New York City is home to more Asian Americans than any other city in the country. As the fastest growing segment of the city population -- over 50 percent since 1990, according to the census -- Asian Americans are now seeking to receive their fair share of attention on the myriad issues that affect their community.
The problems affecting Asian New Yorkers are not that different from the city's other minority communities: Hate crimes, racial profiling and police-community relations, the state of public education, a low wage workforce, and a large immigrant population, many of whom face poverty. Yet somehow Asian Americans are often forgotten and excluded from public discourse on these matters.
The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a non-profit civil rights organization based in New York, states on its website that "despite our community's size and growing economic clout, however, we frequently are ignored by elected officials, left out of important policy decisions, and overlooked in dialogues about key issues, such as affirmative action, police brutality, and race relations."
How is it that with a population of almost 800,000, Asian New Yorkers are given the cold shoulder? One such reason is a serious lack of representation. Despite such a large presence, there has never been an Asian American elected to any citywide or statewide office. "The fact that no Asian American has ever been elected is an issue," says Margaret Fung, executive director of AALDEF. That will probably change this year with some thirteen Asian American candidates running for seven city council seats. While electing an Asian American to the city council will not bring about changes overnight, Jessica Lee, executive director of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, believes that an "Asian American council member would give more visibility to Asian American issues as well as give more access to the city government for all members of the Asian American community, even those outside of the district." Even if only one or two win "it's good that a lot of Asians are running," says Fung. "Hopefully it will spark greater participation and voter turnout among the Asian population."
Low civic participation among Asian-Americans has historically always been a problem. Recent studies seem to indicate a change, with Asians becoming more involved in the political process, thanks in large part to organizations like AALDEF. According to a study by John Mollenkopf, director of CUNY's Center for Urban research, Asian Americans were just as likely to vote in last November's election as were other New Yorkers. The problem is that just about one in five eligible Asian New Yorkers are registered to vote. This should come as no surprise, though, considering the United States' history of discriminatory immigration and naturalization policies.
The Chinese have the distinction of being the only nationality to have been specifically prohibited from immigrating to the United States by federal law.
New York's residents were some of the strongest supporters of the 1882 Chinese Exclusionary act that prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country. During the 1882 congressional debate, United States House Representative Roswell Pettibone Flower from New York City, a future governor of NY, expressing the will of his constituents, echoed popular sentiment against the Chinese. "Shall we protect our labor, or shall we allow it to be degraded to the coolie standards? Not like the European immigrant, who brings us wealth and love of liberty, he [the Chinese] comes to take wealth away, and to stamp upon labor the servile characteristics of his race." It wasn't until 1943 that Chinese Americans were allowed to become citizens, and it took another nine years until Japanese Americans and other Asians gained that same right. After being denied admission to the country for well over half a century, Asian immigrants began coming in record numbers after 1965, when the immigration laws were changed. Still, some argue, the xenophobia and discrimination that were built into American law continue to have their effect.
Even though Asian Americans are now covered by city, state, and federal civil rights laws, anti-Asian violence and discrimination remain serious problems. As the perpetual foreign "other," Asian Americans are constantly ridiculed and singled out for persecution.
The murder of Queens restaurant worker Jong Rim Lee is a deadly example of such a case. The Korean father of four was bashed over the head with a ten-pound cobblestone last September for no apparent reason other than his race. But the New York Police Department decided not to categorize it as a hate crime, though his attackers did not take his wallet full of cash.
A serious problem is the underreporting of anti-Asian violence. Police statistics show only seven hate crimes committed against Asians in 2000. Advocates and the police themselves agree the actual numbers are much higher. Barbara Sicilia, a commanding officer of the New York Police Department's Hate Crime Task Force told the Daily News, "clearly, they are underreported." Narrow definitions of hate crimes as well as problems with police-community relations all contribute to underreporting. The issue gets compounded when victims of hate crimes or discrimination do not feel that anyone cares or is paying attention.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights has received 155 complaints of discrimination filed by Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino residents (they categorize by national origin) over the past three years in the areas of employment, housing, and public accommodations. Though not a lot as compared with other groups, it is still a cause for concern for members of the Asian American community.
