SALDEF meets with EEOC Commissioner Stuart Ishimaru

By Rob Young/Appeal-Democrat

A 19-year-old Sikh man was told he would have to shave off his beard to qualify for the Yuba City Police Department’s cadet program, a national Sikh rights group said Wednesday. Police Chief Richard Doscher differed somewhat with the version of events as put forth by the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or SALDEF. Nothing in department rules disqualifies a Sikh with a beard and turban – and even with a ceremonial kirpan, or dagger – from becoming an officer, as long as the kirpan is worn under the uniform, said Doscher. A turban the same color as the uniform would be acceptable, the police chief said. SALDEF said the applicant, Harvir Singh Uppal, was told by Officer Kim Slade, director of the cadet program, that “though the turban was acceptable, the beard does not conform to the uniform standards of the Police Department and it would have to be shaved off.” Doscher said SALDEF’s complaint arose from a misunderstanding between Uppal and Slade. He said it was unclear if Uppal was even wearing a beard at the time. Uppal, a Yuba College student, told the Appeal-Democrat late Wednesday that he had a full beard and wore a turban during an interview last fall at the Police Department. According to Doscher, Slade asked Uppal if he intended to wear a beard. Uppal then asked if the beard would disqualify him from the program but did not respond to letters and phone calls inquiring whether he was still interested in being a cadet, said Doscher. Uppal said Slade told him by phone about a week after the interview that the beard was unacceptable. Uppal did not give a religious reason during the interview for having a beard. The subject of Uppal’s Sikh religion did not come up, Doscher said. SALDEF said that, after Doscher and Mayor John Miller were informed of “the discriminatory nature of this policy,” Doscher wrote a letter of apology to SALDEF and reaffirmed the department’s policy of religious diversity. In the Jan. 23 letter, Doscher wrote that Slade “did say he asked Mr. Uppal if removal of his beard would be objectionable (not being fully versed in the significance). No rejection letter was ever sent to Mr. Uppal.” “Please accept this as an unintentional oversight be one of my staff officers, which I take responsibility for. I can assure you that as of this writing there is no misunderstanding any longer,” Doscher wrote. Doscher asked SALDEF to have Uppal recontact the department. Although SALDEF said Uppal was denied employment, the cadet program is made up strictly of unpaid volunteers age 15 and over who are exploring law enforcement careers, said Doscher. Uppal, a full-time student and Home Depot employee, said he was “honored that they’re welcoming me” but is undecided about reapplying. He said he hopes the controversy results in other law enforcement agencies hiring Sikhs who wear beards and turbans. In the post-9/11 world, Sikhs with beards and turbans are still viewed erroneously as terrorists, he said. Uppal said he initially contacted SALDEF, but he now thinks “it was a misunderstanding and that it was blown out of proportion. If I’d spoken with the chief, it wouldn’t have gone this far.” “I don’t blame Slade,” said Uppal. “At least they’re trying to resolve things.” Appeal-Democrat reporter Rob Young can be reached at 749-4710. You may e-mail him at ryoung@appeal-democrat.com. Appeal-Democrat

