January 20, 2021
“There are many people working as migrant workers in the sex industry that have been victimized and harassed,” Yang stated. “We need to decriminalize sex work here in New York City to show a model of what a better approach is.
Right now, these workers are being pushed into the shadows and being killed, mistreated, systematically marginalized. Their pain is being ignored by our city and our community and we can and must do better.”
New York lawmaker Ron T. Kim has been a loud advocate for sex workers since the death of Yang Song, who was a 38-year-old sex worker living in Queens, NY. During a targeted police raid on the night of Nov. 25, 2017, she fell to her death from the balcony of her 4th-floor apartment.
A year before, an undercover police officer raped her at gunpoint. After reporting the assault, Song was harassed by an NYPD vice squad, pressured to become an undercover informant, threatened with deportation, and arrested and humiliated in multiple stings in the months before her death, according to Hyphen.
Yang has been a controversial figure in the Asian-American community. One of the key issues Asian-Americans have been fighting for before the pandemic and is still being continuously targeted by current Mayor de Blasio is the high-stakes tests required for entry into New York City’s elite public high schools, which Asian-American students dominate.
“I think we should de-emphasize them. If they are going to be used and they should be used in conjunction with more holistic practices,” Yang told The New York Post.
Andrew Yang is spitting on meritocracy. By that very quote, Yang has betrayed the hard-working low-income Asian-American families who struggle so that their children can have a better education. However, it’s no longer about hard work and sacrifice because now we’re talking about Yale/Harvard style holistic approaches to student admissions.
“I believe that we overemphasize the standardized tests at every level in the United States right now and that it’s doing our kids harm,” Yang continued.
Yang grew up in the Hudson Valley and attended Somers High School. But after sophomore year, he earned admission to the Phillips Exeter Academy, the elite boarding school in New Hampshire. He’s the byproduct of an elite education, according to The New York Post.
Legalize sex work? Continue Mayor de Blasio’s fight to destroy meritocracy in specialized schools for the gifted? Are these the policies we want?
Feature Image via Eater New York