Another incident involving bias against Asians occurred at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn. Last September, at the beginning of their senior year, 5 Chinese immigrant students were told they had to leave school because they had already completed all of their requirements for graduation. Feeling like they were not yet prepared to leave, and still not having completed college applications, the students protested. They were eventually escorted back into the school by a delegation including two members of the Board of Education and allowed to complete their senior year, but not before accusations of racial discrimination were levied at the school's administration by students, parents, and even teachers. Mark Talo, a former teacher at the school told the Times, "It was like being in the Deep South during Jim Crow."
The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund is investigating the incident and considering filing a civil rights lawsuit in Federal District Court. "I hope that it is one of the more extreme incidents because of the wide range of discrimination that it represents," exclaims Fung. "This reflects some of the challenges in the public education system of how to address the needs of a very diverse population." Indeed, according to a 1996 report by the NYC board of education, 36 percent of Asian American students in city public high schools drop out or do not graduate on time, contradicting the model minority myth and indicating that Asians too are at risk of failure.
What are some ways the city can be more responsive to its Asian-American residents? "I'd like to see the city government support more services for Asians," says Lee. Asian Americans make up close to ten percent of the city population, yet according to her organization, Asian communities only receive about 2 percent of the city funding for social services. "Funding has to change to match the changing demographics of the city."
James Wong writes frequently for the Village Voice.
When New York was predominately Protestant in the mid-nineteenth century, overt anti-Catholic persecution was common. Thomas Nast cartoons then often reflected a breathtaking anti-Catholic bias. Irish Catholics were drawn as monkeys; bishops wore miters that were really crocodiles. But even the Know-Nothing Party's attacks on Roman Catholics nationwide were tempered somewhat in New York City by the concentration of Catholics here and the formidable leadership of Archbishop John Hughes.
Today, 43.4 percent of city residents are Catholic, with Baptists (10.7 percent) and Jews (10.9 percent) in a tie for a distant second. The city has a Catholic mayor, Rudy Giuliani. The Speaker of the Council, Peter Vallone, is Catholic, and attends mass daily. The state's last four governors (Wilson, Carey, Cuomo, and Pataki) have been Catholic. There was a Catholic governor, Thomas Dongan, way, way back in 1684, who passed the colony's first religious liberty law. Cardinal John O'Connor was presented the Congressional Gold Medal just before his death last year, and was honored posthumously last month at St. Patrick's Cathedral by George W. Bush in his first appearance in New York as President, when most of the city's powerful turned out in force.
But in the last decade, Catholics, particularly those who adhere strictly to their faith, are coming forward to say that anti-Catholicism is back. "It seems to me that Catholics are welcome in society until they start talking about their beliefs, particularly on life issues and human sexuality," said Claudia McDonnell, a self-described orthodox Catholic who works in Manhattan.
"My faith is regularly denigrated in the mainstream press," said Austin Ruse, President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, citing the New York Times and Washington Post in particular (charges the papers vigorously deny). "On a personal level, in social situations when you talk about your faith you get the curling of the lip and questioned about how you could believe these things. Someone actually moved away from me with a look of horror."
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, based in the city and with a high profile nationwide over the last decade under its president, William Donahue, states on its website that "anti-Catholicism is more virulent and pervasive than ever before in American history." The League has been able to enlist such prominent advisory board members as conservative columnist Linda Chavez and philanthropist and former Domino Pizza CEO Thomas Monaghan.
According to Patrick Scully of the League, it goes beyond social snubs, citing examples such as "annual events at the Brooklyn Museum" like Chris Ofili's picture of "The Holy Virgin Mary" using elephant dung and "Yo Mama's Last Supper" featuring the artist, Renee Cox, as a nude Jesus. These works famously drew the ire of Mayor Giuliani and sparked huge debates over public funding of the arts. "There is a sense of unfairness and double standard," Scully said. "You would not see a display ridiculing the gay community or African Americans or Jewish people."
The majority of the League's complaints are against media portrayals of Catholics, from TV shows like "Ally McBeal" to movies such as Kevin Smith's "Dogma." But Scully is also concerned about legislation in Albany that, he said, "would have required Catholic institutions to violate their core beliefs by providing medical coverage for contraceptive procedures that the Church is against." Indeed, this is one of the few high-profile issues that Cardinal Edward Egan has taken up in his first year as Archbishop of New York.
Scully also cites the desecration of a series of statues outside Catholic churches last year, particularly in Brooklyn.
