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In March 2002, more than forty Latino advocacy groups, attorneys, community activists, and students throughout the San Francisco Bay Area received letters with racial epithets, some of which contained white powder. One such letter was addressed to "You stupid, fucking, spic turds," and accused Latinos of being prostitutes and drug users who cannot learn English. The incident coincided with the six-month anniversary of the September 11th attacks. While the powder did not test positive for being toxic, the incident is being treated as a violation of the federal hate crimes statute (Southern Poverty Law Center, Terrorism: Latest anthrax hoax targets Latinos, 2004, www.splcenter.org).
Two alleged skinheads beat and robbed a man in Reno, Nev., in September 2001. The men confronted the victim two days prior to the attack, telling him that he was "messing up the white race" because he had a child with a Latina. The two assailants were booked for investigation of armed robbery and battery with a hate crime enhancement (Anti-Defamation League, 2001 Extremist-Related Criminal Activities: Nevada, 2004, www.adl.org).
In September 2001, two white men assaulted a Mexican immigrant in Lancaster, Calif., who was mistakenly thought to be Arab. The victim had stopped at a red light when the assailants surrounded his car. The victim then tried to evade the attackers, but they followed him home and subsequently entered his home by force. While beating him in front of his family, the attackers yelled racial slurs and claimed they were doing this "in the name of America" ("Mexican Mistaken for Arab is Assaulted in the U.S.," The News, October 3, 2001).
At the University of Florida, the building for the Institute for Hispanic-Latino Cultures, commonly known as La Casita, was spray-painted with a racial slur in March 2001. The statement was directed at a Latino student who was one of two candidates for UF Student Body President: it read, "No spicks for president!" La Casita is designed to be a "home away from home" and resources center for Hispanic students (Sara Myrick, "Vandals spray paint racial slur on La Casita," The Independent Florida Alligator Online, March 27, 2001, www.alligator.org).
In Farmingville, N.Y., two white supremacists who claimed to be contractors picked up and drove two Mexican day laborers to a deserted factory promising them work. Israel Perez and Magdaleno Escamilla were beaten and stabbed in the September 2000 attack. One of the perpetrators shouted racial slurs and struck one of the day laborers with a heavy post-hole digger and stabbed the other. Both victims were hospitalized with serious injuries (Mike Davis, "The Devil's Ranchos," ColorLines, Winter 2001-2002).
In January 1998, Carlos Durand, a Hispanic man living in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., was taunted with racial epithets like "wetback," harassed, and intimidated before being clubbed over the head with a baseball bat in front of his three children. Several of his attackers were members of a skinhead group called Fourth Reich Skins. One of them was his neighbor at the apartment complex where the victim lived and was attacked (U.S. Department of Justice, Brief in U.S. v. Joseph Russell Downen, March 13, 2000, http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/briefs/-downen.htm).
Attacks upon Asian Pacific Americans
Ignorance, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiment all trigger attacks upon Asian Americans. According to the 2002 audit of Violence Against Asian Pacific Americans by the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, 275 bias-motivated hate crimes were reported in 2002. While this figure is lower than the 507 reported in 2001 and the 392 reported in 2000, it informs us of several pressing concerns that prevent a comfortable acceptance of the 2002 statistic as an accurate representation of hate crimes in America. The lack of uniformity and training among law enforcement officers on handling and reporting hate crimes and the significant problem of under-reporting in APA communities where the government and law enforcement's relationship to the community is weak and far removed, help to explain the decrease in number of hate crimes reported. The number of hate crimes committed is likely much higher. The crimes reported also displayed a high level of violence compared to those reported in the past.
As with other minorities, violence against Asian Americans feeds upon longstanding discrimination and contemporary tensions. Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian Americans have been subjected to cycles of intolerance since they first arrived in the United States more than a century-and-a-half ago.
Chinese Americans have a long history in the United States. As mine and railroad workers, they were exploited as cheap "coolie" labor by their employers and bitterly resen-ted by other laborers. In the courts too, Chinese Americans were treated as second-class citizens. In People v. Hall, 4 Cal. 399 (Cal. 1854), the California Supreme Court prohibited people of Chinese descent from testifying in cases involving whites. This decision shielded whites from prosecution for crimes committed against Chinese-Americans and made Chinese-Americans even more vulnerable to violence and discrimination. For instance, in 1887, in Hells Canyon, Ore., 31 Chinese gold miners were shot to death. Their six killers either escaped or were acquitted.
