Trans employee wins $20K settlement against Shake Shack

He was told he had to "explain his gender to co-workers" when they started harassing him since management didn't want to intervene.

By Alex Bollinger 

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Shake ShackPhoto: Shutterstock

A transgender man won a $20,000 settlement in a lawsuit against the fast food chain Shake Shack after he faced a month of transphobic harassment on the job with no support from his employer.

The man, who has not been identified in the media, worked at Shake Shack in 2020 in Oakland, California. He said that he was harassed daily and referred to as female.

He told his supervisors about the harassment and instead of helping him they told him to “explain his gender to co-workers rather than rely on management to correct discriminatory behavior,” according to the California Civil Rights Department, which helped him with his lawsuit. The supervisors said it was his responsibility to convince his coworkers to stop harassing him.

His lawsuit says that after a month he grew “frustrated by management’s failure to address his concerns” and quit.

“California law prohibits intentional misgendering in the workplace,” California Civil Rights Department director Kevin Kish said. “Intentional misgendering and other forms of discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression can be stressful and traumatic.”

After mediated talks, the agency said that Shake Shack agreed to improve their discrimination training for managers and employees and adopt more strict policies about discrimination and harassment. Shake Shack also agreed to report anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and harassment complaints directly to the state for the next year and pay the former employee $20,000.

“Creating a welcoming and fulfilling environment for all our employees and guests is critical,” reads a statement from Shake Shack. “We are constantly taking steps to ensure our policies and culture reflect our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace.”

2 teens charged in death of transgender TikTok personality Brianna Ghey

Her death has sparked outrage throughout the United Kingdom.

ByKiara Alfonseca

February 15, 2023

Brianna Ghey is shown in this undated photo released by the Cheshire Police

Two tens have been charged in the death of Brianna Ghey, a transgender girl found dead in the English town of Warrington.

Emergency services were called to a local park Feb. 11 when Ghey's body was found on a path, authorities said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

People hold placards as they shout slogans during a vigil, in London, on Feb. 15, 2023, in tribute of 16-year-old transgender teen, Brianna Ghey, who was stabbed to death.

Niklas Halle'n/AFP via Getty Images

A 15-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl were initially arrested and questioned by the Cheshire Constabulary police force and were later charged with murder Wednesday.

Police say it is unclear if the circumstances surrounding her death are hate-related, but the investigation into a motive is ongoing.

"A number of enquiries in relation to this incident are underway and we are doing all that we can to establish the exact circumstances of what has happened," said Detective Chief Superintendent Mike Evans in a statement.

MORE: Amid anti-LGBTQ efforts, transgender community finds joy in 'chosen families'

Ghey was described by her family as "a larger than life character who would leave a lasting impression on all that met her."

Members of the public attend a candle-lit vigil on Feb. 15, 2023, outside the Department of Education in London, in memory of transgender teenager Brianna Ghey, who was fatally stabbed in a park on Saturday.

Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire via ZUMA Press

"Brianna was a much loved daughter, granddaughter, and baby sister," her family said in a statement. "Brianna was beautiful, witty and hilarious. Brianna was strong, fearless and one of a kind."

Ghey was a popular personality on social media, with thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok.

Candlelight vigils continue to be held across the U.K. – from Glasgow, Scotland to Dublin, Ireland – as the transgender community honors and grieves Ghey's memory and life.

"The loss of her young life has left a massive hole in our family, and we know that the teachers and her friends who were involved in her life will feel the same," Ghey's family said

A 30-Year-Old Native American Trans Woman Was Killed After Meeting Up With A Man From A Dating App, Her Family Says. 

Almost Six Months Later, No One Has Been Arrested.

Family and friends of Acey Morrison say she took care of everyone around her, but they fear they won’t get accountability in her death.

Nico Lang
BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on February 15, 2023 


Gabriella Trujillo for BuzzFeed News

Nearly everyone who knew Acey Morrison has a story about the impact she had on them: how she pushed them to be their best selves or helped out when they needed a hand. Morrison’s cousin, Casey Morton, moved into her Rapid City, South Dakota, apartment two years ago and found a counselor and confidant in Morrison. As a Native American trans woman, she was one of the few people in his life who could understand what it was like to be LGBTQ in a Republican-leaning state. “I get called ‘fag’ all the time because of how I identify myself — as a proud gay man and also Native American,” Morton told BuzzFeed News. “It’s so close-minded here.”

When Morrison’s nephew, Dale Two Eagles, ran out of gas a few years ago, his aunt was the one who came to his rescue — even though she had a busy day of errands to run. Morrison’s childhood friend, Cheryse Hawkins, credits her with helping her get sober after she slipped into addiction in her early 20s. With Morrison’s encouragement, she completed her GED, enrolled in Job Corps, and received an associate’s degree in child development. Hawkins has now been sober for seven years, but after they fell out of touch, she never got the chance to say thank you

“I never got my moment to tell her, ‘Hey, I changed my life, and it was because of you.’” she told BuzzFeed News. “I find comfort knowing that now she knows — especially us being Native American and her going to the spirit world. I feel like she knows, but I wish I had the opportunity to tell her.”


Instagram
Acey Morrison

Morrison, who had just turned 30 in July, was fatally shot in a Rapid City mobile home on Aug. 21, making her the 30th trans person to die violently in 2022. By the end of the calendar year, that total would increase to 38 — among the highest numbers on record since the Human Rights Campaign first began tracking violence against trans Americans in 2016. At least 29 of them were trans women of color. But in spite of the violence of Morrison’s death, it has not been declared a homicide, and no one has been arrested almost six months later. Her mother, Edelyn Catches, told BuzzFeed News that the man who shot Morrison described it as self-defense, which her family and friends dispute. The Pennington County sheriff’s office says the case remains under investigation and declined to answer questions from BuzzFeed News.

“It’s just hard to accept it, to the point where all I want is justice. I want someone to pay for it.”