Ruse of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which works to educate United Nations delegates and the public about the "family as the fundamental unit of society" (among other issues), believes that there is "an anti-Catholic elite in the United States Senate." He said that given the way Attorney General John Ashcroft's religious beliefs were treated during his Senate confirmation hearings, "I feel that as a believing, practicing Catholic, I need not apply for certain government positions."
But Philip Nobile, a New York journalist at TomPaine.com and a former editor of the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal with a pontifical degree from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, disagrees. "Catholic bashing is a very misused term because you do not bash Catholics when you criticize certain beliefs. Beliefs are fair game.
"Anti-Catholicism is not in the same league as anti-Semitism," said Nobile, a non-practicing Catholic. "Catholics in New York are now the 'overdog' and have no minority status whatsoever." It is some Catholic organizations, indeed, who have been accused of doing the bashing, against gay people, who are excluded from marching in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Manhattan.
Catholics are, like people of all religions, protected by city, state, and federal human rights laws. Randolph Wills, deputy commissioner of the City Commission on Human Rights, said that though there are some 1,100 complaints of discrimination they receive annually, there have been a total of just 27 complaints since 1995 where the person has indicated that his or her Catholicism was at least part of the reason for suffering bias -- 22 employment cases, three concerning housing, and two in public accommodation. Creed as a whole makes up three percent of their complaints.
Scully said that the League handles numerous complaints from Catholic individuals. "In New York, we helped some people who were in rehab who were not being allowed to go to mass and had trouble getting to reconciliation confession," he said. They contacted the state and it was rectified. "I remain convinced," he said, "that anti-Catholicism remains the only acceptable bigotry."
Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. He is co-host of the weekly Gay USA on Channel 35 on Thursdays at 11 PM.
"We are human beings," one transgender activist repeated over and over at a recent vigil in Sheridan Square. Hundreds had gathered to remember Amanda Milan, 25, a transgendered woman who had been stabbed to death outside the Port Authority one year ago as some bystanders cheered their approval. The trial of Dwayne McCuller, Milan's alleged murderer, and his accomplices, is under way in Manhattan Criminal Court under the watchful eyes of the city's transgender rights groups, energized as never before by this brutal killing. They are now seeking inclusion in city and state human rights and hate crimes laws, fairness in the criminal justice system, increased social services, and more of a voice in the movement that they helped found.
While some of these goals are slow in coming, one of the community's largest institutions, the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, just officially added "Bisexual and Transgendered" to its name in time for its grand re-opening on July 12.
Transgendered people like Sylvia Rivera were among those who led the fight at the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion that sparked the modern gay movement and that is commemorated with a Fifth Avenue parade each year on the last Sunday in June. But for many years, "the gay and lesbian rights movement found us an embarrassment," said Diana Montford, a transgendered activist who has been the host of her own cable show (on Time-Warner's channel 57, Wednesdays at 3 PM) since 1990. "Now we're fed up," she said, "just like at Stonewall."
Montford said that she still gets "dirty looks" from some people, including gay men. But she was recently honored by Public Advocate Mark Green at his annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride ceremony at City Hall. At his pride fest, Comptroller Alan Hevesi honored Melissa Sklarz, the first transgendered person elected to public office in New York -- judicial delegate -- in 1999.
Rivera has reactivated Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries, born right after Stonewall, to provide some shock troops for the revived movement. She remembers when "cross-dressers" were cut out of the city's gay rights bill in 1974. That legislation became Local Law 2 in 1986 and added "sexual orientation" to the human rights law, defining it as "heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality."
While cities like Washington and Minneapolis included transsexuals in the term sexual orientation when they passed their ordinances in the early 1970s, New York activists (including myself) went with a safer definition in 1986, thinking that is what was needed to get the bill passed.
The New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy is working to see that protection for transgendered people is written into law, but must win over gay lobbyists as well as legislators. The state finally enacted a hate crimes law last year, but did not explicitly include transgendered people in it. "We're pushing for an amendment to it," said Pauline Park of the association.
Transgender activists also want an amendment to the city human rights law that would add the category of "gender identity and expression." Hearings were held on Intro 764 in May, but despite the fact that the bill has 27 sponsors, no vote is scheduled. Mayor Giuliani opposes the bill, saying that his Corporation Counsel has opined that transgendered people are covered under the existing categories of "gender" and "disability," a view shared by City Council Speaker Peter Vallone. But the bill is supported by all the Democratic mayoral contenders and Republican Mike Bloomberg who said "If it's already covered, there is no harm in spelling it out." A leading sponsor of 764, Council Member Christine Quinn (D-Chelsea) is hopeful that a vote will be held before the end of the year. Park is impatient: "We're faced with pervasive discrimination," she said, "including by the city and especially by the New York Police Department and the Human Resources Administration. Transgendered women, if legally male, are held in men's cells in jails. And in homeless shelters, they are forced into the men's shelters."
