Wake-Up Call: Anti-Asian Hate and Philanthropy's Role in an Intersectional Justice Movement

A recent march against anti-asian racism in manhattan. Sang Cheng/shutterstock

A recent march against anti-asian racism in manhattan. Sang Cheng/shutterstock

On October 24, 1871, a mob entered Los Angeles’ Chinatown and dragged residents from their homes in an orgy of violence that ended with 19 dead. The majority of those killed were hung from hastily constructed gallows in an event that has been characterized as one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history. Of the hundreds who participated in the attacks, eight men were convicted of manslaughter, and their convictions were later overturned. The massacre was only one incident in an atmosphere of anti-Chinese sentiment that led to the 1882 passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only federal law ever to ban a group of immigrants solely on the basis of ethnicity.

Over a century later, on June 19, 1982, Chinese American draftsman Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two laid-off auto workers in Detroit on the basis that he was somehow to blame for the Japanese automotive industry out-competing American firms. Charged with murder, the two perpetrators were convicted of manslaughter and served no jail time. Responding to protests, the presiding judge wrote, “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail.”

Like so many other people of color, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders living in the United States have experienced a history of racism, disenfranchisement and violent hate that goes back centuries. The recent shootings in Atlanta, whose perpetrator “was having a bad day” according to one local law enforcement officer, are just the latest example. From mob violence like the L.A. massacre to hate crimes like Vincent Chin’s murder, to federal policy like race-based exclusion acts and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, anti-Asian hate and discrimination are nothing new. 

But for philanthropy, whose funding for AAPI communities—like its support for other communities of color—has long been relatively minuscule, the surge in anti-Asian hate and bigotry over the past year may prove to be something of a wake-up call. In the past month alone, new funding commitments have emerged, including a recent $100 million pledge from the California Endowment and a new, dedicated grantmaking entity that has yet to officially launch.

“During the first part of the pandemic, when anti-Asian violence was on the rise and more visible, people thought that was terrible, but they also saw it as episodic,” said Patricia Eng, president and CEO of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP). After the Atlanta shootings, she said, “People are really recognizing it and speaking out in a different way.”

To get a better sense of how philanthropy is responding—and can respond better—to a problem that is deeply rooted in the broader history of systemic racism against communities of color, we reached out to some leading funders and nonprofits serving AAPI communities. Their observations and recommendations paint a picture of longtime neglect and a lack of understanding of AAPI communities among nonprofit funders at large. According to Shaw San Liu, executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, “As a field, philanthropy has contributed to racial inequity in our country through the dramatic under-resourcing of BIPOC communities and AAPI communities within that.” 

Liu, Eng and other philanthropic and nonprofit leaders stressed that rather than force AAPI grantees (and other BIPOC organizations) to operate under a scarcity mentality, the “philanthropic pie” must expand. Not only in dollar terms, that is, but also through an increased willingness among different communities of color, including AAPI ones, to act and fund in solidarity with one another. 

Getting up to speed

Just as the killing of George Floyd prompted many in philanthropy to reexamine what they thought they knew about the history of anti-Black racism in the United States, the ongoing uptick in anti-Asian hate has highlighted just how little many of us know about the Asian American experience.

“We need to get more sophisticated and nuanced about race and the interplay between groups,” said Cathy Cha, president and CEO of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. “It’s important to understand that there is nothing equivocal about being brought to this country as a slave hundreds of years ago. But while anti-Black racism is the bedrock [of systemic racism in the U.S.], it’s a lot more complicated these days.”

Cha co-authored a Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed with California Endowment CEO Robert Ross, who is Black, discussing several of the factors that have prevented philanthropy from properly resourcing AAPI communities in the fight against hate and discrimination. Foremost among them is the notion that AAPI people are a “model minority,” a myth in which Asian Americans’ supposedly uniform educational and financial success is used as a wedge to paint other people of color, Black people in particular, in a bad light.

The idea of Asian Americans as a “model minority” is factually incorrect on multiple levels. “The reality is that Asians are the most economically divided group in the U.S.,” said Meera Venugopal, associate director of development and communications at the New York-based Asian American Federation. “In NYC specifically, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing demographic, and at 1.3 million, represent 16% of the population. Almost one in four Asians lives in poverty, 70% are immigrants, and 70% have low English proficiency,” Venugopal said. 

On top of vast economic disparities within and between AAPI populations, there’s the sheer diversity of the Asian American population itself. “The AAPI community is extremely diverse,” the W.K. Kellogg Foundation pointed out in a statement. “There are dozens of ethnic groups that speak more than 100 languages. Many people within the AAPI community experience racism and its impacts differently from one another or other communities of color.” Take, for example, the decades of heightened racism experienced by many Americans of South Asian background following the September 11 attacks. 

Another dynamic that many AAPI people face, one that played a central role in the Atlanta tragedy, is the way in which racism and misogyny intersect to impact AAPI women and girls. Often subject to sexualization and objectification on the basis of their race, many Asian American women deal with “small and large violations of your basic human dignity and your humanity” throughout their lives, as National Domestic Workers Alliance executive director Ai-Jen Poo put it during a panel discussion hosted by the National Asian Pacific Women’s Forum. The majority of recent anti-Asian hate incidents, including the Atlanta attacks and others over the course of 2020, have been directed at Asian American women. 

