By Dianne Anderson

Searching for equity in Orange County can feel like a needle in a haystack, but this month the spotlight on diversity is shining on harder to reach places.

Trina Greene Brown, a leader in gender and racial equity movements, applauded the county’s recent initiative to reinstate an Office on the Status of Women and Girls, a project that originally ran from 1978 to 1991.

She said the commission is crucial for supporting over half of the county’s population to thrive.

Greene Brown also has a background in programs to address violence against girls and women of color. With the alarming rate of hate crime against the Black community, she said the commission must ensure diverse representation that prioritizes women and girls facing multiple oppressions.

“The restoration of the Office on the Status of Women and Girls represents progress towards resolving issues such as domestic violence, mass incarceration, school pushout, housing difficulties, maternal mortality rates which disproportionately affect women and girls of color, with Black women and girls being adversely affected,” said Greene Brown, founder of Parenting for Liberation, is also a professor at California State University, Fullerton, Department of African American Studies.

Later this month, her organization will help advocate with other organizations in Sacramento, including All of Us or None and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC) in the Quest for Democracy 20204.

Policy work is important, she said, particularly SB 1126 Senator Dave Min (D-Irvine) which calls for mandated reporters to no longer be compelled to refer families to Child Protective Services solely on the basis that a child has witnessed domestic violence.

That process often leads to children being pushed to foster care.

“They consider them not fit to parent. They take the children away from them, that they desire to protect,” she said. “We’re fighting against that, if you’re in an abusive relationship and the partner you’re living with is abusive, that could be a forced removal of your child. We know that domestic violence is really hard to get out of or escape.”

Last month, Vice Chairman Doug Chaffee introduced a resolution to launch the Orange County Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, and approved by the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

The Commission will have seven members, including two at-large appointments to be appointed by the Board, and five members of the commission appointed by the Board within each Supervisorial District appointing one member.

“The commission will be tailored to focus on local needs. Using the data, it gathers on the actual experiences of women and girls in Orange County, it will be able to form its priorities and initiatives for the upcoming year. Vice Chairman Chaffee’s office has been in contact with commissions across the state to learn best practices and to be able to network and share with other commissions,” said Emma Fisher, policy advisor for Chafee in an email.

To ensure the independence of the commission, she said commissioners will be free to decide for themselves what the commission will research and study.

“I am pleased to have brought this item forward during Women’s History Month and create the Orange County Commission on the Status of Women and Girls,” said Vice Chairman Doug Chaffee, Fourth District. “This Commission will serve as a vital platform to monitor, advise, and promote the well-being of equal status of women and girls in Orange County, and be pivotal to help the County of Orange foster an environment with brighter, more equitable futures for all.”

In other concerns around equity, EQCA is also paying close attention to Orange County, where their nonprofit has advocated over the months at several city council and school board meetings.

In Sacramento, the organization sponsors bills to include areas of civil rights impact for LGBTQ+ every year. This year they’ve backed 11 bills.

“A lot of advocacy has been happening in Orange County, we have a lot of work we’re doing. There was a school board recall and other Orange County policies introduced around the district,” said Jorge Reyes Salinas, spokesperson for Equality California.

Equity policy involving transgender students in Orange County also spurred parents to ban together and successfully advocate to remove conservative school board trustees Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner. Both board members pushed discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ policy against transgender students, and were voted out of their seats last month in the recall election.

“We went to city council meetings, especially during the forced [transgender] outing policies and in addition to that, we let people know that we were supporting the recall,” he said, adding that they rallied against banning the Pride flag on city property, a proposition that also prevents the flying of breast cancer awareness and religious flags.

But the fight for equity in Orange County is especially important as the county grows more diverse.

“The numbers of Asian, Latino, and African American residents have all increased, by 31.3 percent, 7.3 percent, and 12.1 percent, respectively, while the number of White county residents has declined by 9.8 percent since 2010,” according to First Five Community Indicators 2022-23.

At the same time, there are concerns about the steady increase and disproportionate police use of force against Black and Brown residents, who are taking the brunt of police force.

Ameena Mirza Qazi, Equity Research Insitute Scholar-Activist, and USC contributors looked at URSUS – Use of Force Incident Reporting and Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) data and found that Black and Brown residents are taking the brunt of police force.

Qazi, a social justice attorney, policy analyst, and activist from the Peace and Justice Law Center in Fullerton, writes that Black residents are disproportionately impacted by the use of firearms by law enforcement, accounting for nearly 6% of the firearms uses of force, even though Black residents comprise only about 2% of the population.

“White and Asian individuals significantly represented less victims of firearms use than their respective proportions of the population. When adjusted for percentage of total population, Black individuals are the most overrepresented in uses of force. In fact, since the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder, the uses of force against Black residents in Orange County has seen the greatest increase,” Qazi reports.

To apply to serve as a commissioner,

https://cob.ocgov.com/sites/cob/files/2023-10/BCC%20application%20updated%2010-12-23%20Fill-In_0.pdf

For First 5 Community Indicators,

https://first5oc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/FINAL_DIGITAL_CommunityIndicators22-Reduced.pdf

For USC Police Violence in OC Findings, see

https://dornsife.usc.edu/eri/2024/01/09/police-violence-in-orange-county-key-findings

For Parenting for Liberation, see

https://parentingforliberation.org/