The state bill proposing to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is said, after being stalled for 31 years, to be near passage in the Republican-dominated State Senate, after overwhelming approval in the Democrat-controlled Assembly. But it, too, does not include gender identity.
Matt Foreman, director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, said: "If we could get gender identity into the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, we would," but wants to avoid last minute changes in order to "move it along and not open it up to any negative amendments." The strategy is to help get gender identity into local ordinances -- something that Rochester did in June -- before trying for it at the state level.
Park has accepted this strategy, but said, "It may be time to revisit that approach given the enormous amount of support in the City Council." Rivera, now 50, asks "Am I supposed to wait until I'm 80 to see my community achieve its rights?"
Dennis deLeon, chair of the City Commission on Human Rights under Mayor Dinkins and now director of the Latino Commission on AIDS, said, "There is so much misunderstanding of transgendered people' So many groups now covered under the human rights law have been misunderstood. And people cannot assume that because you do include the category in the law that they will exercise their rights. Very few gay cases have been filed over the years. There is tremendous need for community education, especially at places of employment. It's about educating equal employment officers in corporations."
The 7th Annual Gay & Lesbian Values Report of Best and Worst Company Employers just released by Out & Equal Workplace Advocates found only four of the Fortune 500--Apple,Avaya, Lucent and Xerox--in complete compliance with their standards, and that was because they include "gender identity" in their non-discrimination policies."
Nevertheless, progress has been made. Paul Schindler, editor of LGNY, the lesbian and gay biweekly,said, "It's amazing that in two years transgender activists have gone from a situation where Bill Bradley said, 'I don't know what you're talking about,' to Mike Bloomberg very casually saying he is against discrimination against transgendered people."
The most common complaints of transgendered people are job security, respect at places of public accommodation, and safety on the streets--things that would be addressed by inclusion in human rights and hate crimes legislation. Darren Rosenblum, a New York attorney, wrote of the plight of transgendered prisoners in the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law (volume 6, Issue 2) last year. He found incarcerated transgendered people "at society's bottom rung," and wrote that "their everyday survival" was a series of "heroic acts." Some are denied the hormone treatments that help them maintain their desired gender. Others are cast into brutally unsafe environments with other prisoners who have nothing but contempt for their status. "Their condition demonstrates flaws both multiple and fundamental in the hierarchization of gender, sexual orientation, race, class, and deviance," he wrote.
Some of the newfound acceptance of transgendered people has come about due to the success of people like Tony-nominated playwright Charles Busch ("The Tale of the Allergist's Wife") who said " never wanted to be a woman, I just wanted to be an actress." He noted that Ru Paul has had "an enormous influence," taking cross-dressing mainstream on TV. While Busch and Paul are not transgendered, they express themselves in ways not considered culturally typical for their genders.
In the absence of explicit legal protections, human rights lawyers like Tom Shanahan do their best to defend the rights of transgendered people in court. He is suing the Twilo nightclub on behalf of two transgendered dancers who were fired, they say, because the club wanted "real women." And employees of Toys R Us in Manhattan are alleged to have chased two transgendered clients out with baseball bats earlier this year.
The Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project recorded a doubling of reports of incidents of violence against transgendered people in the past year, a rise that Clarence Patton attributes to "greater awareness" in the transgender community that if these crimes are reported they will be taken more seriously. The Anti-Violence Project has been pressing the Manhattan District Attorney's office to handle the Amanda Milan case with greater sensitivity than some past cases. Last year, project director Richard Haymes said, the defense attorney for a man accused of murdering Fitzroy Green, a transgendered man, pointed to the transgendered witnesses in the case and told the jury that if they could not trust these people to baby-sit for their kids, they should not credit their testimony. The DA did not object and the defendant walked.
"Who the victim is often determines whether or not there will be justice," Councilmember Quinn said at a rally for Amanda Milan.
Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. He is co-host of the weekly Gay USA on Channel 35 on Thursdays at 11 PM.