By Janice Hayes Kyser
Contributing Author
SAN FRANCISCO — South African immigrant Wendy Drew discovered quite a bit about hate and ethnic bias rising up throughout apartheid within the big-city metropolis of Durban.
As she encountered bias and second-class remedy in a segregated nation, nonetheless, Drew was all the time taught to face up for herself and by no means yield to racial prejudice or hostility.
That spirit of resistance prompted Drew, a distinguished Bay-area chef, to problem a person who unexpectedly referred to as her the “N phrase” exterior a San Francisco bar on Sept. 1. Moments later, Drew— a former star of the Netflix sequence, “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment” — was being brutally pummeled, in the end struggling a damaged nostril and a horrible eye damage.
Almost three weeks later, the bodily wounds are therapeutic, however the psychological and emotional wounds are nonetheless very uncooked, Drew says.
“I’m having bother sleeping,” says the 42-year-old chef, who runs a catering enterprise along with her equivalent twin sister, Pamela, that gives South African delicacies for a variety of tech firms, pharmaceutical companies and people within the Bay Space.
“I maintain replaying the incident in my head,” she says. “There’s a small a part of me that wonders if I ought to’ve stored my mouth shut. Then there’s a much bigger a part of me that claims, no, you needed to converse up; to struggle again and thank God you had the power to take action and other people got here to your aide.
Nonetheless, it’s onerous. I’m paranoid. I’m an unbiased one who is now afraid to exit on my own with out questioning if somebody is following me or trying to do me hurt.”
As tragic as Drew’s story is, it’s removed from distinctive.
Greater than 518 Black folks had been victims of reported hate crimes in California final yr, with most of these crimes occurring in Los Angeles County, in keeping with a report by the California state lawyer basic.
The report exhibits that whereas hate crimes towards Black folks dropped 20.6% in 2023, Blacks had been nonetheless the most important sufferer group by far — because it has been in recent times.
“Previously few years, we’ve witnessed hate-filled rhetoric grow to be extra heated, extra polarizing, extra harmful throughout the nation and sadly, California is not any exception,” California Lawyer Normal Rob Bonta stated in an announcement.
“These are extra than simply statistics on a web page. Every information level represents actual folks damage by hate, actual households affected by unbelievable ache and hardship and we all know these numbers solely inform a part of the story whereas hundreds undergo in silence,” Bonta stated.
Underneath California legislation, a hate crime is a prison act dedicated no less than partly due to a sufferer’s actual or perceived incapacity, gender, nationality, faith, sexual orientation or race or ethnicity — or affiliation with somebody with one or extra of these traits.
A burning want to struggle again towards injustice made it inconceivable for Drew to remain silent.
Haunted on the one hand, grateful on the opposite, Drew says the perpetrator, a homeless man who was on probation and has assaulted others, hopes her assault spared another person’s life.
“Perhaps instinctively God was utilizing me as a result of he is aware of my power. … Perhaps another person’s life may have been taken and I used to be a diversion,” she stated. “I stored telling my attacker whereas I used to be pushing him and combating again, you will jail at the moment and he did and which will have saved another person’s life.”
On that fateful night time, she and her twin had been out at a restaurant and bar, Café Terminus, pitching a canned grownup beverage they created to bar administration. Drew bought a cellphone name as their assembly was wrapping up and stepped exterior to talk to her mom who lives within the East Bay. That’s when her attacker lobbed a racial epithet that was an assault Drew says she by no means noticed coming.
“I believed we had been simply going to get right into a shouting match and I used to be prepared to do this,” she stated. “I had no concept what was going to occur subsequent. I had no concept he would begin hitting me within the head together with his fists.”
Drew says earlier than she and her sister got here to the U.S. some 19 years in the past, her uncle sat them down and gave them the “discuss” many Black People give to their little children about how one can work together with the police.
“He advised us to maintain our fingers seen and to deal with the police by calling them ma’am and sir,” she stated. “I all the time thought my abuse would come by the hands of legislation enforcement; I didn’t ever assume it might be a citizen I encountered on the road.”
San Francisco District Lawyer Brooke Jenkins formally charged Drew’s attacker, Irvin Rivera-Lara, 31, with assault prone to trigger nice bodily damage and battery with severe bodily damage. The costs embody particular allegations that the incident was a hate crime.
Rivera Lara Irvin Rivera-Lara, 31, is a homeless man with a violent prison historical past
“Hate crimes don’t have any place in our neighborhood and have to be addressed swiftly by the prison justice system,” Jenkins stated in an announcement. “Assaults like this demean and degrade people whereas additionally shaking entire communities. I’ll do every little thing in my energy to make sure there’s accountability and justice on this case.”
Drew says the police handled her properly and made her really feel heard and protected after the incident. She is cautiously optimistic that the authorized system will ship justice.
Within the activist spirit of her mother and father, Drew was not going to undergo in silence. She start reaching out to contacts she has within the media so she may inform her painful story. Silence, she says, was not an choice.
“To be able to make change, it’s a must to make noise,” she stated. “I maintain speaking about it as a result of I would love folks to know that hate is rarely acceptable it causes loads of emotional ache. I look within the mirror and I can see the proof that somebody with out understanding me as an individual thought it was OK to make me their punching bag. That’s the most painful half.”
Regardless of her ache and anger, Drew stated she needs to know what motivated her attacker.
“If I may converse to him, I’d ask him why, why would you do that and what do you want to take away the hate out of your coronary heart so that you could be a higher individual?”
This useful resource was supported in entire or partly by funding supplied by the State of California, administered by the California State Library by way of California Black Media as a part of the Cease the Hate Program. This system is supported by partnership with California Division of Social Providers and the California Fee on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as a part of the Cease the Hate program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get assist, go to CA vs Hate.
Janice Hayes Kyser is a contract reporter for Wave Newspaper.
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