Credit: Karaminder Ghuman, Courtesy: The Sikh Coalition
The Sikh community is leading the way to strengthen law that will protect Sikhs and other religious minorities from job discrimination in the workplace. AB1964 – or the Workplace Religious Freedom Act (WRFA) – has been introduced by Assemblymember Mariko Yamada and is co-sponsored by The Sikh Coalition. Earlier this week, in a show of community leadership, the California Sikh sangat packed a hearing room in the California Assembly and testified in favor of AB1964. As a result, the bill passed through the Labor and Employment Committee and will be considered by the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday April 24th. The Sikh Coalition states that,
This is the first time in California’s history that the Workplace Religious Freedom Act has survived a committee vote, and this is a credit to the power of Sikhs to provide leadership on civil rights issues for all Americans. [link]
Why should Sikhs care about WRFA?
Sikhs suffer high levels of employment discrimination because of their Sikh identity. Many are told to shave their beards; others are told to remove their turbans; some are told that they can only work out of public view. If enacted, WRFA would make it harder in each of these cases for California employers to discriminate against Sikhs.
Over ten years after 9/11, the persistence of hate attacks targeting Sikhs in the US, whether in the form of bullying in 
schools, vandalism of gurdwaras, or even cold blooded murder, is a sobering reality for our community. Jodha and I have both discussed elsewhere that the root cause of much of the anti-Sikh violence we see in the United States is the overwhelming vilification of Muslims and Islam in our country, and in the world, today. Nevertheless, it is imperative that we have sound data about anti-Sikh attacks specifically so we fully understand the scope of the problem and thus can address it effectively.
It may surprise you that the US government does not in any way keep track of hate crimes targeting Sikhs. Even in the midst of the surge in attacks against Sikhs in the wake of 9/11/01, the FBI never kept track of anti-Sikh crimes. While some of us may not see the FBI as the most trustworthy of agencies to protect our communities and our civil rights given its history of spying and repression, it is nevertheless outrageous that there isn’t even a “Sikh” box to be checked when a hate crime has been reported. It says a lot about the continued marginalization and relative invisibility of our community in the United States.
The legal banning of the burqa and niqab has once again been in the headlines this last week, b
ut this time beyond Europe, in Canada (or as Tanmit from G.N.E. called it last week at Lahir, “America’s pagh”).
Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney, known for his conservative and anti-immigrant policies, announced that new Canadian citizens will now be forced to remove the burqa or niqab while taking their oath of citizenship.
According to the Associated Press,
Jason Kenney said most Canadians have misgivings about Islamic face coverings and said new Canadians should take the oath in view of their fellow citizens…
The Conservative minister called the issue a matter of deep principle that goes to the heart of Canada’s identity and the country’s values of openness and equality. He said women who feel obliged to have their faces covered in public often come from a cultural milieu that treats women as property rather than equal human beings.
A friend sent me this photo yesterday from this past weekend’s annual LGBT Pride Parade in New York City, which was attended by about a million people. I’ve seen this Singh around NYC before. He happens to be one of the transit workers standing up to the NYC Transit Authority’s discriminatory “turban-branding” policy and now is also standing up for LGBT rights. Sikh solidarity seems to be in full swing lately.
The Pride festivities in NYC were a little different this year since they came just after state lawmakers voted in favor of legalizing gay marriage in New York last week. While some Sikhs (and Sikh institutions) have been outspoken about their opposition to allowing same-sex couples to marry, many others of us are celebrating this milestone civil rights victory in New York, seeing the fight for justice for LGBT people as no different as justice for women, people of color, or any other oppressed group.
Despite my previously alluded to reservations about the state sanctioning the way we structure our romantic relationships, households, and/or families, I believe that legalizing gay marriage is nevertheless a much needed blow to the deeply ingrained homophobia and heterosexism in our society. A lot more than marriage equality is needed to create the sort of radical transformation our Gurus envisioned for our world, but it is, at least today, a reason to say fateh!
A few years ago I was putting up some flyers on street poles and bulletin boards in Williamsburg, Brooklyn promoting an upcoming concert for my band. If you’re from New York City, you know Williamsburg is a neighborhood covered with concert flyers and band logos, and the home of dozens of music venues filled with indie rock-loving, skinny jeans-wearing hipsters (for the record, this has nothing to do with me nor my old band).
After a few minutes of putting up a bunch of flyers with tape, I was suddenly surrounded by 4 police cars and their flashing sirens. One of the cops approached me, while the others stayed close behind. He had one of our flyers in his hand and asked if I put it up. I said yes. He informed me this was “graffiti” and was illegal. I apologized and said I was not aware of that. He took my ID, talked to his colleagues, and the next thing I know I’m being aggressively handcuffed and put into the back of a police car without any explanation.
