 I'm going to introduce Bo Yang. As you know, we invited her. She's the executive director of the Vermont Commission on Human Rights, which is one of those commissions that is part of our government. She was born in Laos and came to the United States at the age of three. She joined the Human Rights Commission in 2015 as an executive law administrator. And her work there was in advising government agencies, such as state employees and housing providers, legal providers, social service providers, so that they could interact with Vermonters in a way that is effective and considerate and respectful and fair. And she joined in 2015 as that. Before that, her bachelor's is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her JD, that's the law degree, at the University of Minnesota. She clerked with district court. And she did private practice and volunteering with organization on my notes. The Minnesota Volunteer Lawyers Network, which provides instruction and training for lawyers and non-legal professionals serving immigrant populations. I think I did mention the implicit bias training, which I'm a big fan of. It can be uncomfortable to go through, but it is so valuable. And I'm really grateful that my school system, that my children attend, provided implicit bias training for the teachers. It's been really great in our community. Let's see. And at the end of last year, of course, she was appointed the new executive director of the Human Rights Commission. And she continues to do implicit training. She trains other people to provide implicit bias training and provides implicit bias training and works on, of course, fair housing laws, bullying, harassment, and hazing. And we are delighted to have her with us today. Welcome. It's truly an honor to have sat with all of you during lunch and then also to have a chance to speak with you today. So my hope is that I would kind of talk a little bit about my background and then share with you the work of the Human Rights Commission. And then hopefully, at the end, have a chance to be part of a discussion about sort of the future of human rights and the future of discrimination in the state of Vermont. Sound good? Yes. OK, so as was mentioned, my name is Boer. And I am the executive director and legal counsel for the Vermont Human Rights Commission. And I want to start off today by sharing with you something that I heard at a conference a couple of years ago. It was a conference on employment discrimination in Burlington. And the guest speaker that day was former Governor Madeleine Cunin. And she said something that day that has sort of remained with me ever since. She said, it isn't the case that you cannot find men who care about women's issues. You can. But when they get into office, they face many competing demands and priorities. And the issues that impact our lives as women sometimes fall lower and lower on that list. And I truly believe that. Our personal experiences and relationships from childhood through adulthood stay with us. Our travels, our communities, how the world has received us, defined us, categorized us, what opportunities that we've had or have had to fight for or been wrongfully denied from enjoying. All of these things, they inform the work that we do. In the same way that someone without these experiences and relationships may have an intellectual understanding and appreciation of the issues, they will lack sometimes a deep and profound connection to those issues. When we elect women and people of color to positions of power, affordable health care and child care equal pay, sexual harassment in the workplace, these things remain at the top of that ever-growing list of priorities. And they have a fighting chance. So it was not lost upon me that when I became the executive director in November, I was bringing to this position all of my experiences as a refugee and an immigrant, a person of color, a person with a disability, a woman, a parent, a person who was socioeconomically disadvantaged for most of my life. A couple of years ago, I think it was mentioned I was born in Laos. And a couple of years ago, I made my first trip back to my first and only trip back to that country of origin. And I was sitting at the Mankong River. This is a river that divides Laos from Thailand. And for those of you who don't know, Laos is in Southeast Asia. And it's a landlocked country that borders. You've been there? Yes, that borders Vietnam and Thailand. So I found my way back to this river sitting in front of this river with my nephews and my sisters. And it was at sunset. And the river was wide that day and very low and dry. And I could see these tall patches of green grass separating the two countries, Laos from Thailand. I was sitting on, obviously, the Laos side. And the last time that I was in front of this river was before I could form really any memories, almost 40 years ago. The secret war in Laos had come to an abrupt end. After using men like my father and grandfather and uncles to fight on the front lines of a clandestine war, which was orchestrated by the CIA, we were deserted without notice, provisions, or any means of escape. And when my uncle returned with news that the Americans had left to the country, our family faced a dilemma. We could stay in our home country and continue to fight a losing war. Or we could walk across the jungles of Laos by foot, cross that Mankong River to Thailand, and hope that there's refuge on the other side. At this point, my father, uncles, and grandfather were really threats to the Lao Communist government. They