Well, good morning, all. Nice to see you, Dr. Lerman.

Thank you for being here. My friend Spencer, thank you for inviting me. My name is Shelley Mayer. I’m the State Senator for this community, which is, for those of you who are not familiar, this is about 320,000 people that I represent in the state capital in Albany, New York. And in the districts that are drawn for the New York State Senate, we have gerrymandered districts, so to speak. They go like this. They’re not a regular shape that you would think. So, I go from, for those of you who know New York, from the Bronx border in Yonkers to the border with Connecticut. A big district, very diverse, and so I’m very honored to be here and to speak a little bit about some of the issues that I think you are focused on. I have long remarks, but I might cut it down since we are fewer, but whatever you would like. So, thank you for having me. After all, I’m just a New York State Senator, deeply familiar with the ups and downs of New York State politics and what happens in Washington, but I’m not an international expert.

But even without the expertise of many of you here, particularly those from other nations, I am a personal witness to the issues of ethnic and religious conflict in the communities I represent, in the response of New York State to an increase in incidents of hatred, and to the increasingly hate-filled tone of disagreement and conflict within the United States, all too often based on ethnic and religious bigotry. So, I’m honored to speak to you today on my perspective on these issues and my proposed solutions, many of which you already know, on a more micro scale of what we can do about the issues that bring you here today. So, first let me set the table. It’s highly appropriate we have this discussion now in the midst of the most sacred time in the Jewish calendar, the time between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the Day of Atonement.

In the Jewish calendar, it’s a time of reflection, self-review, commitment, and recommitment to the concept of Tikkun olam, repairing the world, and to what we are going to do to achieve this. So, it’s a fitting moment to remind ourselves of the quote from Isaiah, “come let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, he shall judge between the nations and arbitrate for many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore.”

We’re all familiar with that. Well, clearly, the world has not followed that very well. And that is the heart of the matter that we’re here to discuss. Here in the United States, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program, which creates criminal data about hate crimes, reported a troubling increase in bias-related crimes from 2019 to 2020, an increase of almost 1,000 reported crimes deemed single bias incidents. Of these, over 61% were attributable to race, ethnicity, and ancestry, over 13% to religion, 20% to bias based on sexual orientation. And that’s just criminal behavior. And here in New York State, bias-related complaints spiked significantly during the height of COVID. Despite an overall decline in hate crime incidents, reporting to police departments and sheriff offices in New York State in 2020, anti-Black and anti-Asian hate crimes increased. Agencies reported 128 anti-Black crimes, most reported in the last five years, 31 anti-Asian crimes, the highest number in the last 10 years.

And in New York City in 2021, and you may know this, there were 131 hate crimes targeting Asians in New York compared to 28 in 2020 and just one in 2019. Looking at New York State, race, ethnicity, and national origin constitute the most common bias motivation, 44%. Anti-religion bias, 42%. Anti-black bias, 59% of the incidents involving these kinds of issues.

In the anti-religion bias category, anti -Jewish crimes were 88.3 % of the total reported. And according to the Anti -Defamation League, nationally, anti -Semitic incidents increased 24 % in New York State, which included 51 anti-Semitic assaults, the highest number of anti -Semitic assaults ever recorded in New York State. And even here in Westchester County, viewed as one of the most affluent counties in the United States, complaints of bias on these categories jumped almost 74% from 2019 to 2020. And one other category that we should talk about, online hate. Online hate, which is not reported or deemed a hate crime, continues to be so prevalent in American society. Hate -based harassment, which targets people because of membership in a marginalized or minority group, identity remains high. According to the Anti -Defamation League, harassment against marginalized groups by online media is 65% of the complaints. 58% of marginalized people reported hate -based harassment in the past 12 months.

That’s the global picture of the United States, the state of New York, and even here in Westchester County. But I’m in a micro little thing. I’m in the world of politics in a district. I have an incredibly diverse district. I’ll give you an example. Last week here’s what some of the things I attended. A Catholic wake, a Buddhist celebration, an Armenian church picnic, a Latino college program, an African American women’s political group, and a Rosh Hashanah service. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. My colleague Emily Lavin is here, my communications director, we go to communities representing the diversity of my district every day and we celebrate that. That is the joy of the American experience that I am proud to represent, but too often the anger, the resentment, and the hatred has now bubbled down into the politics of local office like mine. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, but I’m giving you my perspective here on the ground, where I talk to people who are not engaged in politics or anything else, but they’re angry.

