Asian-American activists offended that MARTA re-named the train line into the heart of Atlanta's Asian community the "yellow line" will take their objections to the transit agency's chief on Friday.
“Yellow,” as a term for skin color, carries a generally negative, racist connotation among Asians.
MARTA officials were warned by an employee before the name change last October that Atlanta’s burgeoning Asian community would find the term for the line to Doraville offensive.
“Historically, it has had a derogatory intent,” said John Park, an attorney with the nonprofit Center for Pan Asian Community Services in Doraville, just down the hill from the Marta station. “It physically paints a very unattractive picture. I don’t consider myself ‘yellow.’”
Park and other Asian activists plan to meet Friday with MARTA CEO Beverly Scott. They hope MARTA will change the line’s name from yellow to gold.
Scott said Monday that she will go into the meeting with an open mind. "There are very few things in this life that are absolute," she said.
While Scott did not "in any way want to minimize" the concerns, she said that one MARTA employee's complaint was not indicative of everybody's feelings. She added that by the time it was raised, MARTA was ending a year-long process to implement the change. "Everything was printed, we were ready to go," she said.
MARTA launched the color-coded lines Oct. 1 to help passengers navigate the system more easily. Transit officials noted that other systems, including Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, use similar color codes. MARTA designates its lines red, green, blue and yellow.
John Yasutake, MARTA's former manager of equal opportunity and conflict resolution, attended what he called “a senior staff meeting” Sept. 1 where the proposed name changes for the Doraville line and other routes were discussed. Scott did not attend the meeting.
“I said, ‘Hold on folks, do you realize that there’s a very large Asian community in Doraville and the surrounding area?” Yasutake recalled Monday. “I was offended as an Asian man. Would we run a line through East Point or the West End and call it the ‘black’ line?”
Yasutake, who now works for a college in Bellevue, Wash., said the MARTA staff members didn’t appear concerned that “yellow” is considered insensitive and might infuriate members of the community. On Oct. 7, after the change was implemented, he wrote to Scott detailing his concerns.
In her response to Yasutake, Scott said, “while it was certainly not our intent to be contemptuous in changing the name of the Doraville Line to the Yellow Line, we thoroughly understand the historical perspective that you shared with us on this matter.”
“As a result,” Scott continued, “this gives us added impetus to increase both our internal and external cultural diversity efforts to maximize the Asian American community’s inclusion in the Authority's contracts and procurements, job recruitment, community outreach and sensitivity training.”
Scott, according to internal MARTA documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution through the Georgia Open Records Act, asked her staff to research the use of color coding. But after meeting with local Asian community groups, Reginald Diamond, executive director of the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, said in a Nov. 16 note to a colleague that the name would remain the same.
He added, "I do not believe that any of the parties we met with last week use MARTA on other than an occasional basis."
The U.S. Census Bureau tallied more than 200,000 Asian-Americans – Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans and others – across the Atlanta metro area in 2004, a number considered by many to be greatly under-counted. Asian economic clout -- valued at $8 billion in sales by Asian-owned businesses in 2002 -- grows rapidly.
The color yellow has a long history of being used in a negative way when referring to Asians. The so-called "yellow peril," which entered the U.S. vernacular in the 19th century with the arrival of Chinese immigrants, raised racist fears of an assault on Western values and standards of living. Fear of the "yellow scourge" returned in force after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor at the onset of World War II.
“Anybody who rides MARTA knows that the line going up through that area is heavily Asian,” said Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. “These are always sensitive issues. Anticipation of concern and sensitivity, and the outreach, probably should have been done before."
Scott said she heard complaints from the employee and a few advocacy group leaders. At a recent community forum, she asked some Asian-Americans if they were offended and said they told her they weren't. She noted that Asian and American cities that have public transit call some routes yellow lines. However, she stressed that she is ready to listen.
MARTA employs 13 people in its diversity office. They focus on equal opportunity in employment and disadvantaged business and perform some community outreach.
"MARTA is an extremely important part of our community," said Helen Kim, the nonprofit Pan Asian center's advocacy director. "It's our public transit system and we’re very supportive of it. So we’re not at the point where we just want to hear a sound bite from MARTA and shake hands. We want them to show us that they sincerely want to change the name."
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