During the years before and during World War II, Japanese Americans became the target of racial animus by Americans who wrongly associated Japanese Americans as spies and enemies of the United States. They were subjected to unprecedented and egregious violations of civil rights, including forcible removal from their homes, relocation to internment camps, and disregard for their rights to due process. Despite severe racism and questions of loyalty, many Japanese Americans both from Hawaii and the mainland served in the U.S. military, forming the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated unit in U.S. history.
In recent decades, Asian Pacific Americans have been the targets of a range of resentments. Anti-Japanese sentiments remaining from World War II have been exacerbated by the resentment of economic competition from Japan and, more recently, South Korea. Although they are likely to have supported the governments of South Vietnam, Vietnamese immigrants are also targeted by Americans who project their shame and anger at our defeat from the Vietnam War toward the Vietnamese community in this country.
Since those who tend toward intolerance are often unable to distinguish one national origin minority from another, these resentments have spilled over into hostility towards all Asian Pacific Americans. Meanwhile, for those who hate non-whites or fear immigrants and their children, Asian Pacific Americans are one more target for their free-floating rage. And these antagonisms have been aggravated by the stereotype of Asian Pacific Americans as "a model minority" — harder-working, more successful in school, and supposedly more affluent than most Americans. It is an image remarkably similar to the stereotype of Jews — a stereotype that fuels a mixture of false admiration, envy, and resentment. In addition, some people do not accept Asian Pacific Americans as legitimate Americans but rather view them as perpetual foreigners.
These examples illustrate the range of hate crimes against Asian Pacific Americans:
In July 2004, a San Francisco court held that an attack by white teenagers against a group of Asian American teens was "no doubt...a hate crime." Yelling racial slurs and beating them down, a group of 15 to 20 white youths caused swollen jaws, welts, bruises and other injuries on the Asian American youths (Vanessa Hua, "Teen Convicted of Hate Crime in Assault," The San Francisco Chronicle, July 15, 2004).
The fifth murder of a delivery person of Chinese descent in New York in the past five years occurred in February 2004 when Huang Chen, the 16-year-old son of a Chinese restaurant owner was killed while making a delivery. His murderers, Nayquan Miller and Charles Bryant, both also 16, dumped Chen's body in a pond three miles away from the incident. As a result of Chen's death and other related hate crimes involving Chinese food deliverymen in New York, a one-day moratorium was proposed for restaurant food deliveries (Dan Janison, "Symbolic Tribute to Slain Teen," Newsday (NY), February 21, 2004).
Mizanur Rahman, an award-winning Bangladeshi American photojournalist, was brutally beaten to death by two Hispanic men in Brooklyn, N.Y., on his way back home from work in August 2002. After an earlier clash with someone of Bangladeshi descent, the two men released their anger and rage onto Rahman, killing him with wooden dowels. The two men have been charged with murder, with consider-ation to categorize the incident as a hate crime (Sean Gardiner, "Charges in Bangladeshi Slaying," Newsday (NY), August 15, 2002).
On March 9, 2002, a 25-year old Filipino American male was attacked in a Huntington Beach, California parking lot by three 14- year-old white teen males who shouted "white power" and racial slurs at the victim while beating him with metal pipes. The assailants left the victim severely injured and swore to return and kill him (Stanley Allison, "Tolerance is Stressed, Educators Insist," Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2002).
A 20-year-old male Pakistani international student was detained on a visa violation following an INS raid on a Greyhound bus in November 2001 in Stone County, Miss. While in custody at a county correctional facility, the victim was stripped naked and brutally beaten by inmates who referred to him as "Bin Laden" and threatened to kill him. The assault resulted in a ruptured eardrum, a broken tooth, and fractured ribs. The victim has claimed that the officers at the correctional facility made no attempt to assist him despite numerous cries for help (Anne-Marie Cusac, "Ill-Treatment on Our Shores," The Progressive.com, March, 2002, http: //www.progressive.org/0901/amc0302.html).