had spent years in warfare. So they knew that the idea that they could just walk out of the jungles, lay their weapons down, wave their white flags, was just not very realistic. And obviously not very safe for their families as well. So they made a decision to trek through the jungles of Laos. There were many Mung people who decided to stay in the jungles of Laos. And they stay there today. They still remain there. There were some people that were able to successfully integrate back into the community. And those who stayed in the jungles, they were once heroes and soldiers for the CIA. And we're very proud of that. They are now considered terrorists by the Laos government and the US government as well. So I was less than two years old when my family decided we would escape to Thailand. My right leg was left paralyzed by the polio virus the previous year. And I was no longer able to walk. My mother carried me on her back. My father carried supplies and rice and supervised my older sister, who was about age seven at the time, and she could walk on her own. And I had another older sister who was a couple years younger than her. She was about five. And she was accompanied by my grandparents and two aunts who were not much older than my sisters. We traveled with extended family and others from the same troop. And we traveled in large groups so that we could share supplies and support and information. But there was a crippling fear of discovery and death. Parents were pressured to give their infants opium to sedate them because babies would cry. And when some of these baby died from overdose, parents mourned in silence. These were just a few of the many heartbreaking stories of death during that journey. When our group neared the Mankong River, they strategized about how they would cross at night. Being a mountainous people, no one really knew how to swim. And so they used plastic and whatever they had as makeshift flotation devices. And they taught each other to stay to float. But there was no certainty that they would make it. And there would only be one trial. The river was heavily guarded by the Petetlao soldiers who were shooting anyone crossing it. And my mother said that she could not sleep the night before they crossed the river because of the gunshots that she heard all night long. Unlike what it was when I visited the Mankong River a couple years ago, it raged the night my mother and I crossed it. It was in complete darkness. The sky and ground lit up only by rapid fire of gunshots. And years later, my father described in detail the image of bullets propelling blades of grass before him. At the river, my mother watched the current carry people away until they disappeared. It was complete chaos. Hundreds of families crossing at the same time. Faces and bodies no more than shadows. Everyone a stranger indistinguishable. My mom called up to a god she did not yet know. She blew air into the bags, tied them up, put them under her arms. And then with me on her back, she looked ahead and determined to kick her legs until they failed her or she felt solid ground beneath her. Sorry, I've got a feeling a little bit emotional just talking about this. So I've heard this many, many times and have lived through a lot of these stories. But every time I talk about it still. We made it to the Thai refugee camps, but we were lost for days. And my father and sister believed us to be dead and vice versa. And my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and five-year-old sister had been captured by the soldiers and detained. Later, my father asked for money from an uncle who had already arrived in the United States to send money. And then he used that money to bribe those soldiers to get them out of there and onto the Thai refugee camps. We lived in the Thai refugee camps for a few months until we were sponsored by an agency in Chicago. And in America, it was a difficult adjustment for my parents. They had post-traumatic stress disorder. They described hearing cars backfire and thinking they were in the war again. They slept on the hard floors until they got used to mattresses. And once we lived in villages with extended families, here we were separated from them by hundreds of miles. We lived in Chicago's poorest neighborhood, prostitutes loitered the street in front of our high-rise, and my father was robbed and beaten in the park's once. One of my only pictures for my childhood is of my father holding me next to my two sisters. And in the background is an old stained mattress and window frames with cracked paint. And I share this story because, one, that's my only picture that I really have from my childhood. But also, I know now as a parent that when you see cracked paint, it is signs of lead. When public assistance was insufficient to support a large family, my parents went to work as laborers and machine operators and later farmers. All nine of us lived in a three-bedroom apartment before my parents bought their house for $64,000 in South Minneapolis. And our neighborhood was made up of refugees from Southeast Asia, African-Americans, and Mexican immigrants. Then slowly, the neighborhood started to change. People of color moved out to the suburbs, and then white people started moving back into the city. It now became a trendy and nice place to live. And without doing any work on their home, their $64,000 house became valued over $300,000. We went to public schools. Growing up, we shared a small set of school supplies, a single packet of pencils and pens for all seven of us. And at the beginning of the school