We are proud to present the next Fireside Chat as part of a series of discussions produced in partnership with the New York State COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Taskforce.
We would appreciate your help in spreading the word – please invite your networks to attend the event through email, or by posting the event information on social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Participants can view the program at ny.gov/VETF.
We encourage you to submit questions for the speakers in advance by emailing [email protected], and we will also be taking live questions from attendees. We will do our best to pose as many questions to our panelists as possible. You may also choose to register for this event (not required), as a means of adding the event to your calendar and for reminders, at the link here: https://covid-19-vaccines-lgbt-community-staying-informed.eventbrite.com
Thank you all and let’s #VaccinateNY!
Please refer any questions to Emily Stetson, Special Assistant for Intergovernmental Affairs, by email at [email protected] or by phone at (518) 956-2617.
The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) employs skilled attorneys in various roles throughout the agency. Specifically, attorneys for DMV perform legal duties such as conduct traffic and safety-related administrative hearings, provide legal guidance to the agency and its numerous program areas, and represent the agency in various legal proceedings, among other key duties. Currently, DMV is actively recruiting candidates for the Senior Attorney and Motor Vehicle Referee Civil Service positions.
Click here to access the New York State Department of Civil Service’s Legal Specialties Continuous Recruitment Exam. As the flyer notes, attorneys who meet the minimum qualifications must complete the Legal Specialties Continuous Recruitment Exam. Once completed and scored by Civil Service, the attorney is placed on a Civil Service list that many New York State agencies, including DMV, use to recruit and hire attorneys to join their legal team. While the process to apply has a few steps, the rewards associated with a legal career in New York State Government make the exam process worthwhile.
If you have any questions, please contact Paula Gaylord at 518-486-9659.
We are proud to present the next Fireside Chat as part of a series of discussions produced in partnership with the New York State COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Taskforce.
We would appreciate your help in spreading the word – please invite your networks to attend the event through email, or by posting the event information on social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Participants can view the program at ny.gov/VETF.
We encourage you to submit questions for the speakers in advance by emailing [email protected], and we will also be taking questions from attendees. We will do our best to pose as many questions to our panelists as possible. You may also choose to register for this event (not required), as a means of adding the event to your calendar and for reminders, at the link here: https://covid-19-vaccine-tribal-nations-building-trust.eventbrite.com.
Thank you all and let’s #VaccinateNY!
Please refer any questions to Emily Stetson, Special Assistant for Intergovernmental Affairs, by email at [email protected] or by phone at (518) 956-2617.
On March 9, 2021, Fordham Law News published an article spotlighting the role that Fordham Law students have played in spearheading AABANY’s Covid Rent Relief Program. Olympia Moy ‘21 and Meng Zhang ’20 kickstarted AABANY’s volunteer effort last summer, after New York State launched a rent relief program to assist residents who had lost income due to the pandemic. Concerned about low-income Chinatown-area residents, many of whom did not speak English as their first language, Moy and Zhang worked with other AABANY law students and attorneys to hold a one-day rent assistance event. On July 26, the volunteers helped 125 pre-registrants and many walk-ins navigate the challenging application process. When the state’s rent relief program opened its second round of applications in the winter, AABANY volunteers teamed up again to disseminate the program information and invite applicants to contact AABANY’s hotline for assistance. Nicholas Loh ‘22 helped lead this two-week hotline effort, connecting over 85 callers with Chinese-speaking volunteers.
The article celebrated the recognition that these students and AABANY members have received from four New York state senators. At a Lunar New Year virtual celebration in February, Sen. Brian Kavanagh awarded AABANY’s Pro Bono and Community Service Committee with a certificate of commendation for providing invaluable legal assistance to the AAPI community. Looking into the future, Moy states: “We students are going to continue to try to respond as long as there are further rollouts and extensions.” To learn more about the advocacy efforts of Moy and her fellow AABANY volunteers, click here.
The March 1st broadcast of the Brian Lehrer Show featured Arun Venugopal, a senior reporter for WNYC’s Race & Justice Unit. Together, Brian and Arun discussed the alarming rise in anti-Asian violence since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brian opened the show by citing statistics from AABANY and Paul, Weiss’ co-authored report: A Rising Tide of Hate and Violence against Asian Americans in New York During COVID-19: Impact, Causes, Solutions. According to the report, there have been more than 2,500 anti-Asian hate incidents nationwide between March and September of 2020. Drawing on another finding of the AABANY report, Arun noted that targeted attacks are particularly commonplace in New York, where Asians are more at risk of physical assault, verbal harassment, and being coughed and spat on. Arun proceeded to draw awareness to a number of local hate incidents, the most recent among them being the stabbing of an Asian American man in Chinatown last Thursday. Citing the opinion of Chris Kwok, AABANY board director and co-executive editor of AABANY’s report, Arun noted that such attacks may be motivated by the stereotype that Asians are “soft targets” who will not fight back. Expanding on this notion, Arun stated that Asians must be seen as part of broader communities that will fight back.