Morrison’s death is yet another example of the routine violence faced by Two-Spirit people — a term used by many Native communities to describe trans and gender nonconforming people — following several prominent killings in recent years: Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow in 2017, and Poe Black and Whispering Wind Bear Spirit in 2021. Wounded Arrow, who also lived in South Dakota, was fatally stabbed seven times by Joshua Rayvon LeClaire, who was sentenced to 65 years in prison after pleading guilty to the murder. And although in recent years there’s been increased awareness around missing and murdered Native American women, the killings of Two-Spirit people remain an invisible epidemic. Advocates said there’s almost no hard data validating how pervasive this brutality is, and they believe the deaths of Native trans and gender nonconforming people are widely undercounted.

Family members and close friends worry that as in the cases of other Native people whose lives were taken too soon, no one will be held accountable for Morrison’s death. They are still adjusting to life without her. “Her being gone is taking a big toll on me,” Morton said. “It’s just hard to accept it, to the point where all I want is justice. I want someone to pay for it. I helped her get lowered into the ground, but it still hasn’t registered that she’s gone. Still to this day, I open up my phone and I snap her something. It hasn’t hit — that harsh reality that she’s not going to respond.”

Morrison was dead for 16 hours before her family members said they were notified by police, even as they frantically searched for her. They first realized something was wrong when Morrison failed to drop off her 2-year-old nephew, of whom she had recently gained custody, at a babysitter’s house around noon on Aug. 21. By 2 p.m. that day, Morrison should have clocked in at the local hotel she managed, and when she never showed, it triggered warning bells. Her loved ones said she never missed a shift — even when she was sick — and often picked up extra hours at work. It was Morrison’s tireless work ethic, often doing the jobs of several people, that allowed her to work her way up from housekeeping to the front desk and eventually management.

Morrison’s family members called the Pennington County sheriff’s office throughout the day, but law enforcement officials told them they had no knowledge of her whereabouts. After finishing her workday at the local jail, her sister, Raena Cross Dog, drove to her mother’s home to await further information, which arrived in the form of a visit from the Oglala Sioux Tribal Police around 11 p.m. Tribal police said they had been asked to deliver the news of Morrison’s death on behalf of Pennington County and, though Cross Dog pleaded for more information, the officers merely expressed their condolences. “I just remember slamming the door, but I think I blacked out because I was laying on the floor and my son’s dad was blowing in my face,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I checked on my mom, and my brother was holding her and they were all crying.”

Since then, Morrison’s family has been left with more questions than answers as they attempt to piece together the last moments of her life. That night, Morrison drove to a trailer park on the northern outskirts of Rapid City to meet up with a man that friends and family said she had initially connected with on the gay dating and hookup app Grindr. Phone records obtained by BuzzFeed News indicate that she’d spoken to the same unlisted number four times in the 36 hours before her death, beginning with a 2:30 a.m. incoming call on Aug. 19 that lasted for just two minutes and concluding with a nine-minute conversation the following day at 11:51 p.m., shortly before sources believe she drove to the residence where she was killed.

Family members said the sheriff’s department informed them that Morrison and the property owner decided not to go to bed together after a brief conversation over drinks, but he refused to let her drive home, asserting that she was too inebriated to get behind the wheel. He directed her to sleep on his couch instead, and the man claimed that she refused to leave the following morning, resulting in a struggle over a gun. It accidentally fired, family members said investigators told them, and she was fatally wounded. The property owner did not respond to multiple requests for comment from BuzzFeed News, but local news reports said he has been cooperating with the investigation.

Morrison’s loved ones said that explanation doesn’t match up with the person they knew or the little information they do have about the incident. While the man claimed that the shooting was in self-defense, Morrison was allegedly “bruised and beaten” in photos of her body shown to the family 10 days later. “He said Acey was trying to attack him on his property,” Muffie Mousseau, a local Two-Spirit activist who has been working with Catches, told BuzzFeed News. “That’s the story that’s out, but that’s not what really happened. How did Acey get beaten up between 1 and 7 a.m.?” Morrison was shot directly in the chest with a 12-gauge shotgun, Mousseau said, which she believes does not suggest that the gun was accidentally triggered during a physical altercation.




Courtesy Edelyn Catches

Catches added that Morrison would not have stayed overnight in a stranger’s home, even if he had attempted to stop her from leaving. That is part of the reason Catches said that her daughter had a DUI on her record, for which she recently got off probation. “Acey will not sleep in someone else's house,” Catches said. “I’ve seen Acey drunk. When there’s arguing, the first thing is she would try to defuse the situation. She turns around and leaves. She’s not the type to fight.”

Among the many other unanswered questions from that night include the brief disappearance of 2-year-old Orlando, who was missing for 24 hours before he suddenly turned up at Morrison’s apartment. Cross Dog said that family members visited the residence on three separate instances searching for him before he was found on the evening of Aug. 22, sitting awake in his crib. He’d been fed, his diaper was changed, and he didn’t show any signs of dehydration, even though the heat topped 97 degrees that day. Morton believes that someone was babysitting Orlando and brought him home, although he’s not sure who that person might have been.

“Acey would never leave him,” he said. “He was her life, her love, her everything. When she got Orlando, that made her world. She wanted to be a mom, and everything circled around this little guy. She would have never left him unoccupied, unless she knew that someone was going to be there. I personally think there’s someone that knows the story that doesn’t want to be in trouble, that has more information to give us. Someone took care of Orlando but don’t want to say nothing.”

Aside from the preliminary information they received from the sheriff’s office, family members said they’ve gotten few updates. Catches said that Detective Cameron Ducheneaux, the investigator assigned to her daughter’s case, promised to check in every week, but she said she has heard from him only a handful of times since August, despite calling him multiple times a week. When Ducheneaux arranged to meet with Catches at his office in late December, she worried that he was preparing to shut down the investigation, but instead he stood her up, she said. When she arrived at the station, Catches said she was informed that he went home early for the day, and multiple calls to his phone were not returned. Ducheneaux declined to comment on this story, also citing the ongoing investigation.