year, we each received two outfits, which had to last us the rest of the year. I wore winter coats that was donated from the school. And for Christmas, my parents wrapped up free toys they received from a charity for us. But it was still really nice, really wonderful. When it was time to go to college, I studied for the ACT using a book I borrowed from the school library. I didn't even know preparatory courses were even available. And even if I did, I probably would not have been able to afford them because they're very expensive. And I went to college on scholarships and financial aid. Then I went to law school and clicked for a really great judge who had been a former EOC senior attorney. I went to work at Central Minnesota Legal Services in Minnesota, and then I taught at a community college and practiced law part-time before moving here to Vermont. In the same way that my family's socioeconomic status and our immigration story has impacted the way that I see the world, so really has my sex and my gender identity. I grew up in a very patriarchal culture in which men played very dominant roles in the family. At large gatherings, men ate first and separately from women. The practice of requiring dowries at weddings meant that there were extremely high expectations for daughter-in-laws, expectations that did not exist at all with sons and son-in-laws. Women were left out of important family discussions and decisions. Interestingly, within my nuclear family, we did not ascribe to those norms and practice. My mother was a strong and opinionated woman, sometimes too much so, and she happened to have a more stable job and so she worked a lot. And by default, my father ended up being our caretaker. He cooked, he cleaned, he went to our parent-teacher conferences, and pretty much raised us. It was an interesting dynamic to observe my parents act out gender roles that were different than the cultural framework they existed in. And in many ways, this gave me permission to question my identity, my place in this world, and to confidently confront discrimination and startling statistics. And I just wanna share some of those statistics with you, particularly as they relate to judges and lawyers. So in a recent survey of lawyers, women and minority judges scored lower on measures asking whether they should be retained than male or white judges. They were significantly more likely to be rated not adequate. They had lower ABA, which is American Bar Association ratings, even after controlling for education, race, gender, political affiliation, and prior experience. While 80% of white men said they had equal opportunities for advancement, only 63% of white women said the same thing. 59% of men of color and 53% women of color. Half of all women lawyers, about 49% of white women and 51% of women of color, reported that credit for their contributions was stolen by somebody else. And women lawyers of color were eight times more likely than white men to report that they had been mistaken for janitorial staff, administrative staff, or court personnel. And that last statistic has actually been a reality for me. I don't know if some of you remember Karen Richards, she was my predecessor. And for those of you who don't know, Karen is a white, able-bodied, and she's about five, six, or five, seven. I hope I don't misrepresent her height. We're sensitive about that. And she and I were going, so I worked at the Human Rights Commission as an administrative law examer before becoming the executive director. And so Karen and I were on our way to a meeting about a case that I had just really resolved and really proud of too as well. And we were going to a building that was a secured building. And Karen and I went in there together. And so when you go into this building, it's secured and the security guards are supposed to take your phone if you are a non-attorney. And if you are an attorney, they let you keep it, but you have to turn it off, okay? So we go in there and the security guards want to take my phone, but they are willing to let Karen keep hers. So then I'm like, oh, I'm an attorney. They're like, oh, okay, okay, great. Very nice communication, but clearly some difference here. So then we go upstairs to our meeting. There's an assistant at the front desk and she welcomes us and there's two sign-in booklets. One is for attorneys, the other is for non-attorneys. And she says, oh, sign in. And she points to the non-attorney book for me. So I'm thinking, oh, I see the book that says attorneys. And so I'm like, should I sign in there? And she goes, oh, are you guys attorneys? And Karen goes, yes, we're both attorneys. And so, okay. So we sign in, we go to our meeting, I come back, oh, it's 4.30, it's late. They've put the booklet for non-attorneys away. So all that's left on the counter is the booklet for attorneys, which is the booklet I signed in under. And now there's a different assistant at the front desk. And I'm getting ready to open the book, find my name and sign out. And then the guy stops me and says, oh, you must have signed in under the other book. Okay, so yeah. So three times, I had three different people make an assumption that I was not an attorney. Had I gone to that meeting all by myself, I might have thought maybe it was something that I was wearing that day, right? And had Karen gone to that meeting by herself that day, she wouldn't have noticed anything. But we had this benefit that day of comparison and how we were treated differently by three different people, even though we were dressed similarly and were