ProPublica: In New York, Intolerance Has Become Routine, Says Human Rights Commission

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IN NEW YORK, INTOLERANCE HAS BECOME ROUTINE, Rahima Nasa, ProPublica, 'Documenting Hate,' July 16, 2018. *EXCERPTS:

A Human Rights Commission report says almost 40 percent of Muslim, Jewish and Sikh residents of the city surveyed had experienced some kind of harassment. It is just a snapshot, but it makes for a plenty ugly picture all the same: The New York City Commission on Human Rights surveyed more than 3,000 Muslim, Jewish and Sikh residents of the city late in 2017 and found striking rates of racially and or religiously motivated assault, harassment and workplace discrimination. Some 38 percent of those surveyed said they had been verbally harassed or taunted because of their race or faith.
Nearly 10 percent said they had been the victim of an actual physical assault. A similar percentage of those surveyed said they had seen their property vandalized or otherwise defaced.

Lurking in those broad numbers are some more specific outrages: 18 percent of Sikhs surveyed said they had been denied service by a local business; roughly 6 percent of those surveyed who said they wore religious garments reported having had someone try and tear those garments off them. The commission, which enforces the city’s anti-discrimination statute governing employment, housing and public accommodation, said last month’s “first of its kind” report was meant to “rigorously document” experiences of bias harassment, discrimination and acts of hate. They survey was conducted in late fall 2017, and asked respondents to report incidents dating back to mid-2016, the height of a volatile election season.



- Read More, SIKHS IN AMERICA: A HISTORY OF HATE. Demonized as immigrants. Mistaken for Muslims. For more than a century, Sikhs in the US have faced suspicion and violence.

Some 17 percent of those surveyed reported some form of discrimination at work - from being told they could not observe their faith to being told they could not wear religious clothing. Roughly 3 percent reported being fired because of their race, ethnicity or religion. The findings are consistent with national and local trends.
The FBI and the New York City Police Department have seen increases in reports of hate crimes in the last several years. A recent report from the California attorney general’s office showed that hate crimes in the state have increased by about 17 percent in the last year and have been on the rise for the last three years. Yet the commission’s survey underscored a stubborn fact about bias-driven harassment and crimes: People by and large opt not to report them...
The population perhaps most at risk? Black Muslim women in the Bronx, where one in five reported being physically assaulted in the months in question...con't.

READ MORE, https://www.propublica.org/article/in-new-york-intolerance-has-become-routine

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1. "Sikhs in America: A History of Hate," ProPublica article from the above post.

Last edited Sun Jul 22, 2018, 11:43 AM - Edit history (1)

-SIKHS IN AMERICA: A HISTORY OF HATE- Demonized as immigrants. Mistaken for Muslims. For more than a century, Sikhs in the U.S. have faced suspicion and violence, by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, August 4, 2017

The 1907 episode in a seaside timber town in Washington came to be known as the Bellingham Riots. Really, though, there were no riots. There was a pogrom. At the time, the U.S. was suffering through deep economic distress, a panic-filled recession that had begun the year before. Angry anti-immigrant sentiment was ascendant. And hundreds of Sikh men who had traveled from India to Bellingham to toil in the lumber mills paid the price.

Some 500 white men, many of them members of the local Asiatic Exclusion League, descended on the Sikhs and other South Asians, routing them from the bunkhouses where they roomed and chasing them into the streets. Within hours, the entire Sikh population of Bellingham had fled, frantically piling onto trains and boats in search of some sort of refuge. Many had been physically battered.

I knew nothing about this incident until I visited Washington state this spring and met with members of the Sikh community there. For them, it was easy to draw at least some parallels between that century-old ugliness and recent events. Immigrants were again being demonized. Lost jobs were fueling white working-class despair and resentment. Hate crimes were reported to be up. Yelling, “Get out of my country!” a gunman had shot two Indian software engineers in an Applebee’s restaurant in Kansas. Closer to home, in Kent, a suburb of Seattle, a man had shot a Sikh in an apparent hate crime.

A few weeks after the shooting, on a gray March day, I met Hira Singh Bhullar at a café in Kent. “The shooting happened four or five blocks from here,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the crime scene with his finger. Bhullar, who works in the IT department at the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, was shaken. He’d lived for a time in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He never felt entirely safe there, always worried that somebody would accost or attack him.
But Bhullar had never felt threatened in Washington. Sure, some racists had posted mean comments on his Facebook page when he ran for the Kent City Council. Still, he didn’t take that kind of internet obnoxiousness too seriously.
Now, though, things seemed different. He worried about what seemed to him to be a metastasizing meanness towards immigrants and members of minority religions...cont.

READ MORE, https://www.propublica.org/article/sikhs-in-america-hate-crime-victims-and-bias

*NOTE: Documenting Hate: Hate crimes and bias incidents are a national problem, but there’s no reliable data on the nature or prevalence of the violence. ProPublica is collecting and verifying reports to create a national database for use by journalists, researchers and civil-rights organizations. Learn more.

In 2012, Harpreet's mother and five sisters were murdered at a gurdwara/temple in Wisconsin.