a wall” in the cafeteria.

The council did not take any action or make any decisions on Monday.

—The Associated Press contributed to this report.