both attorneys. And that was really, it was fascinating. And recently I was at a mediation and the other attorney that was there asked me if I had brought anyone with me that day. So said no, I'm the executive director and I speak for the agency. And he was really puzzled by that. And then later when we were just talking naturally, he found out that I was an attorney or the legal counsel for the agency. And then he said, wait, you don't litigate the cases yourself, do you? I was like, yeah, I do, it's me, I do that. And he goes, oh, okay, you should probably tell the mediator that you're an attorney. And I said, well, the mediator knows because at the end of my name is Esquire, right? So he's like, oh, okay. That whole exchange was very friendly, very innocent. But it did leave me questioning. If I had been a man, whether he would have ever asked if I was there by myself or if there was someone going to come and help me make some decision that day. I also wondered if he had been a woman whether he would have asked me that question. I don't think so. We know the society has an implicit bias against women, women who are confident, ambitious, strong, and competent. These characteristics, they don't make, these characteristics make men more likable, but they don't necessarily make women more likable. We have seen studies and surveys that have shown that even when people rate women as strong, ambitious, highly qualified, they still don't choose them for the job. And often as women, we're sort of stuck in this really difficult ambiguous area where if we try to be like a stereotypical man, it backfires because we're not feminine enough. And if we try to be feminine, it backfires because it looks like we're not competent or qualified and so forth. So it can be a really difficult, narrow path to navigate. These biases, these implicit biases are true, not just for women, for people of color, for people with foreign sounding names, for people with disabilities as well. I mentioned earlier that I had polio when I was younger. My right leg is shorter and smaller than my left leg and I walk with a crutch and a brace. And for the majority of my life, I refuse to let my disability stop me from becoming educated, becoming an attorney, a wife and mom from traveling, kayaking and even downhill skiing. Although that doesn't really count because I downhill skied in Minnesota and we know that's not real, okay? I have yet to downhill ski in Vermont and then I can probably count that. But you know that until I share that. So I've never asked for a reasonable accommodation, although now as an adult, I know that I've received them from my teachers. I just never made a formal request for them. They gave them to me. And a few years ago, I took an implicit bias test. Okay, Harvard does the implicit bias test and if you haven't done it, I would encourage you to do it. I took an implicit bias test because I was interested in knowing at the time I was teaching at a community college and I was interested in knowing whether or not I had any implicit bias because as a teacher, you have a lot of discretion. Sometimes students are late with their assignments or they miss a class and you have the discretion to decide do they get to make up that assignment? Do you deduct points or don't you? And I wanted to make sure that I was being fair, right? So the first thing I did was try to not be defensive and to question myself and to go, hmm, I'm curious about that. And the most interesting thing that I found out when I was doing that implicit bias test was that I, in fact, have a bias in favor of able-bodied people. What? What? I have had polio my whole life. I'd been a person with disability my whole life and I thought, this is shocking. How is it possible that I could have bias against people in my own protected group? And when I examined my life deeper and really asked myself questions about it, I realized that I have spent a lifetime denying my disability and denying an identity of being a person with a disability. And so, of course, I had developed this bias against people with disabilities in favor of able-bodied people. And that is really important for me to know because that means I have a blind spot. Just because I am a person with a disability did not, that did not make me inherently more sensitive to people with disabilities and I have to recognize that. And I have other blind spots. I'm straight. I'm cisgender. I don't have any mental health issues yet. Asked me, this job is really hard. Asked me in a few years. Or in the middle of the legislative session. And while I'm a person of color, I'm not black. People are not consciously or unconsciously afraid of me. And I get to navigate this world on afraid of the police. I'm from a two-parent household. Two parents who were incredibly resilient, supportive, positive, and completely unlined on my educational goals. So I know that despite all of my experiences, there are many experiences that I have not had. And as the head of an agency that is charged with protecting Vermont's most vulnerable, I have to be willing to confront these blind spots without being defensive and on a continuous basis. So what does all of this mean for the work that we do at the Human Rights Commission? It means that I promise, not just you guys and my staff, but all the people of Vermont that my personal and professional experiences, it means that I have an unwavering commitment and dedication to the work that we do at the Human Rights Commission. And I wanna spend a little bit of time sharing with you the work