Nevertheless, “Asian women, in particular, have been strong leaders in both crisis response as well as leaning into civic engagement across the country,” said Maria Torres-Springer, vice president for U.S. programs at the Ford Foundation. “It continues to be crucial to support the leadership of women in advancing justice, as they sit at the intersection of identities that have been traditionally marginalized from civic participation and from leadership roles in advocacy,” she said. 

Stagnant support

With all that in mind, exactly how well has philanthropy been doing to support AAPI communities and combat anti-Asian hate? In short, not great.

A recent AAPIP report delved into the numbers, and the picture it paints is far from encouraging. “The percentage of foundation dollars designated for AAPI communities has not moved over the past three decades,” notes the report, which pegs AAPI-specific support at a vanishingly small 20 cents out of every $100 of philanthropic giving. In 2018, the most recent year the research covers, overall funding stood at just $174 million for the nation’s fastest-growing racial demographic.  

Moreover, AAPI funding is brittle. Grants from the top five funders made up a full 38.1% of AAPI funding during the period from 2014 through 2018, with the top funder—you guessed it, Ford—supplying 22.8% of the total. While the support of those grantmakers is of course welcome, such a top-heavy funding landscape can be a vulnerability.

“When funding is concentrated among several funders, it creates instability where any shift can topple a lifeline for AAPI communities,” said Lyle Matthew Kan, AAPIP’s interim vice president of programs, who authored the report. 

That state of affairs places AAPI nonprofits and communities in a precarious position, especially at a time of overlapping crises. “The Asian American Federation has been screaming from the rooftops ever since we started noticing the effect of COVID-19 news on our small businesses way back in January of 2020, to little response from philanthropy,” Venugopal said. She also noted that “In NYC, while some of the smaller, local foundations include AAPI grantees in their portfolio, the larger foundations do not.”

The sheer diversity and number of organizations serving AAPI communities makes it difficult for a small cadre of top funders to adequately resource the field. There are simply not enough philanthropies involved. And as tends to be the case in philanthropy, foundations and individual donors alike tend to gravitate toward the bigger players, leaving small local groups dependent on local support. 

Eng at AAPIP pointed to a rising groundswell of local funding, particularly from within AAPI communities and among AAPI-affiliated community foundations, seeking to address that need. But there is still room for a lot more philanthropic investment, particularly alongside funding for other under-resourced communities of color. Some of the top funders of AAPI communities already engaging in that work to varying degrees include the Ford Foundation, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, the California Endowment, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, the James Irvine Foundation and the Marguerite Casey Foundation, among others.

Overcoming invisibility

Although the overall lack of philanthropic attention to AAPI communities remains a big problem—Liu at the Chinese Progressive Association called it “invisibilization”—there have been some promising developments in the funding world over the past year, and especially since the shootings in Atlanta. In the aftermath of that tragedy, AAPIP published a letter calling for solidarity and collective action in the face of anti-Asian hate onto which over 700 philanthropic professionals signed. Eng called that encouraging, considering the bump from about 500 who endorsed a similar AAPIP letter a year ago as anti-Asian sentiment began to spike. 

But at the same time, Eng said, “We’re not satisfied with having just another letter that then goes away.” For its part, AAPIP has been convening AAPI philanthropic leaders to plot ways forward in the recognition that the status quo cannot continue. “We need to leverage our own positions in philanthropy to really make this much more visible and call for more sustained investment in solidarity with other communities of color,” Eng said. 

Cha at the Haas, Jr. Fund made a similar point. “More AAPIs across the country are wondering if the quiet … stance that our communities have taken has been the right route. People are wondering what to do, and there are a lot of possibilities to really activate, educate and engage a broader swath of AAPI communities,” she said. 

Over the past several years, the Haas, Jr. Fund—a longtime supporter of AAPI communities—has shifted its grantmaking strategy in a way that reflects where a lot of AAPI-focused funders appear to be headed. One big shift has been to embrace power-building and civic engagement, strategies that many funders of AAPI communities have traditionally bypassed in favor of direct service grants. 

On the national level, a philanthropy-backed organization called the Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Fund has helped lead that charge. Created in 2014 as a joint effort between Ford, Wallace H. Coulter, the Haas, Jr. Fund and Carnegie, the fund aims to reverse historically low rates of AAPI turnout and voter registration. The fund’s executive director, EunSook Lee, has sought to highlight and build upon civic activities popular in many AAPI communities—like church services, immigrant associations and alumni groups—to push back against the prevailing “invisibility” of AAPI people in civic life. 

One encouraging counterexample to AAPI people’s perceived civic invisibility was the recent role Asian American groups played to encourage participation in Georgia’s special Senate election this January. But by and large, AAPI communities have been well off the political radar. Cha at the Haas, Jr. Fund noted that when the fund backed a recent effort to survey suburban Chinese Americans by phone, residents accepted the calls in high numbers, expressing surprise because “no one had ever asked them” about their opinions before.