“I just miss her laughter. If I felt down, she would make a joke about whatever the situation is and get me to laugh.”

Now Morrison’s loved ones worry that the sheriff’s office may be attempting to pin the blame for her death on the woman herself. While investigators haven’t asked family members for information about her relationship to the shooter, Catches said they have zealously dug into her daughter’s past — contacting former coworkers and even people with whom she went to high school. But Catches said that finding someone with a bad word to say about her daughter will prove difficult.

“All her friends I talked to, they say, ‘Oh, she inspired me so much to keep on going and better my life,’” she said. “Now they message me and they cry. They miss Acey. I tell them, ‘Whenever you’re down, do what I do. I think about what Acey would have told me: Snap out of it, Mom. Step back. Take time to look at it and then take care of it a little at a time.’ I just miss her laughter. If I felt down, she would make a joke about whatever the situation is and get me to laugh. When she laughs, it’s just that laughter that lifts your spirit up.”

Acey Morrison’s best friend, Rowena Blacksmith, said Morrison taught her how to speak up for herself and fight for what she wanted in life, whether that was shutting down middle school bullies or meeting their mutual weight loss goals. It was Morrison who encouraged Blacksmith to go back to college last year when she was unsure of whether she could handle the responsibility of raising three children while juggling her course load. “She was the one who had goals set and knew what she wanted to do,” she told BuzzFeed News. “She was always the humorous one, and I was the shy type. She was the one who got me to get out of my shell and express myself more.”

Seeing how little seems to have been done about Morrison’s killing has made it difficult for Blacksmith to cope. Blacksmith visits her friend’s gravestone as often as three times a week, sitting for hours with a soda and assorted snacks that Morrison liked to eat. “The fact that she’s getting no justice breaks my heart and makes me relive that day when I found out,” she said. “I felt so clueless and helpless. I’m still trying to figure out life without her.”

Although Morrison’s death gained national attention after she was included in HRC’s regularly updated index of trans people who were killed, it initially drew little notice in South Dakota. When her name was read aloud as part of a Trans Day of Remembrance event in Rapid City on Nov. 20, it was news to many of those present. Some in the crowd gasped. “It was a shock to some people,” Toni Diamond, a board member for the Black Hills Center for Equality, told BuzzFeed News. “We didn’t know there was somebody locally that had lost their lives.”

Part of the reason that few locals knew about the killing is that initial media reports about the shooting either misgendered Morrison or didn’t use pronouns to describe her at all. The first — and to date, only — article published in a South Dakota publication that mentions she was transgender ran in the Argus Leader in November, almost three months after her death. This is a common phenomenon following the deaths of trans people: In a 2020 report from Media Matters, nearly two-thirds of trans individuals killed that year (62%) had been deadnamed in media reports and referred to by a gender that didn’t match their lived identity. “We go missing in lots of different ways: physically and then also through data.”

But according to advocates, understanding what happened to Morrison means recognizing not only her trans identity but the vulnerable intersections at which she lived. A 2016 report found that Native Americans were more likely than any other group to be killed by law enforcement, and Rapid City, in particular, has a poor track record in how it treats Native populations. At least 43 children died while attending the Rapid City Indian School, a boarding school run by the federal government that was shut down in 1933 following repeated and unchecked disease outbreaks. They were buried in unmarked graves on a hillside near the former campus, which is soon to be the site of a memorial. In December 2014, the police killing of Allen Locke, a 30-year-old Lakota man, drew protests after the shooting was ultimately declared justified. No charges were brought against the responding officer.

More recently, the city’s Grand Gateway Hotel was sued by the Department of Justice in October 2022 after its staff allegedly refused to book rooms for Native customers following a shooting that took place at the establishment. Before the alleged service refusal, the DOJ said co-owner Connie Uhre posted on Facebook that she cannot “allow a Native American to enter our business.” “The problem is we do not know the nice ones from the bad natives, so we just have to say no to them!” reads a screenshot of the Facebook post included in the lawsuit’s complaint. Attorneys for the hotel and Uhre have denied any discriminatory practices and that she made the Facebook post, and the lawsuit remains ongoing.



Getty Images
Rapid City, South Dakota

Mousseau, cofounder of the Native advocacy group Uniting Resilience, said the mistreatment of Indigenous people is pervasive in Rapid City, particularly for members of the LGBTQ community. She estimated that she has been stopped at least 11 different times by police since 2019, including being “taken out, put in handcuffs, roughed up, jerked around, and pushed around.” When she and her wife walk into a store, Mousseau said they can feel all eyes on them, and they make sure to check the lug nuts on their car any time they go out. They also have locks on their gas tanks and cameras outside their home.

“It’s like back in the 1920s here in Rapid City,” she said. “I guarantee you: If you have brown skin, you get off the airplane, and you walk to your taxi, you’re gonna know that you’re a different color. That’s a warning I give to a lot of minorities: You don’t want to come to Rapid City because it’s Racist City here.”

Despite the layers of oppression that LGBTQ Native people face — whether in Rapid City or elsewhere — hard data on the subject is scarce. Research shows that 84% of Indigenous women have been targeted with violence at some point in their lives, and they account for an estimated 28% of missing persons cases in South Dakota, despite making up just 4% of the state’s population. The murder rate for Native American women is 10 times higher than the national average. But while activists have successfully pushed for the conversation on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to include Two-Spirit individuals — leading many to adopt #MMIWG2S in social media posts — but it remains unclear how many of these victims are LGBTQ. The National Crime Information Center has recorded 5,700 cases since 2018, but the federal database does not indicate how many identified as trans or gender-diverse.