The great thing about the OC Turban Flap is this: The actual damage is microscopic, while the underlying principle can be pumped up to Brown vs. Board of Education proportions. The “victim” is not physically or financially injured, but the implications are so menacing that you can, if you try hard enough, see the outline of Jim Crow in the background. As has been widely reported, Sanjum Paul Sing Samagh, a UC Irvine medical student who always wears a Sikh turban in public, was turned away from a Costa Mesa bar that does not allow its patrons to wear hats. Big deal, you say? As discrimination goes, this rebuff hardly ranks with Rosa Parks. Gather your party and go to another joint where hats (and, therefore, turbans) are allowed. Really, who has time to make a federal case out of such a trivial affront? That’s the grumbling get-over-yourself view. But if one is so inclined – and Samagh is, along with his Rancho Bernardo family and the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund – you can take this front-door rejection and rev up the civil-rights engine to the red line. A hat is one thing, they contend, a Sikh turban another. The two are as similar as a Yankee cap and a Jewish yarmulke. The hat can be taken off at will. (Or when your mother lays down the law at the dinner table.) The turban can’t be removed without also removing the faith. For practicing Sikhs, turbans are sacred expressions of identity. Conflating the two types of “headgears” – baseball caps and turbans – does appear to discriminate on the basis of religion, a dicey move under the Constitution. This, you would think, is the sort of issue best broached by the legal bar, not a dance bar. OK, it’s understandable why the Pierce Street Annex might want to enforce a hat-free zone in its raucous confines. Expressive hats among well-lubricated clubbers can be like gang (or, maybe more provocatively, USC or UCLA) colors on the head. A bar is certainly within its rights to impose a dress code that raises the sartorial tone – and preserves the peace – as patrons drink, mingle and dance to hip-hop music. Ironically, in taking a step to improve its image and pacify the mood, the Annex has punched itself in the eye. It is now a lightning rod for the daily slights suffered by the nation’s more than 150,000 Sikhs, a non-Muslim religious group that has been ignorantly subjected to anti-Muslim prejudice. Adding injury to insult, the Annex is a target of a pro-Samagh UC Irvine boycott. It’s unclear what the student stiff-arm will do to the bar receipts, but it can’t help in a competitive nightclub market. So what should the Annex have done on the night of Jan. 25? It’s simple. The management should have realized that its policy did not anticipate someone like Samagh. Every rule has exceptions. This was one such occasion. Think about it. What would the Annex do for a cancer patient wearing an inoffensive cap to hide his bald head? Tell him to go someplace else to dance? If you did, how would you sleep at night? The Annex’s owner reportedly told Samagh and his aghast friends that he was a lawyer and that he had the right to treat all headgear as headgear, period. In a legal sense, that may be true. But in a business sense, it’s self-defeating to defend it. This bar has been open for about 32 years. It’s survived all sorts of changes in a trendy market. In short, it’s adapted. Now it’s time to adapt again. If the no-hat policy is retained, a bright line should be drawn between commercial headgear and a religious turban. Granted, someone in a do-rag might push for “equal” treatment at the door. “It’s an expression of my Rasta religion, man.” That may be awkward to deal with, but nothing like the negative publicity the bar is experiencing now. As civil-rights stages go, the OC bar is, at best, a symbol of more serious confrontations. Sikhs have been taken off commercial flights because of the ceremonial daggers their faith can require them to carry. In Europe, the failure of devout Muslims to assimilate in dress has sent shock waves through France and Britain. Distrust of Muslim immigrants fuels the debate. So far, Samagh is asking for is an apology and a change of bar policy. That should be so easy. That is, unless the Annex has a thing about serving Sikhs. In which case, the bar deserves to lose its hat.

He was denied entry for wearing a turban By Lisa Petrillo UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER February 9, 2007 A turban-wearing Rancho Bernardo medical school student claims he was discriminated against when he was turned away from a popular college hangout. The bar in Orange County has a “no hat” rule. But Sanjum Paul Singh Samagh, an American-born Sikh, said he tried to explain to the bar owner that his black turban was a centuries-old religious symbol, not a fashion statement. Samagh, a Stanford University graduate, has now joined forces with a national civil rights organization demanding a public apology and a policy change from the Pierce Street Annex bar in Costa Mesa. “It may be a small thing, just getting into a bar to have a beer with my classmates, but it’s the tiny things in life that add up,” Samagh said. “If I don’t fight the fight, then what happens the next time?” His classmates at the University of California Irvine Medical School have declared a boycott against the bar. Pierce Street Annex officials did not respond to media questions about their policy or the incident. It began Jan. 25, a Thursday, generally a popular night of cut-rate drinks at the bar. Samagh, 24, said he and about 20 classmates headed to the Annex to celebrate a birthday and the end of exams for the first-year medical students. Samagh said he reacted with shock when the bar owner barred his entry, telling him that headgear was headgear, religious or not. “He kept saying he was a lawyer and he knew his rights, and I tried to talk to him, one professional to another, but he was adamant,” Samagh said. He and his parents, Pam and Paul Samagh of Rancho Bernardo, said they have joined forces with the Washington, D.C.-based Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, formally requesting an apology. They are pursuing the action, they say, to raise awareness of acts of discrimination against Sikhs. California is home to one of the largest Sikh populations in the United States, numbering more than 150,000 people, according to the Sikh organization. The Samagh family has been active in Poway’s Sikh temple, where an official there said that blatant acts of discrimination against local Sikhs have been rare. Paul Samagh said the biggest problem he experienced living in San Diego County was people mistaking him for a Muslim, because of the turban and beard that he and most Sikhs wear. It became dangerous for Sikhs for a brief period after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks, he said. “People . . . threatened to kill me more than once,” said Paul Samagh, who owns gas stations now but ran a gourmet food store in Poway at the time. “I just stopped going to work after 9/11.” The Samagh family said they never experienced outright discrimination while they raised their children in San Diego’s North County. Their son was class president, played basketball and was on Rancho Bernardo High School’s varsity tennis team – always wearing the turban. He also was senior class valedictorian. Nationally, the Sikh American Defense group said they encounter anti-Sikh bias incidents at least a few times a month, although generally the problems can be resolved quickly. Recently, a Sikh youth was turned down as a volunteer for a local police department in Northern California because of a no-beard policy, said Rajbir Singh Datta of the Sikh American Defense group, who successfully fought the rule. “You have to pursue every single one of these cases,” Datta said. “What we want to do is have a society where Sikhs are not looked upon as foreigners. They are part of the fabric of the diversity of the United States.”