In the remainder of the show, listeners from the Asian American community called in to voice their own experiences as victims of the “soft target” stereotype and express a similar desire for intersectional coalitions. While debates continue over how such coalitions may best be built, Arun pointed out that we all have a role to play in the here and now. By reporting bias incidents to groups like Stop AAPI Hate and the Asian American Federation, whose work is also discussed in the AABANY report, we can ensure that the issue of anti-Asian violence remains at the top of the nation’s political agenda.
To listen to this episode of the Brian Lehrer Show in its entirety, click here.
On March 1, 2021, Law360 published an interview with Jane Jeong, a member of AABANY’s Young Lawyers Committee and the host of its new podcast, The Whole Lawyer Project. Diverging from your typical legal podcast, The Whole Lawyer Project spotlights successful Asian American attorneys and the human side of their profession. As Marco Poggio of Law360 writes, “It tells the life stories that won’t be found on the bio page of a law firm’s website.” Poggio’s interview with Jane centers on how her personal and professional experiences inspired this latest creative venture. Invoking her own identity as a Korean American, an immigrant, and a woman, Jane explains, “there are not many leaders in the law who look like me, that have my background.” In the competitive and high-stress environment of BigLaw, this problem of representation fueled Jane’s imposter syndrome, which led her to start writing about the pitfalls of striving for perfectionism on AABANY’s blog. Now, Jane looks to the AABANY podcast as a new platform for the same passion project: increasing the visibility of Asian American leaders in the legal industry, and sharing her own hard-won lessons about balancing wellness and work. Ultimately, Jane hopes to inspire listeners to pursue their own passions, even when they deviate from preconceived plans or customary paths. “My goal for the podcast is to give people a chance to see what other people are doing in all these different creative ways, both conventionally and unconventionally, and see how life in the law can really fit them, instead of the other way around,” Jane says.
To learn more about the creation and content of The Whole Lawyer Project, Law360’s full interview with Jane can be found here (subscription required).
我们很荣幸推出下一期的炉边谈话，作为与纽约州 COVID-19 疫苗公平工作组 (New York State COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Taskforce) 合作开展的一系列讨论活动的一部分。这将是一次向全纽约州讲普通话的社区提供教育的难得机会，意义非凡，所以我们希望这次活动的参与者越多越好。
We are proud to present the next Fireside Chat as part of a series of discussions produced in partnership with the New York State COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Taskforce. This will be a meaningful opportunity to provide education to Mandarin-speaking communities across New York State, and we want to encourage as much attendance as possible.
AABANY is proud to launch its official podcast series, The Whole Lawyer Project, hosted by Jane Jeong, which showcases Asian American attorneys and leaders throughout the nation and the human stories behind their success.
For Jane, learning about the human stories — and sacrifices — behind our external success is a personal passion and mission. As a member of AABANY’s Young Lawyers Committee, Jane previously wrote about her pursuit of wellness in the legal profession on the AABANY blog, where she published The Ten Tips Our Asian Parents Never Told Us, Upside Down, and The (COVID) Days of Our Lives.
Most recently, Jane shared her story with Law360, in an article entitled The Pursuit Of Wellness In BigLaw: Lessons From My Journey (subscription required). In a heartfelt account, Jane opened up about mental health and wellness issues in Big Law — including her personal experiences with the pressures of the industry, the costs of perfectionism, reaching an emotional breaking point and, as a potential blueprint for others, how she has set boundaries and made changes to her daily routine to take care of herself. “I conflated sacrifice with success and exhaustion with excellence. I just continued to reach and reach — demanding that I become the perfect attorney I knew I was not, waiting for the day I could finally stop acting and just be,” she writes.
Together with Jane, AABANY is proud to further explore the human side of lawyering in The Whole Lawyer Project. The inaugural episodes of the podcast, which feature immediate past AABANY President Brian Song and AboveTheLaw Founder, David Lat, can be found under the tab for The Whole Lawyer Project on the AABANY blog. It can also be found on Spotify and iTunes. For anyone hoping to gain further insight into the human stories behind our external success, it is well worth a listen.