Shortly after September 11th, a 51-year-old South Asian American woman named Swaran Kaur Bhullar was attacked by two men on a motorcycle when she stopped her vehicle at a red light on her way to the local video rental store in San Diego. The two men pulled open her car door and attacked Bhullar while yelling, "This is what you get for what you've done to us! I'm going to slash your throat!" Although she used her arms in self-defense, Bhullar was stabbed twice in the head ("9/11: A Year After," Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2002).
Thung Phetakoune, a 62-year-old American citizen of Laotian descent, was murdered by his neighbor, Richard Labbe, on July 14, 2001 in Newmarket, N.H. Witnesses overheard Labbe make racial comments before and after the assault and Labbe stated to the police that he was paying back Asians for the deaths of Americans in the Vietnam War. He also added that he hated Vietnamese people (Susan Nolan, "Victim's family backs hate crime charge," The Hampton Union (NH), Aug. 26, 2001, http: //www.seacoastonline.com/2001news/hampton/-h8_26a.htm).
Attacks upon Arab Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs
Especially in times of crisis in the Middle East or in the aftermath of incidents of domestic terrorism, the two to three million Americans of Arab descent are vulnerable to hostility, harassment, and violence. In the nine weeks following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Arab Americans were a primary target of hate crimes and discrimination. According to the FBI, there were more acts of bigotry directed against Arabs and Muslims (including ethnic slurs, harassment, threats, assaults, and vandalism) during the first thirty days following September 11th than in the previous five years.14
In the year after September 11th, Arab Americans also reported more than 800 cases of employment discrimination, a number four times greater than previous annual rates. Physical assaults, death threats, and overt ethnic and religious bigotry in schools and on college campuses also became problematic. By September 2002, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Legal Department reported a four-fold increase in discrimination complaints, including illegal airline discrimination, police and government agency misconduct, hate crimes, and physical and psychological abuse of people perceived as Arabs and Muslims in the United States.
Post-September 11th national security campaigns by the government also disproportionately affected Arab- and Muslim-American communities. New policies gave the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security more power to pursue suspects among Arab and Muslim immigrant and nonimmigrant communities. These campaigns included new immigration policies that permitted secret detentions, hearings, and deportations; alien registration based on national origin and ethnicity; "voluntary interviews" and discriminatory visa screening procedures that affected thousands of young Arab men; and selective deportation of Middle Eastern "absconders." Many policies, such as international student monitoring, transcend the Arab-American community and affect people of other ethnic groups.
The introduction of the USA PATRIOT Act also marked a turning point in our government's national security policy. Provisions of this Act tolerate indefinite detention of foreign nationals without adequate process or appeal, new search and surveillance powers with insufficient judicial review, and measures providing for guilt by association.
The Arab and Muslim American communities voiced other civil liberties concerns after September 11th. Some concerns identified police and FBI misconduct, such as arbitrary and abusive stops and detentions and abuse of detainees. Other concerns affected the public at large, such as new policies allowing eavesdropping on attorney-client communications and a growing acceptance of racial profiling and stereotyping.
The media and public figures have sometimes been too quick to blame Arabs or Muslims for incidents to which they have no connection, such as the Oklahoma City bombing. This problem became more acute after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. After September 11th, mainstream media and publications in the United States became increasingly accepting of hostile commentary against Arabs, Arab culture, and Islam. Leaders of the evangelical Christian right also openly vilified Islam, and members of Congress, media pundits, and think tanks voiced openly racist statements about Arab Americans.
In this environment, hate crimes directed against Arab Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs make up some of the worst elements of this post-September 11th backlash. The following examples illustrate the types of hate crimes Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs continue to experience:
In Fresno, Calif., a Sikh temple was vandalized with racist graffiti. Two large scrawls reading "Rags Go Home" and "It's Not Your Country" were spray painted on the temple. Fresno police were investigating the vandalism as a hate incident ("Vandals deface temple in Fresno," The Fresno Bee, March 16, 2004).
