4/1: Why Is the Stop Asian Hate Movement Following the Lead of Zionists and Police?

Two groups affiliated with Stop Asian Hate raise questions about its affinities for carceral state power and Zionism.

Dylan Rodríguez - TRUTHOUT

The emergence of the United States-based Stop Asian Hate movement since 2021 has catalyzed various forms of organization and grassroots mobilization that pivot on demands for increased policing, enhanced hate crimes legislation and other forms of state-centered grievance. Stop Asian Hate’s militant, public-facing liberalism has momentarily overshadowed numerous radical projects and networks formed by Asian and Pacific Islander activists in and beyond the U.S., including those engaged in autonomous mutual aid, anti-racist organizing, Black and anti-colonial/Palestine solidarity, prisoner support, sex worker solidarity, queer and trans self-determination and abolitionist community-building. Grassroots organizations like Asian American Feminist Collective, Freedom, Inc., Asian American Pacific Islander Women Lead, Lavender Phoenix and Butterfly Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network predate the rise of anti-Asian/anti-Chinese animus during the COVID-19 pandemic and the gendered racist terror of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, engaging in popular education, community care and direct safety-based intervention in ways that expose and challenge carceral state violence rather than rely on it.

By contrast, Stop Asian Hate’s state-focused liberal social justice orientations hinge on a redemptive political fantasy: a reformed U.S. nation-building project in which police power, criminal jurisprudence, public policy and earnest carceral state actors (including elected officials and prosecutors) strengthen and expand the state’s obligation to protect people of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent from “hate,” “hate crimes,” “hate incidents,” and other forms of racial animus.

As with every large-scale social movement I’ve ever studied or directly engaged, this fantasy matters. It guides practical decision-making, organizational strategy and tactical choices. The alliances, internal protocols and political priorities guiding the formation of Stop Asian Hate’s two most prominent organizations — national coalition Stop AAPI Hate and The Asian American Foundation — raise urgent questions about the stakes and consequences of the movement’s public-facing claims, demands and organizing activities.

Stop AAPI Hate as Carceral Entrepreneurship
Founded on March 19, 2020, in “response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Stop AAPI Hate immediately garnered corporate media and philanthropic attention as a public-facing coalition between two well established California-based nonprofit organizations (AAPI Equity Alliance and Chinese for Affirmative Action) and the San Francisco State University Department of Asian American Studies.

Developed to compile and analyze data reflecting “incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying,” Stop AAPI Hate’s data collection framework relies on the terms and methods of criminology, atomizing “anti-Asian hate” by conceptualizing — and thus narrating — such violence as a matter of discrete events and interpersonal encounters. The coalition gathered almost 2,000 “incident reports” of “coronavirus discrimination” during its first two months of research, and continues to generate research studies utilizing a framework that defines anti-Asian hate through a taxonomy of “hate acts,” “hate crimes,” “hate incidents” and “civil rights violations.”

By generating an original national dataset, Stop AAPI Hate attracts significant financial and political support from foundations, police and elected state officials, well-funded Asian American nonprofits, and Asian American celebrities, academics, industry executives and cultural/social media influencers. Signaling this entrepreneurial intent, two of Stop AAPI Hate’s administrative leaders published a USA Today opinion piece for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month calling for “policymakers, government agencies and others” to invest in “partnerships between government civil rights agencies and trusted community-based organizations” while strengthening “existing protections and enforcement and [passing] new civil rights laws.”

Notably, Stop AAPI Hate foregrounds “narrative change” as a primary area of concentration, specifically mentioning the organization’s participation in “hundreds of speaking engagements” with audiences ranging from members of Congress, the Commission on Civil Rights, the United Nations and the World Bank to a range of “policymakers, students and educators, as well as business, entertainment, and nonprofit leaders.” The unspoken assumption in this work is that bureaucratic, administrative, industry and state elites should be the primary audiences and actors for such change.

Confoundingly, the organization asserts that it’s “grounded in the belief that we must confront racism at its root with comprehensive, non-carceral solutions to effectively prevent and respond to anti-AAPI hate.” Directly contradicting this stated ambition, Stop AAPI Hate’s state-focused advocacy and data curation reproduces rather than disrupts carceral notions of violence, justice and criminal deterrence. Even as the organization reinforces a liberal dependence on state-based institutions and actors to address, prevent and punish “hate,” it also claims to engage in community-centered education and restorative justice projects. The latter efforts, however, do not decenter the criminological paradigm that drives Stop AAPI Hate’s public- and state-facing campaigns for “justice” and “equity.”

Stop AAPI Hate’s Zionist and Police Problem

Perhaps the most significant 21st century development in the political economy of Asian American organizations has been the lightning-quick emergence of The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), founded in May 2021. TAAF garnered over $1 billion in its first year of existence, including influxes from the Ford, MacArthur and Mellon foundations, Bank of America, Etsy, Coca-Cola, Citi Foundation, Merck and Zoom.