that we do and our mission. So the mission of the Human Rights Commission is to promote full civil and human rights in Vermont. The commission protects people from unlawful discrimination in housing, state government employment, and places of public accommodations. And when we think of places of public accommodations, we usually think of stores, businesses. But it also includes schools. It also includes hospitals. It also includes roads. And it includes prisons. So it includes a huge gamut of places. Any place where the general public gets to go and receive some types of service or benefits, that definition would include that. These statutes that I mentioned prohibit individuals or entities from taking adverse action against people in protected categories based on their membership and one or more of those protected categories. We have four statutory mandates. We have to enforce the laws through investigations and litigation. We have to conciliate disputes, pre and post investigative reports. We have an obligation to educate the public by providing information, referrals, and trainings. And we advance effective public policies on human rights. And that's what I'm really busy doing during the legislative session. Our investigators, we have three of them and they are attorneys. And then their responsibility is to conduct neutral investigations of complaints of discrimination. And then they make legal recommendations to myself and the commissioners who are appointed by our governor. And during the course of the impartial investigation, the investigators seek to resolve complaints through conciliation. They identify cases that are suitable for mediation and in cases that cannot be resolved through conciliation or mediation. They do a legal analysis and factual finding and they make a recommendation in an investigative report after reviewing the evidence in the law and that goes in front of our commissioners. I sign off on those reports and our commissioners have these monthly hearings in which they hear from both sides. They read the report and then they make, they vote. They vote on whether or not there are reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred or no reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred. If they vote no reasonable grounds to believe discrimination occurred, the case ends there. And if they vote that discrimination did occur, then as the executive director, I have six months to try to settle that case or come back to the commissioners and ask for permission and advise them whether or not we should litigate this case. We are an agency that is very small with limited resources and so we don't litigate every case even if we find reasonable grounds. What we take into consideration is one, the merits of the case, but also the likelihood that it could settle and the likelihood that we could win and also does this case have the chance to stand for something important in the state of Vermont? So these are the things that we're considering when we're deciding whether we should litigate a case or not. I mentioned earlier that the Human Rights Commission is also charged with increasing public awareness of the importance of full civil and human rights for each inhabitant in the state. And it is within these roles to ensure equal justice and equal opportunity and equal dignity that we speak across the state of Vermont and provide training to individuals and groups about their rights and responsibilities under state and federal civil rights laws. We have a lot of trainings around implicit bias. We do trainings around sexual harassment. We do trainings around bullying, harassment and hazing and fair housing laws. And fair housing law training is so incredibly important, especially in the state of Vermont where rentals are scarce. And we have a lot of landlords who are individuals and who are not in the business usually of renting. And so they lack the information and they lack the ability to hire attorneys to give them information about the law. We often come across those landlords and so training is really essential for them because otherwise they are not getting those kinds of trainings about fair housing laws. In 2018, we did over 37 trainings to over 800 Vermonters. We trained employees and managers of the state, law enforcement, community members, victims advocates, private employees, housing providers, individual landlords, private and non-private attorneys and service providers of all sorts. Some of the highlights of the work that we've done at the Human Rights Commission in the last few years include a claim that was brought by an individual who was deaf. She had gone to the hospital and she had never been provided an interpreter for the days that she was there. She filed a claim against the hospital and settled for a substantial sum of money and it resulted in significant policy and practice changes impacting the rights of all patients, not just patients who were deaf. In another case, a state employee who was experiencing hostile work environment because of her race, who was hearing the N word on a regular basis, whose colleagues and managers really didn't know how to address when those comments were being made. She filed a complaint to address that discrimination. She received some monetary relief and the agency agreed to training. But what was really important about that case is that it was the impetus to change some laws this year around how discrimination claims are settled. So oftentimes, we don't realize and the complaining parties don't even realize that bringing such