Many of them exhibit open racism, open ethnic and religious hatred. So how can we fix it? Here are some of my ideas. I have six specific ideas that, again, on an international stage, they may not be easily transferable, but they work in the world of real people and real policy. The first is early exposure to diversity and education about diverse communities. I’m very fortunate to be the chair of the New York State Senate Committee on Education, responsible for education of the entire state, from children in the city of New York to children in the most rural communities on the border with Canada. We have a fantastic premise of free public education in the United States. It has led to the path for so many students, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or zip code, as we say, to have a path forward. This is one of the great promises of America. But in a diverse and changing world, our educational system must reflect the reality of the world and the fact that racial, ethnic, and other tensions are causing death, destruction, and fear in all corners of our planet and even here at home.

So, for here in the United States, I believe we need to be more attentive and intentional to the history of America, both our strengths and our shortcomings. We need to talk about African American contributions to the American story, and not just on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Too many American high school graduates know only about Dr. King, when there are hundreds of thousands of African Americans who changed our country. They know just the basics about slavery, and yet some school boards in the United States don’t even want the word slavery mentioned in our schools. They know absolutely nothing about the story of the Asian American experience in the United States, and particularly in light of COVID, this became clearer and clearer as there was an effort to blame the Asian American community for COVID being present in the United States. I personally only began to learn the full story of the Asian American experience in the United States after COVID started and the activists raised their voice.

I think it is likely my colleagues in the Senate are likely to require some kind of specific educational curriculum on the Asian American experience based on what we saw here. We need to teach more fully and regularly across all the grades about the Holocaust, genocide, acts of hatred, death, and destruction. What’s going on in Iran right now? We need to talk about that in our schools with great detail, regularity and sensitivity to the tensions that exist in our culture. I would say as the chair of this committee we have hundreds of bills where members are saying teach about this, teach about LGBTQ history in the United States. Teach more about the Holocaust. Teach about genocide in countries all over the world. And yet, we have done very little to require schools to do that. I think the pressure is on, and unless schools voluntarily agree to do more, we are going to end up telling schools what they must teach. And in the United States, schools do not like to be told what they want to teach, what they must teach. But this is a moment in time where we can’t back off from making sure our students learn. And the other thing is, we need students to be capable of participating in our civic life. And they cannot do so if they are not understanding of the diversity of the American experience. It is really a hindrance to full participation when you still hold on to these ideas of racism and anti -religious bigotry and ethnic hatred. The second point where I think we have work to do is in the role of social media. Social media companies have been too slow, hamstrung by misaligned incentives, and ill equipped to address the amount of hatred on social media. Children are being exposed to it, in fact addicted to it, in the United States at a very early age. As they say, technology companies made possible the fire hose of hate speech, conspiracy theories, and misinformation through news feeds powered by algorithms that amplify divisive and hatred content.

At the time that President Trump’s COVID -19 diagnosis was announced, there was an 85 % increase in negative sentiment on Twitter towards Asians. His diagnosis of COVID -19 was directly correlated through social media with anti -Asian violence. And there was a national surge in anti-Asian hate crimes. Myself, my colleague, Senator John Liu, who’s the chair of the Committee on New York City Schools, in his district in Queens reported unprecedented physical attacks on people simply going to the grocery store, taking their kids to school. Even in my home community of Yonkers, New York, the city on the border of the Bronx where I live, the third largest city in New York, an Asian American woman in public housing was beaten mercilessly by a man for no reason, no reason at all. She was carrying her grocery bags, an older woman, and he’s been prosecuted and will go to jail. But social media and our fascination with it is undoubtedly contributing to the rise in hate and destruction based on race, ethnicity, or religion.

We must aggressively force the companies that host these platforms to shut down false information, racist and hateful and violent interaction, and unlawful behavior. That’s the second thing. Third thing, I think probably translates to those of you outside the United States, rebuilding civic ties and strengthening community reintegration. It’s part of the American tradition and many other countries as well to have a robust civic life where people participated through volunteer activities, whether being on the board of a library, their parent association, their church, their neighborhood association. There’s so much less of that now. That was a way for people to meet, to eat, to join with people who were different than them, to get to meet them. Your child is in school with a child of a different race, a different ethnic heritage, a different religion, and you sat with the parents, and you got to know them, and you worked together. There’s much less of that now, for a number of reasons. But that is an essential way that we break down these barriers, because when you meet, and I say eat, with someone who is different, you create a bond that shows you have common humanity, and we are losing a good deal of that.