Led by a board that includes the founder and chair of Himalaya Capital, the co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts (a global firm managing over $500 billion), the co-founder of Alibaba Group (also governor of the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets and Women’s National Basketball Association’s New York Liberty), the co-founder of Yahoo! and the CEO of Citadel Securities, TAAF boasts a “five-year portfolio strategy” to distribute grants to “best in class organizations working to mobilize against hate and violence, educate communities, and reclaim our narratives.”

But the presence of Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on TAAF’s board reflects a key political and organizational influence on the foundation’s mission. Described in one philanthropic periodical as “the only non-Asian on TAAF’s board,” Greenblatt’s presence is more than just a signal of organizational affinity: He was substantially involved in the strategic planning that led to the creation of TAAF, buttressed by the ADL’s “systems that track online hate and real-world hate crime,” which indicated a “spike in anti-Asian animus” in 2020.

Greenblatt is, by his own account, a leading organizational presence in the foundation who was “enlisted” by “a small group of individuals active in the AAPI community” to provide “guidance in creating what became TAAF.” His primary role has been to ensure that TAAF replicates the ADL’s modus operandi through an emergent Asian American analog: The ADL’s method for “[fighting] hate and extremism” defines TAAF’s funding relationships with “existing AAPI organizations … such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Stop AAPI Hate.”

Since its founding in 1913, the ADL has functioned as a watchdog organization that ostensibly identifies antisemitic activities and calls on institutional leaders, state officials, corporations and media outlets to condemn, fire or otherwise disaffiliate from those it deems culpable. Crucially, the ADL endorses a definition of antisemitism closely aligned with the one adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which has been subject to mounting scholarly, legal and activist criticism for conflating criticism of Israel and the ethno-supremacist political ideology of Zionism with antisemitism.

Criticism of the ADL’s and IHRA’s conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism has emerged from a range of scholarly, human rights, free speech, decolonial, Palestinian liberationist, radical feminist and abolitionist perspectives, and even periodically been covered by corporate media. Notably, the inaugural 2023 conference of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism convened a broad community of scholars, including Rabab Abdulhadi, Emmaia Gelman, Christine Hong, Jennifer Kelly, Sean Malloy, Alana Lentin and myself to develop rigorous archival, theoretical and practical responses to demystify this conflation.

Nonetheless, Stop AAPI Hate, TAAF and other Stop Asian Hate organizations not only tacitly comply with the ADL’s positions, but also replicate its organizational fixation on “hate” as the primary unit of analysis, public discourse and liberal state intervention. As Stop Asian Hate replicates the ADL’s methods, it’s worth raising a key question: What are the consequences of these organizations’ shared frameworks of “hate” victimization?

Gelman, a Jewish anti-Zionist scholar, organizer and teacher, writes in the Boston Review that, “At a time when it should be easier to see the ADL as a conservative knowledge production agency, a resurgence of concern with ‘hate’ has only consolidated its power.” (The ADL has long defined itself as “the leading anti-hate organization in the world.”) Crucially, Gelman shows how since at least the 1960s,

“The ADL [has] targeted civil rights groups from liberals to revolutionaries…. The ADL also surveilled ethnic representational groups, particularly Arab and black, and Jewish groups concerned about Israeli treatment of Palestinians…. In the present, the ADL has continued to militate against internationalist, intersectional anti-racism, and has used its status as ‘the nation’s premier civil rights organization’ to do so.”

Gelman’s analytic history demystifies Greenblatt’s grandstanding declaration of alliance between the ADL and Stop Asian Hate: “The Asian-American community has been under siege and now it’s the Jewish community…. It’s moments like this when allyship really matters.” Greenblatt’s projection of Jewish-Asian American alliance depicts a coalition of reaction against various notions of “siege,” not limited to hate crimes/incidents. This linkage — both organizational and ideological — enacts an analogy of exceptional victimhood that tethers the figure of the violated Asian American to the ADL’s Zionist notion of Jewishness.

The Stop Asian Hate movement’s affinity for the anti-Palestinian, pro-Israel, Zionist, domestic policing and global militarist regimes of the U.S. state is crystallized in the bureaucratic infrastructures of both TAAF and Stop AAPI Hate. TAAF’s advisory council boasts current and former high-level administrators and staffers of the U.S. global counterinsurgency apparatus, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Council on Foreign Relations member X. Rick Niu, three-time National Security Council appointee Farah Pandith, Hoover Institution fellow and George W. Bush administration appointee Lanhee Chen and former World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, among others.

While it does not feature a similar group of advisers, Stop AAPI Hate quietly maintains strong ties to organizations with histories of punishing critics of Israel as well as people involved in Palestinian solidarity organizing. Stop AAPI Hate has benefitted from a significant financial and research relationship with Davis Polk, a corporate law firm that made national news in October 2023 for rescinding offers of employment to Harvard and Columbia University law school students due to their criticisms of Israel’s mounting genocidal campaign against Palestinians.