To make a long story short, I was arrested because a few years prior to the flyering incident, I got stopped and cited for riding my bicycle for a few feet on a sidewalk (in the rain) and never appeared in court for this egregious violation of the law and disturbance to the peace.
But this isn’t a story about why I got arrested and how ludicrous it is that these cops arrested me rather than asking me to please not put up flyers on street poles (which were already covered with flyers). This isn’t a story about racial or religious profiling and about if these (white) cops were driven by bias or if they were paying special attention to a turbaned, bearded brown man walking down a gentrified, newly predominantly white hipster block of Brooklyn.
This is a story about incarceration.
When I was taken to the precinct, still not knowing why I was arrested or what the hell was going on, I was aggressively and invasively patted down (more like groped) and searched by the officer who arrested me. After a few conversations with other officers at the precinct, I started putting the pieces together in my head as to why I was arrested, and they assured me that I’d be out of there in a few hours. I felt a bit relieved, though still anxious. I was hopeful that I could keep my head up and make it through this with my self-respect and dignity in tact.
A week and a half ago I posted a blog entitled, Anti-Muslim Hate Comes to Orange County. In it, there was a video showing Muslims attending a fundraiser for homeless shelters being viciously screamed at by members of a local Tea Party group. Racial epithets and a horrific display of disrespect towards the men and women walking to and from the venue were shown.
The point of my post was not to endorse or villify the beliefs of Islam, liberalism, Sharia law, terrorist organizations, or even the organization which the Muslims in this case happened to be attending. It was to highlight the fundamental teachings of the Sikh Religion: no human being should be treated this way regardless of their political affiliation, religion, caste, or gender. We may disagree on some aspects of Sikhi, but human rights, I assumed, was something that we all agreed were the basic foundation blocks for Sikhism. The next day, a possible hate crime took place in Sacramento where two elderly Sikh men were shot. It was absolutely tragic and incredibly sad, and some commenters believed that the incident was the result of “liberal” Sikhs who sided with “Muslim issues,” thus creating an image of terrorists/Muslims/Sikhs as one and the same. The suggested solution was for Sikhs to distance themselves from Muslims and “Muslim Issues.”
I stopped reading the comments after the first few because the views being expressed were truly shocking, and the bickering, name-calling, and hostile tone was, to be honest, pretty brutal. Not something I’d expect to hear from readers on a progressive Sikh Blog. It was a relief to find out that these views really were just of a tiny fraction of the Sikh community.
Guest blogged by Preserve Architectural Heritage
What: discovery of two sites linked to 1984: (1) Hondh Chillar, discovered January 2011. (2) Pataudi, discovered Februrary 2011. Both are in Haryana. Excerpts from Press Releases from Sikhs for Justice reveal that 32 men, women, and children were brutally tortured and killed in Hondh Chillar and 17 in Pataudi.
Why is this discovery important: So far all the investigation into the violence of 1984 has been done via interviews, eyewitness accounts, judicial commissions, and lawsuits. For the first time, we have living evidence of the genocide: the buildings speak for themselves. Though there are thousands of names on the ever-growing list of those killed in 1984, many of us have very little connection to those names since we don’t personally know the families. Even if some of us know or are related to survivors of the violence, it’s difficult and painful to have those individuals recollect and narrate their memories and experience.
Those of us with no familial connection to Operation Bluestar, those of us who were too young to remember, or were not born when this genocide tookplace now have a physical, tangible, alive, and direct relationship to this significant period of Sikh history through these sites. Since memory of any tragic event is intrinsically linked to physical location[s], it is absolutely crucial that we realize the value of Hondh Chillar and Pataudi as sites that provide us with a direct link to the memory of 1984. They are living sites, open for everyone to access and connect with. They are silent victims, that, just like the human victims of 1984, represent a crucial moment from the recent Sikh past.
Guest blogged by Brooklynwala
While many of us were celebrating 311 years of the Khalsa at Sikh Day Parades and Nagar Kirtans this weekend, thousands of immigrants and their allies gathered in Phoenix, Arizona on Sunday to protest what is being called the 
most anti-immigrant legislation in the United States, Senate Bill1070. Signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on April 23rd, this measure allows local law enforcement authorities to question individuals based solely upon the suspicion that they may be undocumented.
According to the New York Times, “The law…would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.”