An eight-fold increase in reported hate crimes against Asians, racist rhetoric such as “the Chinese virus,” and insufficient media coverage of anti-Asian violence — these were among the timely issues discussed at a press conference hosted by the Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) on February 11. The press conference centered around AABANY and Paul, Weiss’ co-authored report: A Rising Tide of Hate and Violence against Asian Americans in New York During COVID-19: Impact, Causes, Solutions. Speakers of note included:
Chris Kwok, Board Director, Issues Committee Chair
Karen King, Vice Chair, Pro Bono & Community Service Committee; Counsel, Paul, Weiss
U.S. Rep., Grace Meng (D-NY)
Prof. Russell Jeung, Stop AAPI Hate
President Frank Wu, Queens College, CUNY
AABANY President Sapna Palla and Executive Director Yang Chen were joined by executive editors of the report Chris Kwok and Karen King, professors Russell Jeung and Frank Wu, and Congresswoman Grace Meng.
The report’s primary finding is that anti-Asian hate and violence surged in 2020. Between March and September of that year, the number of reported anti-Asian hate incidents related to COVID-19 exceeded 2,500.
At the press conference, Rep. Meng kickstarted the discussion of this grim reality by situating it against a backdrop of long-standing intolerance toward the AAPI community, which motivated the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Meng condemned some of the nation’s top government officials and social institutions for fanning the flames of this deep-rooted racism. As noted in the report, the xenophobic rhetoric of elected officials, paired with misinformation spread by the media, normalizes and fuels disease-based stigma against Asians. The subsequent uptick in violence against Asian communities motivated Meng to propose and help pass House Resolution 908 in 2020 denouncing all forms of anti-Asian sentiment. While Meng described the bill as largely symbolic, it has since been incorporated into President Biden’s presidential memorandum, which includes concrete measures to disseminate COVID-19 resources in different languages and improve the collection of data on hate crimes. Meng’s fight to amplify voices within the AAPI community thus lights the path forward. “We’ve taken a positive step — an initial step — but we must continue to speak out whenever and wherever anti-Asian sentiment rises,” said Meng.
A similar desire to spotlight the plight of AAPIs motivated Chris Kwok to serve as an executive editor for the report on anti-Asian violence. Since the onset of the pandemic, Kwok noted at the conference, there has not been a single prosecution or civil resolution for any incident of anti-Asian bias. A key purpose of the report is thus to show that Asian invisibility in the political and legal space has real-life consequences. Moving forward, Kwok hopes to inspire a constructive dialogue among Asians and other Americans alike. To that end, the report highlights seven initiatives that will help policyholders at all levels keep communities safe and hold perpetrators of violence accountable. These initiatives range from broad prescriptions, such as public education campaigns and collaboration among minority groups, to specific remedies, such as clear reporting mechanisms for victims and the more consistent prosecution of hate crimes.
Professor Russell Jeung continued the discussion of possible solutions to anti-Asian hate incidents while echoing his concern about the divisive effects of COVID-19. Drawing from data he helped collect for Stop AAPI Hate, Jeung said that among United States cities, New York City reported the second-highest number of hate incidents in the past year. Assessing the range of anti-Asian hate incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate, the report notes a concerning number of incidents involving verbal harassment, physical assault, and being coughed and spat on. Worse still, the youth and the elderly are the most common victims of racist attacks and consequent racial trauma. Among its federal recommendations to address this issue, Stop AAPI Hate proposes to expand civil rights protections for AAPIs experiencing discrimination, end the racial profiling of Chinese researchers, and mobilize a federal interagency response to anti-Asian hate amid the pandemic. As Jeung is quick to emphasize, this fight for the civil rights of Asian Americans is a fight to expand protections for all Americans. “Please stand up, speak out, build bridges, and together we can make good on the promise of a diverse democracy,” said Jeung.
In promoting the proposals of Stop AAPI Hate and the report, for which he wrote the foreword, Queens College President Frank Wu highlighted the importance of building multi-racial coalitions. Wu identified Black, Latinx, and other underrepresented communities as allies to the AAPI community. As emphasized in the report, stronger collaboration among such minority groups is especially critical in communities like New York City, whose diversity heightens the danger that hate incidents exacerbate racial politics. “It would be a mistake of principle and pragmatism to point the finger at another group and suggest that others are guilty by association,” said Wu. Instead, we must look to universal values and American ideals as forces for national unity. As Wu writes in the foreword to the report, “To be Asian American is to be American, to express confidence enough in an experiment of self-governance to participate wholeheartedly.”
President Frank Wu, Queens College, CUNY, wrote the foreword of the report.
Rep. Meng concluded the press conference by calling on all Americans, especially those raised in the United States, to identify and combat racism when it occurs within their own circles. Meng stated that too often, stories of victims from the AAPI community are left out of mainstream media and the public consciousness. Along with implementing the aforementioned policy recommendations, therefore, Meng emphasized the need for racial solidarity. Only then can Americans progress toward the shared goal of dismantling systemic racism in this country and advancing justice for all.