The AAPI Civic Engagement Fund has also been active around specific responses to anti-Asian hate incidents, standing up an Anti-Racism Response Network Fund to support 37 AAPI community organizations. Funders include Ford, Kellogg, Unbound Philanthropy, the Groundswell Fund and the Susan Sandler Fund.

In addition, state-level groups like Asian American Pacific Islanders for Civic Empowerment have been active around building out ground-level power-building infrastructure, creating resources like the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit. Again, a similar list of funders was involved in that California-based effort: the Haas, Jr. Fund, the California Endowment, the California Wellness Foundation, Unbound Philanthropy, the Rosenberg Foundation and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation.

New funding opportunities

The shift among AAPI philanthropy to embrace civic engagement and community power-building doesn’t end there. A number of commitments have come down the pike recently that may expand the range of funding available, both from typical foundation funders as well as new players—including individual donors. 

Just this week, the California Endowment announced a major commitment of $100 million over 10 years to support AAPI organizations in the state. That’s no small amount, and it’s even more significant given the paucity of philanthropic funding dedicated to AAPI communities. Like other COVID-era funding initiatives, the commitment will provide both immediate support to frontline organizations as well as longer-term backing for civic engagement and power-building.

“Over the next 10 years, TCE’s programmatic funding goals have evolved to focus on statewide power-building infrastructure in many manifestations. This will include seeking to identify emerging and aligned AAPI leadership and organizations across the state,” said Ray Colmenar, a managing director at the California Endowment. Colmenar also pointed to a rapid-response portfolio the endowment is developing to document and counter anti-Asian incidents through a variety of strategies: community organizing, alliance building, healing and restorative justice, narrative change and the like. 

Other key AAPI funders like Ford and Kellogg have also increased or are considering increases to their AAPI grantmaking. One recent example was $1 million in response funding that Ford dedicated to the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, in part to support the families of the Atlanta victims and to resource the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice—a national advocacy network that is one of the largest recipients of grant money in the AAPI space.

In addition to more concerted action from foundations already backing AAPI communities, there are encouraging signs that anti-racism work and community organizing are picking up steam as priorities among AAPI donors themselves. As we often note, rampant wealth inequality means big need, but also big fortunes. As members of the nation’s most economically polarized racial group, some AAPI people have money to spare. The uptick in anti-Asian attacks has certainly gotten their attention.

One effort to note is Stand With Asian Americans, a new coalition of AAPI business leaders that has pledged $10 million over the next year to fight anti-Asian hate and violence. The group is partnering with the Asian Pacific Fund to distribute grants to organizations including StopAAPIHate, AAPI Women Lead, NAPAWF, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the Association for Asian American Studies. “We don’t deserve to live in fear in our own country,” a statement from the campaign reads.

Among the most interesting developments on the AAPI donor front is one that hasn’t happened yet: the upcoming launch of a new grantmaker called, simply, the Asian American Foundation. Slated to begin its work next month, the new foundation has the backing of a number of donors and partners from AAPI communities. In addition to addressing hate incidents, its focus will involve moving toward a sense of true belonging in which Asian Americans are seen as Americans, not as perpetual foreigners.

We’ll go in deeper on the new Asian American Foundation once it launches, but from what we know at this point, its approach will reflect many of the developments discussed above—education and strengthening community infrastructure, as well as a focus on accurate data collection around hate incidents. 

“The pie itself is not big enough”

Grace Meng, the first Asian American to be elected to Congress from New York, has stressed the need to make the most of this moment and to ensure that AAPI visibility as part of the movement for racial justice in the U.S. doesn’t dissipate. In February, Meng introduced a House resolution condemning anti-Asian sentiment related to COVID-19, rebuking racist epithets around the virus. In many ways, Meng embodies growing calls from AAPI people not only to be recognized as Americans, but to acquire the political representation—and power—that entails.

“This is a pan-Asian and cross-class moment,” said Taryn Higashi, executive director of Unbound Philanthropy. “In the current moment, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are identifying across national origin, class and gender to a degree that we have not experienced before.” She went on, “Within philanthropy, we have an opportunity to help AAPI leaders develop stronger linkages across communities, articulate new solutions, and strengthen the voices of those who are breaking out of silos.”

Simultaneously, most of the funders and nonprofits we heard from emphasized that while AAPI communities need support, that support must occur in conversation and collaboration with funding for other communities of color. Torres-Springer at Ford pointed to “inspiring solidarity and support for the AAPI community from peer movements.” Organizations like “NAACP LDF, Color of Change, United We Dream, Muslim Advocates, UndocuBlack Network, and so many movements held hands, shared resources, mourned, agitated and advocated together in the aftermath of this violence,” she said.

In confronting systemic racism, we’ve seen over the past year—and over the past couple centuries—that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. But at the same time, there’s more than enough philanthropic money floating around to put to rest the notion that different racial and ethnic constituencies, including AAPI communities, have to compete for nonprofit funding. As Cha and Ross wrote in their joint op-ed, “It’s time to face the truth that the pie itself is not big enough and the very notion of divvying up justice among and across different populations is antithetical to what justice means.”