Charlene Aqpik Apok, executive director for Data for Indigenous Justice, said there is no “clean data source” that comprehensively examines the violence that LGBTQ and Native people face in their daily lives. “The data systems aren’t set up to capture our identities, whether it’s as Indigenous peoples, queer folks, or nonbinary people,” she told BuzzFeed News. “We go missing in lots of different ways: physically and then also through data.”

While the only information that activists have is anecdotal, Apok said the violence against these populations is so pervasive that it’s difficult to even talk about. “That's living data, and it’s very viscerally ingrained in our bodies,” she said. “People that I love very much have been really harmed, and the amount of losses that we see in our families and our communities is devastating.”

As advocates work to raise greater awareness about the hidden violence targeting LGBTQ and Native people, Morrison’s mother just hopes to keep her daughter’s memory alive. Catches said that she owed so much to Morrison, who took her to physical therapy appointments and made sure that she was eating healthy. Morrison was always giving her mother extra money — even if she was down to her last $20 — and even helped Catches get a job when she was struggling. The 56-year-old is raising Orlando now that Morrison is gone, although it has been extremely tough without her daughter there to help.


Instagram

For weeks after Morrison’s death, Catches barely slept and has suffered from extreme chest pain, but she was able to finally find some peace after being invited to a local sweat lodge. Catches elected to sit outside the door, praying, until the medicine man urged her to come in, saying that her daughter wanted to speak to her. Typically during these ceremonies, the medicine man translates on behalf of the deceased, but in this case, Morrison addressed her directly, she said. She told Catches that she worried for her but assured her mother that she was safe now. “I gotta go,” Morrison told her. “I love you, Mom.” Morrison left before her mother got to say the thing she had so badly wanted to tell her: “Thank you for being part of my life. I’m just glad I was your mom.”

As Catches and her community work to move forward, there’s one conversation that she still wants to have: a discussion with the man who shot her child. “That guy needs to admit to what he did. He needs to go to jail,” she said. “He killed Acey. I want him to live forever, and I want him to fucking suffer.” ●

Hong Kong transgender men win ID card legal challenge, but activists say more changes need to happen

Although the ruling was hailed by many as a victory for transgender people in Hong Kong, some activists said it avoided discussing other controversial issues concerning the community like restroom use.

Nathan Wei Published February 15, 2023

Transgender activist Henry Tse left Hong Kong’s High Court on January 25. 

SCMP via Reuters Connect.

In a landmark ruling on February 6, the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal unanimously decided that full sex reassignment surgery should not be a prerequisite for transgender people to amend their gender on official identification documents.

The two victorious plaintiffs, Henry Tse (谢浩霖 Xiè Hàolín) and a person identified as Q in the media, are both female-to-male transgender people. According to the written judgment, before they took legal action, the pair had both received hormone treatment, undergone breast removal surgery, and changed their original feminine first names into masculine ones. They had both changed the gender marker on their British passports after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria and receiving medical treatment in the U.K.

However, when Tse and Q applied to change the gender status on their Hong Kong ID cards, the government rejected their request, citing their failure to meet a requirement stated in a local policy, which stipulates that a transgender person has to complete full sex reassignment surgery before changing their identity cards. For female-to-male transgender individuals, this means further operations to remove the uterus and ovaries, and construct male genitalia.

In 2018, Tse, Q, and another transgender man called R launched a legal challenge against the policy at the Court of First Instance, but the trio lost the case. Tse and Q then appealed the decision to the Court of Appeal, which was dismissed in a ruling handed down in early 2022 after Tse and Q appealed.

Tse and Q didn’t give up: They took their case to the Court of Final Appeal, the highest court in Hong Kong, where judges ruled in their favor. “Much like myself, many trans folks in Hong Kong, especially my friends who are trans men, have been longing for today’s final victory for years,” Tse told reporters outside the courthouse after winning the case on February 6.

The written judgment issued by the Court of Final Appeal recognizes that the medical procedures of genital removal and construction are “at the most invasive end of the treatment spectrum for gender dysphoria and, as the medical evidence shows, a full sex reassignment surgery is not medically required by many transgender persons (including the appellants) whose gender dysphoria has been effectively treated, and who are successfully living in their acquired gender.”

The judges also pointed out that because Tse and Q have kept a masculine outward appearance for a long period of time, the incongruence between their looks and the sex entry on their ID cards would produce “greater confusion or embarrassment, and render the gender marker’s identification function deficient.” The policy about full sex reassignment surgery was rendered unconstitutional by the court, which concluded that it harmed the pair’s dignity and violated the right to privacy protected in Hong Kong’s Bill of Rights.

Joanne Leung (梁詠恩 Liáng Yǒng’ēn), a Hong Kong trans activist who founded the Transgender Resources Center in Hong Kong and Love of Rainbow Resources, told The China Project that she welcomed the ruling and considered the written judgment as reflecting a better understanding of trans men’s needs and concerns. “For female-to-male trans people, genital removal and construction operations have a higher risk but lower success rate, and are more expensive compared with other sex reassignment surgery procedures. Many people prefer to seek hormone treatment and breast surgery only,” she said.

But Leung stressed that it is still unclear whether and to what extent the government will streamline its requirements for surgical procedures. “The judgment rules ‘full surgery’ as unnecessary, but they don’t provide a definition of the term, which opens space for interpretation,” she added.

Leung said that the Hong Kong government might end up removing the requirement over genital construction, but retain the one over genital removal, a legal practice adopted by several countries to make sure that transgender people are sterilized before making amendments on their legal documents, and avoid introducing more complicated matters into the existing legal system.

“For instance, if a trans man holds the reproductive capacity and chooses to bear a child after changing his legal sex to male, the government would then need to define the legal relationship between them and deal with subsequent legal issues,” Leung said. However, trans activist groups in many places have been criticizing the measure as violating the right of bodily integrity and autonomy of trans people. “This is a question of human rights,” Leung added.