President Obama stated that the law threatens “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”
French legislators are currently considering a ban that would prevent Muslim women the right to wear full-body veils in public areas such as buses, trains, hospitals, restaurants, schools and other public places. Since 2004, head scarves and other signs of religious affiliation have been banned from public schools by a government determined to enforce France’s tradition of strict secularism amid fears of growing fundamentalism. Although Sikhs have also been fighting for their right to wear turbans in France – what will an overt ban, which sends a clear statement to its citizens about religious tolerance, mean to other minority groups in the country?
Identifying the burqa as alien to French culture, say the ban’s critics, also fans xenophobic sentiment. What will be declared un-French next? The sari? The Sikh turban? Day-Glo bicycle shorts? [link]
Interestingly – there are only about 2,000 Muslim women in France who wear these veils. Many say that France, a country that prides itself on liberal democracy, is simply taking away the individual freedom to make a choice. As an Op-Ed piece in the NYT asks, “Why the French obsession with the burqa? After all, as the French government itself has conceded, only about 1,900 women wear the full-body covering. So why are over half of the respondents in recent public opinion polls in favor of a ban on it?”
Almost two years ago I blogged about an NPR story that highlighted the issue of Runaway Grooms. Today, I once again write about the same issue – this time the media terms it “Holiday Brides” – a different name telling the same story. We should be outraged that years after we first heard about this issue, we are still having the same conversation. We are told that about 20,000 women have been deserted by men in the UK, US and Canada who promise to return to India and never do. The most recent questions is then, why are Punjabi women still falling for this obvious scam?
In a dusty village in the Jagraon district of Punjab, northern India, 35-year-old Suman (which is not her real name), lives with her widowed mother in a small room in a crumbling building. Four years ago, the secondary school teacher married a British man in a wedding arranged by relatives. Shortly after the ceremony, her husband, who is in his 50s, left for London with the promise he would send for her. At first all appeared to go well. “He would visit two to three times a year. “Whenever he came to India, we had a good time,” she said. However, on one visit he claimed her application for a spousal visa to the UK had been refused. It was like being a prostitute you take along and have a good time with and then leave behind ‘Suman’, 35 ”He told me he had applied for an appeal. “But he has never shown me a copy of that appeal. He’s never shown me any documents.” The visits and calls ended, and for the past six months Suman has had no contact with her husband. “In hindsight, it was like being a prostitute you take along and have a good time with and then leave behind. [link]
Gurmeal Singh, the British Sikh police officer who was humiliated for practicing Sikhi, will be compensated for “indirect harassment” and humiliation. Judge Murray Creevy ruled that the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) viola
ted his dignity.
The BBC reports that the Assistant Chief Officer at GMP, Julia Rogers felt that they had always acted in the best interest of Singh. However, GMP accepts the ruling and has already updated their policies.
After a heated conversation with his Sergeant about his inability to remove his turban while on the job, Singh feared that he would be made to look like a comic character on television by wearing a modified turban.
Ultimately the ruling according to Singh’s lawyer:
“… leaves him in difficulty in relation to his future career but will hopefully open the eyes of Greater Manchester Police. He joined the police because of his values as a Sikh. What is important now is what Greater Manchester Police will do to help him come back.”
One of our goals on The Langar Hall is to raise awareness about issues affecting our community around the globe. Whether or not we identify or relate to these specific issues may not be as important as much as the acknowledgement that these issues do occur and that individuals and families and even children are affected. We hope that by raising awareness we can begin, as a community, to stand up against injustice in all its forms.
A recent article from the BBC reports that, according to campaigners in Punjab, British Asians are hiring contract killers to carry out up to 100 murders in India each year. One of the most well known cases is that of Surjit Athwal, a British Sikh woman who disappeared in Punjab in 1998. Eventually it was revealed that she had been murdered in a so-called honor killing after her in-laws discovered that she planned to divorce her husband. They had hired criminals in India to kill her. She was strangled and her body dumped in a river. Her brother, Jagdeesh Singh, now campaigns for other victims’ families.
“I think Surjit’s case exposed for the first time in this country overseas outsourced killings. How the Punjabi community, settled in Britain, send their females back to the land of origin, in the full knowledge that they can have them murdered easily, swiftly and efficiently.” [link]
So Abercrombie & Fitch is at it again or I should say has been at it for a 
while-practicing bias against those who “don’t look the part” of mainstream White American society. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a college age Muslim girl who wears a hijab is filing suit against the retail store for not hiring her because she would violate the “Look Policy”.
What is Abercrombie & Fitch’s “Look Policy”? The policy jargon aside, the bottom-line for this retail store is that hijab’s aren’t “sexy” because mainstream White America doesn’t view them that way and only sex sells.