And for me, as a very proud American, this is something that America must regain. This willingness to engage in volunteer activities that involve different people that you don’t know before and then learn about them. So these multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious activities, they’re all over the place. But between you and me, they’re mostly older people. The next generation is spending much less time. They’re taking care of their kids. They’re working more. They have pressures of the economy. And they’re tied up in either social media, their other activities. We have to, and I’ll get to this at the end, realize that this common good of coming together has to be dominant. We cannot only be about ourselves. That’s how we end up in this really moment of ugliness that we’re seeing around the world. So that’s a third thing. The fourth thing is working within and across faiths. True interfaith dialogue and hard work within our faiths and across the faiths needs to be done.

I have a wonderful example that I heard about from one of my friends who is a leader in teaching people how to be cantors, that’s the singers in the Jewish tradition. They’re now requiring peace studies as part of their curriculum. To be a cantor, just to sing in the service, I mean that’s what we used to think, you just sung in the service. They’re saying, no, you’re not just singing the service. You’re bringing together people through sound and music, which is a tremendous unifying force like art. But you need to learn how your role can translate into being a missionary of peace. And so, they’re requiring this, which I think is a fantastic development.

But also, there’s opportunity for interfaith work. Even within faiths, and any of you who are involved in the faith community, everybody’s busy fighting against each other, But even within their own faith, forget that they have one faith and another faith. Within the faiths, in one of my communities, the black church community is not unified, the Latino church community is not unified, and the other faiths are not unified. So it is very hard to create interfaith when we’re having fights within our own faith. But we’ve got to get past that. And interfaith work has power, because people do go to their places of worship, they do respect the leaders in the worship community, and it is an opportunity to use faith as a unifying message, which cuts across every faith. And I think there is tremendous opportunity, I’ve spoken about this here, I don’t believe we have enough interfaith activity here in our community. Some of my community is very effective at it, and other parts of it are much less effective and I think that’s something we can do.

And the last of the big things is passing anti-hate legislation and then making sure it’s enforced. So, in New York State, 75 years ago, New York was the first state in the nation to create an anti-discrimination bill, making it unlawful under New York law to discriminate against people in employment, in housing. It was called the Ives Quinn anti-discrimination law in 1945, signed by a Republican governor. We’ve built that law over time. We’ve expanded it and strengthened it. Now it includes many more forms of discrimination that are unlawful under New York law. But if you don’t enforce it, and you don’t let people know, it’s just a piece of paper. So, the same with our laws in Congress, and our laws in every other state and municipality. We need strong laws, and then we need to enforce them. And we can’t be dependent on whether the prosecutor or the enforcing agency agrees or doesn’t agree. This is a society of laws. These laws against discrimination have a purpose, which is to deter unlawful behavior and to put people on notice about what is unlawful.

We cherish the First Amendment here, and speech is protected, but speech that gets close to conduct and is threatening is in another category. And in the United States, we can go after it, and we should. Because hate-filled, threatening speech is all too prevalent and very damaging. This is another area in which voting really matters because who we have as judges, prosecutors, elected officials really matters. You need people who are committed to this. So, my last point is strengthening our belief in the collective good. You know, President Kennedy said this famous phrase so long ago, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for the country. We’ve walked back from that. We’re very self-absorbed as a country, in my opinion. There’s not enough willingness to say, I’m putting my own interests aside for the common good of my community, of my city, of my state, of my country. Everything is not about me.

We try to teach our children this, but then we see that as a society, we are not equally committed to it. In today’s America, some of that has been lost, but I think it’s time to reassert it publicly, to say it loudly, to confront those who are unwilling to accept it. I was out at a train station this morning at 6.30 in the morning, campaigning for office, and there are plenty of people who don’t want to have anything to do with the electoral process. They’re finished with it, it’s terrible, go away, you’re all terrible. If you’re not going to engage in choosing who’s going to represent you, and luckily, we have a system where you can choose whether you like me, you can choose somebody else. This is a right that people died for, and it is a right that matters. And it’s important that we make people understand, from children on up, that this civic life of a common good has value. One, it protects people. We have a society of laws where we try to keep people safe. But for the rest of the world, we’re all in it together.

We need a world that accepts and acknowledges the diversity and the threats that hatred and violence pose to our friends and neighbors, to all of us. So, these six steps that I outlined sound so simple but hard to make happen are just my one person’s approach based on a day-to-day life with people with great differences, but much in common. In that way, America is a testing ground for these ideas, because it is so diverse, and it has a commitment to individual freedom. But we have to move forward with the confidence that working together, the ideas of unity, peace, and love, the beating of swords into plowshares, will move us towards a place of peace and away from hatred, violence, ethnic terrorism, religious bigotry, and racism. I’m confident we can get there, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you.