The judgment also evaded discussing other controversial issues concerning the trans community in Hong Kong, such as an ongoing legal battle over access to public washrooms. “I think they tried to limit the scope of the ruling to information change on ID cards,” Leung said. “From a legal perspective, the right to change one’s gender listing on the ID card does not necessarily entail the right to access public bathrooms freely.”

According to Leung, the root of the problem stems from a murky definition of “legal sex” in Hong Kong’s legal system. While transgender people in the city are allowed to make changes to their ID cards, an important document that one has to show when accessing certain facilities, there’s no way for them to alter the sex entry on their birth certificates, regardless of whether they have fully transitioned or not.

“We can imagine a case in which a police officer refuses to accept a person’s ID card as the final proof of his/her legal sex and continues to ask him/her to present the birth certificate, which would contradict his/her gender marker on the ID card and the gendered facilities he/she is trying to access,” Leung said. “Without specifying the definition of legal sex, it is unclear whether this police officer breaks the law or not. This is why we have to continue pushing the government to establish a more comprehensive gender recognition act and fill the gap existing in the current legal system.”

Other LGBTQ stories:

Beijing LGBT Center releases the 2021 National Transgender Health Survey Report

Released last month, this is the second large-sample national transgender health survey conducted by the Beijing LGBT Center. The first came out in 2017. The 2021 survey received 7,625 valid responses from different regions of China, highlighting some of the major issues faced by China’s transgender community, including mental health, access to medical services, and family and social life.

Seattle considers historic law barring caste discrimination

By DEEPA BHARATH

yesterday

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New Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant speaks, in Seattle. One of Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather – a man she “otherwise loved very much” – utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid. Now an elected official in a city thousands of miles from India, she has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

One of Kshama Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather — a man she “otherwise loved very much” — utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid.

The Seattle City Council member, raised in an upper-caste Hindu Brahmin household in India, was 6 when she asked her grandfather why he used that derogatory word when he knew the girl’s name. He responded that his granddaughter “talked too much.”

Now 50, and an elected official in a city far from India, Sawant has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. If her fellow council members approve it Tuesday, Seattle will become the first city in the United States to specifically outlaw caste discrimination.

In India, the origins of the caste system can be traced back 3,000 years as a social hierarchy based on one’s birth. While the definition of caste has evolved over the centuries, under both Muslim and British rule, the suffering of those at the bottom of the caste pyramid – known as Dalits, which in Sanskrit means “broken” — has continued.

In 1948, a year after independence from British rule, India banned discrimination on the basis of caste, a law that became enshrined in the nation’s constitution in 1950. Yet the undercurrents of caste continue to swirl in India’s politics, education, employment and even in everyday social interactions. Caste-based violence, including sexual violence against Dalit women, is still rampant.

What is India's caste system? Is it contentious in U.S.?

The national debate in the United States around caste has been centered in the South Asian community, causing deep divisions within the diaspora. Dalit activist-led organizations such as Oakland, California-based Equality Labs, say caste discrimination is prevalent in diaspora communities, surfacing in the form of social alienation and discrimination in housing, education and the tech sector where South Asians hold key roles.

The U.S. is the second most popular destination for Indians living abroad, according to the Migration Policy Institute, which estimates the U.S. diaspora grew from about 206,000 in 1980 to about 2.7 million in 2021. The group South Asian Americans Leading Together reports that nearly 5.4 million South Asians live in the U.S. — up from the 3.5 million counted in the 2010 census. Most trace their roots to Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

There has been strong pushback to anti-discrimination laws and policies that target caste from groups such as the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America. They say such legislation will hurt a community whose members are viewed as “people of color” and already face hate and discrimination.

But over the past decade, Dalit activism has garnered support from several corners of the diaspora, including from groups like Hindus for Human Rights. The last three years in particular have seen more people identify as Dalits and publicly tell their stories, energizing this movement.

Prem Pariyar, a Dalit Hindu from Nepal, gets emotional as he talks about escaping caste violence in his native village. His family was brutally attacked for taking water from a community tap, said Pariyar, who is now a social worker in California and serves on Alameda County’s Human Relations Commission. He moved to the U.S. in 2015, but says he couldn’t escape stereotyping and discrimination because of his caste-identifying last name, even as he tried to make a new far from his homeland.

Pariyar, motivated by the overt caste discrimination he faced in his social and academic circles, was a driving force behind it becoming a protected category in the 23-campus California State University system in January 2022.

“I’m fighting so Dalits can be recognized as human beings,” he said.

In December 2019, Brandeis University near Boston became the first U.S. college to include caste in its nondiscrimination policy. Colby College, Brown University and the University of California, Davis, have adopted similar measures. Harvard University instituted caste protections for student workers in 2021 as part of its contract with its graduate student union.

Laurence Simon, international development professor at Brandeis, said a university task force made the decision based “on the feelings and fears of students from marginalized communities.”

“To us, that was enough, even though we did not hear of any serious allegations of caste discrimination,” he said. “Why do we have to wait for there to be a horrendous problem?”

Among the most striking findings in a survey of 1,500 South Asians in the U.S. by Equality Labs: 67% of Dalits who responded reported being treated unfairly at their workplace because of their caste and 40% of Dalit students who were surveyed reported facing discrimination in educational institutions compared to only 3% of upper-caste respondents. Also, 40% of Dalit respondents said they felt unwelcome at their place of worship because of their caste.

Caste needs to be a protected category under the law because Dalits and others negatively affected by it do not have a legal way to address it, said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder and executive director of Equality Labs. Soundararajan’s parents, natives of Tamil Nadu in southern India, fled caste oppression in the 1970s and immigrated to Los Angeles, where she was born.

“We South Asians have so many difficult historical traumas,” she said. “But when we come to this country, we shove all that under the rug and try to be a model minority. The shadow of caste is still there. It still destabilizes lives, families and communities.”