A confidential source familiar with Stop AAPI Hate’s internal operations, who requested anonymity due to concerns over professional retaliation, reported that Davis Polk contributed an estimated $350,000 of pro bono legal research to support the coalition’s 2023 civil rights report, with one Davis Polk attorney contributing an additional $10,000 in private donations. Further, while Stop AAPI Hate publicly supported global calls for a ceasefire during the early weeks of genocidal Israeli military action in Gaza, the confidential source describes the organization’s leadership as unresponsive to staff concerns over the organization’s continued connection to Davis Polk. (According to the source, as of early January 2024, the Stop AAPI Hate-Davis Polk relationship remained intact.)

Though Stop AAPI Hate does not publicize its relationships with pro-Israel and Zionist organizations, its collaborations with such groups are readily evident to any close observer. The aforementioned source notes that weeks after issuing its public support for a ceasefire in Gaza, Stop AAPI Hate joined the ADL and TAAF as “community partners/sponsors” for a “Hate Crimes Summit” hosted by 17 separate “government partners,” including the FBI, Department of Justice, the Oakland and San Jose Police Departments, six separate district attorney’s offices, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the California Attorney General’s Office.

Despite previous attempts by progressive Asian American groups — and some of its own staff members — to convince Stop AAPI Hate leadership to decline speaking engagements and collaborative events with the ADL due to its political targeting of Palestinian and Palestinian American, Muslim, Arab American, and other communities critical of the Israeli state, Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Cynthia Choi spoke on a panel at the event alongside an FBI special agent, the executive director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center and a coordinator from the California Attorney General’s Office.

Such open, cooperative relationships with policing, carceral and pro-Israel entities expose the hypocrisy of Stop AAPI Hate’s declared commitment to “confront racism at its root with comprehensive, non-carceral solutions” as a form of public posturing unsupported by its organizational activities, interorganizational relationships and funding apparatus.

AAPI Women Lead (AAPIWL), a feminist anti-violence group based in Oakland, and the San Diego organization Asian Solidarity Collective (ASC) offer concrete, real-time examples of anti-racist, abolition-oriented, Black solidarity-aligned grassroots projects that largely reject the Stop Asian Hate movement’s liberal demands for recognition from the carceral state. ASC, for example, refuses siloed, multiculturalist definitions of anti-racism, framing its work as an ongoing effort to “engage Asian Americans to be liberated from anti-Black racism, model minority myths, internalized colonialism, and white supremacy.” Similarly, AAPIWL emphasizes shared “histories of violence” when addressing anti-Asian racism, emphasizing that “most of us came to these lands (as guests of Indigenous cultures) because of racialized, colonial wars.” Echoing ASC’s mission, AAPIWL contends that “we cannot continue to use frameworks or strategies that will continue to harm any community of color. This is solidarity.”

While both groups are relatively new, my substantive experiences with them as an invited collaborator and organizational participant (I recently joined the board of AAPIWL) directly contrast with Stop AAPI Hate’s political dishonesty and hypocritical collaborations with police power and the state. ASC and AAPIWL demonstrate a commitment to political study, grassroots organizing, and other collective activities that nourish a politics — and collective identity — of insurgency and revolt among people whose ascribed racial and gendered identities denote passivity, docility and assimilation, as well as anti-Blackness and compliance, if not alliance, with police power.

By way of example, AAPIWL’s Intergenerational Participatory Action Research project directly challenges the “hate” and “hate crime” centered framings of the Stop Asian Hate movement by conceptualizing “racial and gender violence across Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities” as simultaneously “systemic, institutional, and interpersonal.” As the first national, community-driven effort of its kind, this grassroots study constructively displaces and decenters Stop AAPI Hate’s criminological, police-friendly approach to understanding (and stopping) anti-Asian violence.

The Liberal Counterinsurgency of “Feelings”

Unlike ASC, AAPIWL, and other radical collectives confronting anti-Asian violence, Stop AAPI Hate, TAAF and related Stop Asian Hate organizations are actively constructing an extra-state, liberal-reactionary ensemble through their initiatives and campaigns. Such efforts reflect a key political logic structuring the Pentagon’s larger strategic definition of counterinsurgency: “Political reform should be started as soon as feasible, even if the insurgency is still ongoing.”

Stop Asian Hate effectively advocates a form of populist criminology that calls for an inclusive, aggressive, equity-oriented response from the domestic warmaking state. This amounts to a reformist mandate to re-legitimate anti-Black, colonial, carceral state violence in a moment of crisis. In this sense, Stop Asian Hate represents an early-21st century Asian Americanist equity grievance that looks to the state as its arbiter, protector and militarized authority figure.

Just as importantly, Stop Asian Hate fabricates and projects a canonical set of liberal reactionary feelings. Liberal feelings work to pacify, narratively rationalize and politically domesticate actual and potential forms of insurgent, insurrectionist, abolitionist and anti-state imagination and activity. More creepily, liberal feelings prepare the Asian/American subject as an ideal inheritor of a 21st century liberal multiculturalist “dream”: a civilizational fantasy that solicits identification with — if not active participation in — U.S. nation-building as a legitimate, reformable, redemptive global project.

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