Now of course Abercrombie & Fitch will not outright say that; though I am sure they will fight to preserve this “status quo” through legal, “objective” and “logical” means. It also seems like the very legal right that is supposed to protect religious freedom will be used to defend Abercrombie’s stance. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits religious discrimination. The 197 amendment to Title VII defines religion to,
“… include all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief, unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate an employee’s or perspective employee’s religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business”.
The California legislator has unanimously passed a Kirpan Education Bill (AB 504) through both houses (Assembly & Senate); it is now headed to Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk. This bill, carried by Assemblymember Warren Furutani (D-Long Beach) and other co-sponsors, will only become law if the California Governator signs off on it. AB 504 is a historic bill because it is the only piece of legislation in America that focuses on Sikhs and our kirpan. Furthermore, the bill is being pushed through the law-making process in California-a state with the oldest and largest number of Sikhs in America.
The Kirpan Education Bill (AB 504) requires that all California law enforcement officers be trained on Sikhs and our kirpan. This training would teach California law enforcement officers about Sikhs and the importance of our religiously mandated articles of faith. Sikhs wearing a kirpan are often disrespectfully approached by law enforcement officers and arrested for concealed weapons charges. Often law enforcement officers will pull Sikhs over for minor traffic violations or safety concerns and as soon as officers see the kirpan the situation is escalated into a criminal offense; although the Sikh was only practicing his/her faith. These officers are unaware that the kirpan is a religious mandated article of faith-a gift from our Guru that we wear with care, respect, and love.
It used to be the case that women who came to the US as dependents on their husbands’ immigration status were 
sometimes caught between a rock and a hard place. In cases where one spouse was abusive, the other spouse wouldn’t leave the relationship for fear of losing their immigration status and being sent back to their original country. If they returned to their original country empty handed and without their spouses, they would be perceived as failures. And so, many women have just endured extremely abusive relationships.
One option that has been available if the abuser is a permanent resident or a US citizen is a self-petition under the Violence Against Women Act. But this wasn’t available if the abuser was in the US on a temporary visa, as many immigrants initially are, or to women outside the US.
Thus, a recent development in asylum law has the potential to open a door to safety for at least some women who are most seriously abused in domestic violence. To qualify for asylum (or refugee status), one must have been a victim of persecution, or have a well founded fear of persecution based on their race, nationality, religion, political opinion, or “membership in a particular social group.” Before this summer, women who were victims of horrendous domestic violence were not recognized as a particular social group, though the issue has been argued for 14 years in a battle to allow battered women to seek asylum in the US. [link]
The government’s prior position under the Bush administration was illustrated in the case of R-A-, a woman who suffered horrific violence at the hands of her husband, a former soldier of the Guatemalan army. She was kicked, whipped, and beaten unconscious, nearly had an eye pushed out, was repeatedly raped, sodomized, threatened with machetes and guns, dragged by her hair, and had windows and mirrors broken on her head. [source 1, 2]. The Guatemalan police refused to help each time she went to them, deciding that hers was a domestic matter. RA fled Guatemala and her husband, seeking asylum in the US.
Sikh victims of crime will now be given the option of requesting a Sikh police officer to work on their case. Well, in London at least. The goal of this new service, offered by the Metropolitan Police, is to make use of the “special” knowledge officers have in regards to Punjabi culture to help address issues such as forced marriage and honor crimes. Many police officers believe that crimes have gone unreported and unsolved within the Punjabi Sikh community due to a lack of cultural understanding by police officers from a “white” background.
Palbinder Singh, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Sikh Association (MPSA) said: “It’s about understanding and appreciating difference. I don’t believe a white officer is ever going to be fully conversant with a Sikh for example. We have got evidence in the most serious type of crimes where Punjabi culture itself is the issue, that they haven’t been properly investigated.” [link]
Cringe.
When the British Sikh Police Association (BSPA) was set up, a spokesman suggested that the organization represented an important move towards social cohesion and integration, just like ‘other support networks within the police’. The BSPA did an excellent job at setting up an online service to allow women to report honor-based violence. It’s a completely valid effort to address the needs of minority communities – and something which should be celebrated. However, while I am a huge advocate for providing culturally and linguistically relevant services in all public sectors, I’m not sure that the solution proposed by the Metropolitan Police in England is necessary a good thing. Instead of providing diversity training to all members of the police force, this policy divides justice across ethnic lines.