The trauma is intergenerational, she said. In her book “The Trauma of Caste,” Soundararajan writes of being devastated when she learned that her family members were considered “untouchables” in India. She recounts the hurt she felt when a friend’s mother who was upper caste, gave her a separate plate to eat from after learning about her Dalit identity.

“This battle around caste is a battle for our souls,” she said.

The Dalit American community is not monolithic on this issue. Aldrin Deepak, a gay, Dalit resident of the San Francisco Bay area, said he has never faced caste discrimination in his 35 years in the U.S. He has decorated deities in local Hindu temples and has an array of community members over to his house for Diwali celebrations.

“No one’s asked me about my caste,” he said. “Making an issue where there is none is only creating more fractures in our community.”

Nikunj Trivedi, president of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, views the narrative around caste as “completely twisted.” Caste-based laws that single out Indian Americans and Hindu Americans are unacceptable, he said.

“The understanding of Hinduism is poor in this country,” Trivedi said. “Many people believe caste equals Hinduism, which is simply not true. There is diversity of thought, belief and practice within Hinduism.”

Trivedi said Seattle’s proposed policy is dangerous because it is not based on reliable data.

“There is a heavy reliance on anecdotal reports,” he said, suggesting it would be difficult to verify someone’s caste. “How can people who know very little or nothing about caste adjudicate issues stemming from it?”

Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, called Seattle’s proposed ordinance unconstitutional because “it singles out and targets an ethnic minority and seeks to institutionalize implicit bias toward a community.”

“It sends that message that we are an inherently bigoted community that must be monitored,” Shukla said.

Caste is already covered under the current set of anti-discrimination laws, which provide protections for race, ethnicity and religion, she said.

Legislation pertaining to caste is not about targeting any community, said Nikhil Mandalaparthy, deputy executive director of Hindus for Human Rights. The Washington, D.C.-based group supports the proposed caste ordinance.

“Caste needs to be a protected category because we want South Asians to have similar access to opportunities and not face discrimination in workplaces and educational settings,” he said. “Sometimes, that means airing the dirty laundry of the community in public to make it known that caste-based discrimination is not acceptable.”

Council member Sawant said legal recourse is needed because current anti-discrimination laws are not enough. Sawant, who is a socialist, said the ordinance is backed by several groups including Amnesty International and Alphabet Workers Union that represents workers employed by Google’s parent company.

More than 150,000 South Asians live in Washington state, with many employed in the tech sector where Dalit activists say caste-based discrimination has gone unaddressed. The issue was in the spotlight in 2020 when California regulators sued Cisco Systems saying a Dalit Indian engineer faced caste discrimination at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

Sawant said the ordinance does not single out one community, but accounts for how caste discrimination crosses national and religious boundaries. A United Nations report in 2016 said at least 250 million people worldwide still face caste discrimination in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Pacific regions, as well as in various diaspora communities. Caste systems are found among Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Muslims and Sikhs.

Among the diaspora, many Dalits pushing to end caste discrimination are not Hindu. Nor are they all from India.

D.B. Sagar faced caste oppression growing up in the 1990s in northern Nepal, not far from the Buddha’s birthplace. He fled it, emigrating to the U.S. in 2007. Sagar says he still bears physical and emotional scars from the oppression. His family was Dalit and practicing elements of both Hinduism and Buddhism, and felt shunned by both faiths.

“We were not allowed to participate in village festivals or enter temples,” he said. “Buddhists did not allow anyone from the Dalit community to become monks. You could change your religion, but you still cannot escape your caste identity. If converting to another religion was a solution, people would be free from caste discrimination by now.”

In school, Sagar was made to sit on a separate bench. He was once caned by the school’s principal for drinking from a water pot in the classroom that Dalits were barred from using. They believed his touch would pollute the water.

Sagar said he was shocked to see similar attitudes arise in social settings among the U.S. diaspora. His experiences motivated him to start the International Commission for Dalit Rights. In 2014, he organized a march from the White House to Capitol Hill demanding that caste discrimination be recognized under the U.S. Civil Rights Act.

His organization is currently looking into about 150 complaints of housing discrimination from Dalit Americans, he said. In one case, a Dalit man in Virginia said his landlord rented out a basement, but prevented him from using the kitchen because of his caste.

“Caste is a social justice issue, period,” he said.

Like Sagar, Arizona resident Shahira Bangar is Dalit. But she is a practicing Sikh and her parents fled caste oppression in Punjab, India. Her parents never discussed caste when she was young, but she learned the truth in her teens as she attended high school in Silicon Valley surrounded by high-caste Punjabi friends who belonged to the higher, land-owning Jat caste.

She felt left out when her friends played “Jat pride” music and when a friend’s mother used her caste identity as a slur.

“I felt this deep sadness of not being accepted by my own community,” Bangar said. “I felt betrayed.”

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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The FTC went after Fortnite. Now, the video game industry is on watch

By Vincent Acovino

Published February 15, 2023 


ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The video game industry brought in more than $200 billion last year according to recent figures, and government regulators like the Federal Trade Commission have recently taken on a more active role in policing the industry. NPR's Vincent Acovino says one lawsuit in particular has put the whole industry on watch.

VINCENT ACOVINO, BYLINE: Epic Games has reached a legal settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC accused the company of infringing on the privacy rights of children and questioned how they profit off of young players. Epic Games was last valued at $31 billion and makes Fortnite, which is one of the most popular video games in the world.

JEFF CHESTER: For decades, really, the FTC has really ignored the data gathering practices of the big companies.

ACOVINO: Jeff Chester is at the Center for Digital Democracy. He says Epic Games knowingly violated online child privacy laws known as COPPA, laws that Chester helped lobby for in the late '90s. Parents of children under the age of 13 were, for a time, not properly being asked about collecting their kids' data. Josh Golin of the organization Fairplay says that Epic did start doing that a few years ago.

JOSH GOLIN: But they didn't retroactively go back and check the ages of people who had already signed up for accounts, so Epic Games was probably illegally collecting the data of millions of children under the age of 13.

