Defending Civil Rights Must Include Everyone's Rights
By: Judy Chu, Mar 08, 2008 - Click here for link to Chinese translation of this essay - Click here for the article as published in AsianWeek
At a recent event in my community, an elderly Chinese lady came up to me and was very concerned with what she had heard in her church. She wanted to know if it was true that the state was about to implement a law that would force girls and boys to share bathrooms in schools and even shower together! She went on to say that her pastor had told the congregation that SB777 could impose a radical new world in schools.
I could see in her eyes that she felt the sky was falling. I replied that there was nothing in that law that would allow for, much less impose, such a thing and that our legislators would not have written such a law. She seemed very confused.
Let me clarify what SB777 is. SB777 was signed by the governor and became law on Jan. 1. It is not a gay rights bill. It does not create any new protections. It will not force boys and girls to share the same bathroom.
SB777 takes existing anti-discriminatory laws for students and puts them in one place. These laws address all civil rights protections for students: for disabled students, students of color, women students and, indeed, students of different sexual orientations. Over the years, these laws were passed piece by piece and were put in different parts of the state code, making it difficult for students, parents and administrators to know what the law really was.
Why make this change? Because rights can only be exercised when people know what rights they actually have under the law.
I supported SB777 before it became law, and I am now happy to see it become part of our legal system. When I chaired the Select Committee on Hate Crimes in the state Assembly, I saw many examples where hatred and violence had been unleashed on people because of their race, gender and sexual orientation. In the case of anti-gay harassment and violence, I was struck by how much of this took place in and around schools. There have been many sad cases where students who were considered "different" suffered discriminatory treatment in school with little action on the part of the administrators. SB777 will help many know their rights so they can protect themselves from becoming victims of hate and violence in our schools.
Schools are the most important institution outside the family for the education and upbringing of our children. The experiences that young people have in schools often affect them for the rest of their lives. When they experience blatant hatred and are ostracized for their skin color or gender, we know that something is wrong — that adults have failed to provide a safe learning environment for our kids. When the child or teen targeted by others for discrimination is your own child, you feel a terrible loss of confidence in the school and even in the state government that is supposed to protect him or her.
Chinese Americans should be especially concerned. Chinese Americans have historically been the victim of terrible discrimination in schools. In the 1870s, Chinese children were the only racial group in California to be denied a state-funded education. The San Francisco Board of Education denied admission to Chinese children, saying that "the association of Chinese and white children would be demoralizing mentally and morally to the latter." They accused Chinese children of being filthy and having contagious or infectious diseases. Then the board decided to admit the Chinese, but only to segregated schools. It was not until 1954 that this situation was overturned, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. the Board of Education that all students should be treated equally in the school system.
It is because of this history that Chinese Americans should be even more sensitive to the importance of protection against discrimination in the schools. This protection should be for every single student in our system. We cannot pick and choose which students are to be protected and which students are not. We know all too well how traumatic it is to be victimized, and to allow even one student to experience it is shameful to our whole school system.
Judy Chu is the vice chair of the California State Board of Equalization. She taught in the Los Angeles Community College District for 20 years and has served as a board member of the Garvey School District. As an assemblywoman, she founded and chaired the Assembly Select Committee on Hate Crimes.