a claim can have really long lasting impact on other people's lives as well. Even people outside that protected category. The Human Rights Commission has also done several cases involving people with mental health issues who have been segregated in prison systems. We've had several of those cases in which they were segregated for prolonged periods of time and we've done some high profile police profiling cases as well. There was a case involving an undocumented immigrant who filed a claim at the Human Rights Commission against the department of motor vehicles when he applied for a driver's privilege card and they contacted ICE and based on the way that he looked. And it resulted in significant policy and practice changes at the DMV and had larger implications for fair and impartial policing. So for the last 30 years, the Human Rights Commission has been chipping away slowly at an unfair and unjust system by working to hold people accountable and liable after they discriminate. I think that the law is an effective tool to force cultural shifts, but effective is not sufficient. It is not a sufficient tool. When I became the executive director, it was a tumultuous time in our state and our country and we find ourselves deeply divided. In Vermont, students with disabilities are three times more likely than students without disabilities to be suspended. African American and Native American students are two to three times more likely than white students to be suspended. A Johns Hopkins study showed that students suspended just one time in grade nine had doubled the risk of dropping out. Other studies have shown that disciplinary removal increases the likelihood of contact with the juvenile justice system by three fold. And other studies can drop out rates to a greater likelihood of incarceration as an adult and higher poverty rates. We saw the news coverage of a beloved legislator resigning because of racial harassment down in Bennington. We saw the African American kids who came to visit in Stowe being forced to leave because they felt that Vermont was unwelcoming and unsafe. And at the Alks Club, the Muslim girls who were honored guests that day were asked to leave by a staff member who presumed them to be rowdy uninvited high school kids. Nationally, we know that there are many hate crimes and hate incidents happening across the country. We see regularly black jurors being struck more often than white jurors. Again, Louisiana, they were struck three times more often. In North Carolina, two times more often. In Houston County, Alabama between 2005 and 2009, prosecutors struck 80% of black jurors. Employment discriminations cases face a great, great barrier compared to other civil cases. Plaintiffs who bring employment discrimination cases only prevailed in pretrial motions 4.23% of the time. That's compared to 22.23% of the time in other cases, non-employment discrimination cases. Of the 4.23% of cases that went at the pretrial stage, the courts reversed those victories 54% of the time versus only 11% of the time of defendant victories. If a plaintiff in an employment discrimination case is successful in making it to trial, they prevail only 20% of the time versus 46% of the time in other civil cases. If they win a trial on appeal, courts reverse them 42% of plaintiff trial victories versus only 8% of defendant victories. It has become an impossible feat to win an employment discrimination case or any discrimination case. But yeah, discrimination is prevalent. We see disparities in our schools, in our places of employment, in our housing. And I knew, coming into this position, that we were not going to successfully eliminate discrimination by winning one litigation case at a time. That was just not going to happen. I was recently sitting on a Planned Parenthood roundtable and I noticed that the discussion there and the focus has been shifting. For years, I think the agency has been working to advocate for women's right to choose and they continue to do that, especially now more than ever. But the discussion of the focus is also addressing inequities around what causes unplanned pregnancies. I think that is an important discussion to have. In the same way, discussions around women's rights have to incorporate a deeper dive into issues that impact women of color. There has been an ongoing battle between women of color and white women in terms of women's rights and I think it's time to address that head on. It is no longer enough to react to discrimination. It is time to engage in a movement to prevent discrimination. And at the Human Rights Commission, that is our vision and our goals moving forward, is not just holding people accountable and liable, but having a discussion with the many great people that live in this state about how do we prevent discrimination from happening. My friend, Ellen, shared a proverb with me and I'm sure I'll get it wrong. She said, you can spend all of your time saving people at the bottom of the river who are drowning. At some point, you gotta make your way up the river to figure out what is happening. And I'm gonna end this speech by telling you that the Human Rights Commission is taking that hike up the river. I don't yet know what we're going to find, but I am really grateful to be here today and to be part of this group and hopefully this is the beginning of having a discussion about what causes discrimination and how do we prevent it from happening. Because I know how to address it once it has occurred, but how do we prevent it from happening in the first place? Thank you.