Oregon recently passed a bill to repeal its ban on religious attire in the workplace, a policy adopted 100 years ago as part of anti-Catholic backlash. However, it let stand an exception to this act — specifically, it continues to ban wearing “religious attire” in classrooms. Its decision strikes against its stated policy goal: to ameliorate religious discrimination in the workplace.
Religious affiliation is a protected class under U.S. equal protection (14th Amendment) and Civil Rights law, but it is subject to a much more lenient standard of review than other forms of discrimination (e.g., race). In 1980, the Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s workplace ban. The Legislature supports its ban by claiming that it is designed to avoid proselytization in the classroom. This is both misguided and continues to advance discrimination.
The Sikh Coalition recently announced that three Congressional representatives from New York and New Jersey wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on behalf of their Sikh constituents regarding the Coalition’s “Right To Serve” campaign.
In their letters, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen and Congressman Joseph Crowley asked Secretary Gates to allow Sikh soldiers to serve with their articles of faith intact. The letters cited other Sikhs’ service in the US Armed Forces and in our allies’ militaries to support their argument that these men should be permitted to serve.
This an important milestone in what is likley to be a long and difficult process. In reference to this, I’d like to share a piece I wrote on sikhchic.com shortly before the launch of this campaign, titled – This We’ll Defend [The motto on the official seal of the United States Army. ]
Last fall, I went to an NFL game to watch my team face their arch rival on Sunday Night Football. As we were watching the pre-game warm-up, the gentleman next to me asked “So what do they think of football in your country?” I paused, and politely replied “Well, considering my country is America…we think pretty highly of it.” He attempted to re-phrase his question and after a few awkward exchanges, I yielded, and answered “Oh…you mean my ancestors, they are from Punjab…I’m not sure what Punjabis think of football.” We changed the topic to the upcoming game and ended our conversation.
I run in to these dialogues a lot. As I’ve gotten older, the occasional taunts and racial slurs I receive due to my articles of faith no longer faze me. I can always blame that on ignorance and lack of education. But the exchange like the one at the football game unsettles me. They are typically with people who are both educated and polite, but it is their perception that is troublesome…their presumption, that because of the way I look…I am not an American.
It is often said that a revolution begins not with the sword but with the pen. However, last Friday night in a packed banquet hall in the Toronto suburb of Malton, I witnessed a revolution begin with the microphone.
At an event entitled “When Lions Roar”, fantastically organized by the Sikh Activist Network, one young artist after another got on to the mike and paid homage to the lives destroyed in 1984. I was blown away by the talent and passion displayed by the performers. Through the art of spoken word, music, and action, each of the 26 acts put a different face on the impact of June 1984. They were all unique in their perspective, but all shared one common thread: 1984 is just too important to forget.
Over 1000 people gathered to attend the 4+ hour event. They covered the entire spectrum of Sikh life. This was not your typical retreat and kirtan crowd. In fact, the diversity of performers and audience has challenged me to rethink my stereotypes about who cares about 1984 and the future of the Sikh panth. Individuals that I would have never suspected of having even a passing interest in Sikhi or the Sikh community, would come up to the mike and speak with such energy, insight and emotion. They often reduced me to tears. And most amazing was the fact that almost all of them weren’t even alive in June 1984.
For a thirty-something guy like me who has always considered myself part of the “youth”, it was indeed a little bit humbling to realize that, while I’d probably still be the youngest guy at a Youth Akali Dal meeting, I’m now probably a generation or two above the youngest Sikh leaders. Which means me and my fellow Generation X-ers need to spend less time trying to do it all ourselves, and more time using our resources to enable the next wave of younger Sikhs to establish their own voice and institutions. We were the first generation coming through the diaspora, with little support from our elders. However, we can make it easier on our younger brothers and sisters. We can provide them seed funding to start their dreams, connect them those that can help them along the path, and help coach them through their challenges.
As you’ll see from the videos and photos, the next generation has indeed stepped up, their language of change is hip-hop and I think they’re gonna be alright.
Click through for videos and pictures.
As talking heads buzzed with news of President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, there has also been a flurry of commentary. Is her selection tokenizing? Is it triumphant? Is she smart enough? Is she nice enough? I don’t think it’s particularly useful to parse the commentary on Judge Sotomayor specifically — a lot of the back and forth parallels and reproduces the tropes that come out in any discussion addressing privilege and remediation.
The same day, a relatively lengthy commentary previewed on NPR’s morning edition. It argued that while Obama’s nomination was a triumph (if successful, Sotomayor will be the first woman of color and first Latina on the Court), the President should examine other forms of diversity on the bench. Specifically, he should appoint an LGBT Justice, next.