ACOVINO: The way Epic Games makes its money from younger players is also under fire from the FTC. Games like Fortnite are free to download and play, but they charge for things that make the game more expressive. You can buy skins to make your character look like Spider-Man or Naruto, and you can even buy dance moves based on popular songs for your character.

MALLORY SUPPA: I tend to go for the dances 'cause they always do, like, really popular music.

ACOVINO: Mallory Suppa is a 24-year-old teacher in Jacksonville, Fla., and she spent around a hundred dollars on Fortnite over a period of about three years.

SUPPA: "Toosie Slide," "Say So," "Fly N Ghetto" - all, like, the TikTok versions of that. I have all of those dances.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SAY SO")

DOJA CAT: (Singing) Day to night to morning, keep with me in the moment, I'd let you...

ACOVINO: But she doesn't regret the money she spent to hit the griddy with Goku. For her, it's a steal.

SUPPA: I've played a ton, and I also think - like, the group of friends that we play with, we all live in, like, different places. So if I were to try to travel to them and see them, it would be way more expensive than me being able to just hop on a game and play with them.

ACOVINO: It's younger players who may be more susceptible to the social pressures that fuel these purchases.

SUPPA: With kids, it's probably really hard because it's, like, constantly like, oh, look at this new thing, look at this new thing, every single day.

ACOVINO: And the FTC argues making these impulse-fueled buys was too easy. Josh Golin says that Fortnite saved credit card information after just one use and in some cases didn't even require authorization.

GOLIN: Fortnite didn't even have those kind of basic safety measures to prevent accidental purchases by kids that parents might not have wanted.

ACOVINO: Within the video game industry, Fortnite is hardly the biggest offender when it comes to these so-called dark patterns that are meant to trick players into spending money.

LEON XIAO: I've seen games that are obviously marketed at children where they would put, like, a very cute little pet into a cage and make the pet sort of cry to try to get the child to - are you sure you don't want to rescue this pet by paying, say, two bucks?

ACOVINO: Leon Xiao is a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen and studies how video games are regulated. He's familiar with the challenges of writing laws for such a large and unwieldy industry. One moneymaking addition to many video games has been the loot box where players pay real money for a random in-game reward. It's essentially a form of gambling. Belgium has made this illegal, and despite that...

XIAO: I found that 82 of the 100 highest grossing iPhone games were still selling some form of loot boxes.

ACOVINO: That points to the kind of enforcement challenges U.S. regulators are up against. Josh Golin says that's why the FTC has gone after Fortnite, one of the biggest fish in the pond.

GOLIN: And I think it's also a big enough fine that it's going to send shock waves across the gaming industry and cause other platforms to clean up their practices.

ACOVINO: Epic Games will pay $520 million in fines and has agreed to rework their practices. Quote, "no developer creates a game with the intention of ending up here," said the company in a detailed statement to consumers.

Vincent Acovino, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

A penitentiary unit will shut down after deaths, exposed by NPR and Marshall Project

By Joseph Shapiro

Published February 15, 2023

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Today, federal officials are taking steps to close one of the most dangerous prison units in the country. The Special Management Unit of the Thomson Penitentiary in northwestern Illinois will shut down, and hundreds of inmates will move somewhere else within the federal prison system. This change came about because of murders and suicides among inmates at Thomson, violence that was exposed by the reporting of NPR and its partner, The Marshall Project. We'll warn you that this report includes some descriptions of that violence. NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro is here to talk with us about this development. Hi, Joe.

JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.

A SHAPIRO: The federal officials who are shutting down this prison unit say they are doing so largely because of violent conditions which you documented in your reporting. Tell us what you found.

J SHAPIRO: That's right. This is reporting I did with Christie Thompson of The Marshall Project. And first, we found a string of violent deaths in just two years - five homicides - prisoners killing other prisoners - and two suicides. And there was another violent death - we're not sure what happened - just two weeks ago.

A SHAPIRO: The question is, why? What set this prison apart? Why was it so much more violent? What did your reporting show?

J SHAPIRO: Right. Well, it started with a little-known practice, something called double celling, which is the practice of putting two men into one tiny solitary confinement cell. It's about the size of a parking space. And they're locked down for 23, 24 hours a day. And we reported on men also placed in restraints, often painful, four-point restraints, for hours or days, often in violation of federal prison policies. This happened in a room that the prisoners told us they called the torture chamber. And these tight restraints would leave scars that the men told us they called their Thomson tattoos.

A SHAPIRO: A lot of your reporting relied on prisoners or their family members who courageously spoke up about these conditions, sometimes even though they feared that the prison system might retaliate against them. Can you introduce us to someone?

J SHAPIRO: Yes, one prisoner, Demetrius Hill. He was an eyewitness to a killing. And he got a message to us the day after it happened. A family told their stories of how corrections officers would often put men together as cellmates or in recreation yards, men who they knew were going to fight. Sue Phillips says guards put her son Matthew alone in a recreation cage with two members of a white supremacist gang, who then killed him. Matthew was Jewish. He had a large star of David tattooed on his chest. And the indictment of these men who were charged with killing him says they have their own tattoos for a prison gang called the Valhalla Bound Skinheads. Here's Sue Phillips. She's talking about what the indictment says was found in their cells.

SUE PHILLIPS: They had white supremacy markings on their shoes. They also had cells that contained Nazi memorabilia, mugs with swastikas on them, articles of literature promoting white supremacy, drawings of Hitler.

J SHAPIRO: These men brutally kicked and stomped her son. And Sue Phillips says corrections officers should have known what would happen when they put her son alone in that recreation cage with them.

A SHAPIRO: I understand the Bureau of Prisons won't say where these 500 or so inmates from Thomson will go, but based on your reporting, it does not seem safe to assume that this is necessarily going to solve the problem.