In Chelmsley Wood, Ala., a Muslim mother and her two children were repeatedly harassed, and their property was damaged by a mob of vandals. Since the September 11th attacks, the family has seen their car fire bombed, their front door kicked in, and the tires on another car slashed. They often hear slurs and vulgarity directed at them yelled from outside their home. Officers set up a camera in the family's home to try to protect them, but that did not stop the attacks on their car (Birmingham Evening Mail, January 11, 2002).
In Northridge, Calif., a Sikh-American man was beaten by two men with metal poles at his liquor store in December 2001. Despite the victim's attempt to explain that he was Sikh and had no association with the accused terrorists of September 11th, the assailants continued their assault, resulting in the victim's hospitalization for head injuries (The Daily News of Los Angeles, December 8, 2001).
In Wayne, N.J., someone shot three bullets at a sandwich shop owned by a Palestinian American from the Gaza Strip. The shop's employees had received a threatening phone call on September 12, 2001, when an unknown caller asked, "What nationality are you? Are you Syrian?" The caller then threatened, "I'll make sure you guys will be leaving here soon." Sometime afterwards, a false rumor spread that Arab employees had celebrated the terrorist attacks (The Record (NJ), October 3, 2001).
In Las Vegas, Nev., a man carrying cans of spray paint was escorted from the Islamic Cultural Center grounds. As the man left, he threatened the center's employees that he would be "back to reclaim the neighborhood." The center had received several threatening phone calls, about six of which they reported to police (Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 18, 2001).
In Jacksonville, Fla., a chain of Middle Eastern cafes and grocery stores received several threatening phone calls. One caller first asked what kind of food was served, and then asked if the hijackers ate the same type. The caller then threatened, "OK, we're going to come and kill everybody today," before hanging up (Florida Times-Union, September 13, 2001).
Attacks upon Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Individuals
Awareness of the serious level of violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people is increasing. In 2003, one private monitoring group, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) documented 2,051 attacks on members of the GLBT community — an 8 percent increase over 2002.15 Similarly, 2003 saw a 27 percent rise in the number of transgender victims.
More alarmingly, there is reason to believe these attacks are becoming more violent. According to the NCAVP, the number of assaults rose 4 percent in 2003, to 705. While minor injury decreased 8 percent, serious injury actually rose 3 percent in 2003. A total of 203 — almost one in three — assault victims, 5 percent more than in 2002, required some level of hospital care. Of those requiring hospital care, 2003 saw an 8 percent increase of victims requiring in-patient care.
A sense of the brutality of the attacks can be conveyed by describing the weapons involved. The number of assaults involving weapons rose in 2003. There was a 15 percent increase in the use of blunt objects, including bats and clubs, the use of firearms rose an alarming 72 percent; the use of ropes and restraints increased 50 percent, and the use of knives and sharp objects also rose.
Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people seem most at risk of attack when there is emotionally charged political debate and heightened media coverage about their rights or their role in society. In recent years, these issues have been raised in the controversies over anti-discrimination laws, gay marriage, and referenda in Oregon, Colorado, Maine, and other states and local communities. As with controversies about affirmative action and immigration, debates about GLBT issues often demonize the members of minorities already subject to discrimination.
As with African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people often feel isolated and vulnerable because of the difficult relationship between their communities and many police departments. That is one reason why the rate of reporting incidents of violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people to the police is likely less than the estimated reporting rate for all crimes. The NCAVP, for example, reported an increase in hate crimes in 2003, but a 2 percent decrease in those incidents reported to the police. There are several encouraging signs: 19 percent of reported crimes resulted in arrests; a 3 percent increase from 2002; and the number of complaints refused decreased 12 percent.
The following incidents are examples of the kinds of crimes committed against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people:
Nireah Johnson, a 17-year-old transgender woman, was killed in 2003 in Indianapolis while sitting in her vehicle. Paul Anthony Moore allegedly killed Johnson after realizing that she was biologically male. Moore also killed Brandie Coleman, who witnessed Johnson's murder, before setting the vehicle containing their bodies on fire to conceal evidence of the crime. Moore has since been sentenced to 120 years imprisonment for the crime (The Indianapolis Star, April 9, 2004).
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