J SHAPIRO: Right. Christie Thompson and I have been writing for seven years now about problems at these special management units. They're supposed to be places that take the most violent, dangerous federal prisoners, gang leaders, ones who commit prison violence - although, by the way, we talked to men who didn't seem to fit any of those descriptions. Our first reporting found similar violence at the previous version of the special management unit at the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pa. And shortly after our reporting, that unit was moved to Thomson. And Thomson became another violence factory, which is why the Federal Bureau of Prisons now is shutting it down after its own investigation, which found the problems at Thomson are so deep and persistent that they figured the place can't be fixed. It's not clear, though, what will replace it. Or, as you said, where these men are going. But we're going to keep watching.

A SHAPIRO: That's NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro. Thank you.

J SHAPIRO: Thank you, Ari. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NORAD is back in the news. So what does it do, exactly?

For years, North American Aerospace Command — or NORAD — had its headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. In this archival photo, a bus enters a tunnel for a half-mile trip to a command center inside the Cheyenne complex. The headquarters is now in nearby Colorado Springs.
CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES

BY Bill Chappell
FEB 15, 2023 

NPR

It was created as a counter to a rival superpower. So in a way, it's fitting that a tiff with another superpower has once again thrust North American Aerospace Command — or NORAD — into conversations about national security and spying.

For the public, the most frequent mentions of NORAD likely come in Cold War-era stories and its famed Santa Tracker, which makes the news every Christmas. But over its nearly 65-year history, NORAD has had to adjust to new threats, and its leader says it needs to modernize, citing a "domain awareness gap" and equipment that was installed in the 1970s and '80s.


With many people now asking questions about NORAD, here's a rundown of its history, how it works today and how it might change:

Is NORAD a U.S. entity?

It's a joint project by the U.S. and Canada, motivated by concerns that the Soviet Union might send bombers to North America. What began as collaborations on air defense and radar installations evolved into calls for a shared organization. The two countries formalized the first NORAD Agreement on May 12, 1958.

The agreement has been renewed every 10 years — a process that has allowed leaders to repeatedly widen its parameters.

For a sign of how things have changed, look at the name. While the first unified command was called the North American Air Defense Command, its name was later changed to include the word "Aerospace," acknowledging threats from satellites and other space vehicles.

The organization also monitors for maritime threats, and it helps civil authorities track aircraft suspected to be used in drug trafficking.

How is it different from U.S. Northern Command?

It can be confusing — both are led by the same officer, Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck. Their responsibilities can overlap, but the key difference is that the U.S. Northern Command is a U.S. military headquarters.


U.S. Northern Command was formed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its activation in October 2002 was "the first time a single military commander has been charged with protecting the U.S. homeland since the days of George Washington," according to an official history.

It's responsible for protecting air, land and sea approaches to North America, from Mexico to the continental U.S., Alaska, and Canada.

U.S. Northern Command's mandate also includes disasters and emergencies, from giving defense support to civil authorities to sharing military resources with federal, state and local authorities.

Where is NORAD located?

For decades, NORAD was headquartered in Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain — a bunker facility whose tunnel entrance will likely be familiar to anyone who has watched the Stargate movie or TV series.

While NORAD still maintains a presence there, its main headquarters are at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. Officials announced that move in 2006, calling for an integrated command center with U.S. North Command.

What is NORAD's 'domain awareness' problem?

The recent spate of unidentified airborne objects has put a spotlight on how NORAD's radar systems work: when they were adjusted to pick up objects like the Chinese balloon, crews saw much more information.

NORAD's current and former leaders say the radar network and other equipment sorely needs to be updated, and work has been ongoing with Canadian officials to chip away at that job.

"NORAD and USNORTHCOM rely on what we call the North Warning System, which is an array of short- and long-range radars in northern Canada, Alaska and elsewhere," retired Vice Admiral Mike Dumont, a former deputy commander at NORAD, recently told NPR.


"They were put into place in the late 1980s, and that system of radar coverage was concluded in about 1992. It's 1970s technology," Dumont said. "So no, NORAD does not have what it needs to adequately defend North America. They need new sensors, sensors that are able to detect in all domains. And by all domains, I mean space, land, air, cyber and maritime."

A NORAD/USNORTHCOM cyber unit was approved in 2012. But the potential battlefield keeps changing, including the threat of hypersonic cruise missiles.

Last year, VanHerck highlighted three "domain awareness challenges," from the difficulty of keeping up with competitors' advances in submarines to monitoring missiles and cyber operations.

"The good news is we're working to fix this," VanHerck said last summer. Praising the latest appropriations, he added, "There's four over-the-horizon radars in the budget, so I look forward to that."

NORAD made history this month


For the first time in its history, fighter jets from NORAD shot down airborne objects in U.S. airspace, Gen. VanHerck said this week, after NORAD tracked a massive Chinese balloon that the U.S. says is a spy airship, along with three smaller objects.

The balloon and another object were shot down under the U.S. Northern Command's authority — the first off of South Carolina and one in Alaska.

But NORAD was directly involved in two other takedowns: On Feb. 11, a U.S. F-22 shot down an object in Canada's central Yukon, after the object crossed from Alaska over the U.S.-Canada border. And on Feb. 12, a U.S. F-16 took down an object over Lake Huron, along the border.

What about NORAD's Santa-tracking domain?

By now, it's a famous story: back in December of 1955, a red phone at the Continental Air Defense Command, NORAD's predecessor, started ringing.

It wasn't a four-star general on the line — but a young boy, who had seen a misprinted phone number in a Sears newspaper ad urging kids to call Santa personally. The recipient of the call, Col. Harry Shoup, quickly went from being annoyed at a potential prank to realizing he had a new duty to perform: encouraging a youngster's curiosity and belief in Santa.

"So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy," Shoup's own children later remembered.

It grew from there, as Shoup recruited servicemembers to answer the phone. NORAD's Santa Tracker later became an authority on the jolly gift-giver's trek around the world. [Copyright 2023 NPR]