{"id":102967,"date":"2023-03-31T17:05:30","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T15:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=102967"},"modified":"2023-03-25T09:02:01","modified_gmt":"2023-03-25T07:02:01","slug":"25-05-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=102967","title":{"rendered":"Double Crossed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Double Crossed<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nSHELUYANG PENG<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Organizations that claim to represent minority groups are really working for the managerial elite.<\/strong><\/span>
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Dr. Mai Khanh Tran, center, stands with her husband, Manh Phi, while mourning at a vigil for those who lost their lives in the Atlanta spa shootings, at Community Center Park in Garden Grove, California, on March 24, 2021. Dr. Tran, a pediatrician, has been active in the fight against anti-Asian hate and has seen it continue to get worse through the years.ALLISON ZAUCHA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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New York City\u2019s Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of the city\u2019s public education system, was once 90% Jewish<\/a>. By the time I entered Stuyvesant in 2013, it was 70% Asian. In the black-and-white photos that adorned the walls, rows of Steins and Cohens looked upon the newest crop of children from working-class immigrant families. Asians are ascendant in many once heavily Jewish domains: specialized high schools; elite colleges; medical schools. Like the American Jewish community, debates now rage within Asian American communities over whether we are \u201creal minorities\u201d or white-adjacent<\/a>, and we even write Tablet articles about being the victims of violent hate crimes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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American Jews and Asian Americans share something else in common: Both have been sold out by activist organizations that are more interested in catering to the sensibilities of the wealthy elite that dominate the Democratic Party than in advocating for ordinary working-class constituents. Leading Jewish and Asian American organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) have demonstrated their real priorities in how they have responded to two of the biggest issues in their respective communities: a wave of violent hate crimes and discriminatory education policies.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIn New York, street harassment, minor assaults, and even full-on beatings of visible Jews are almost a banality now, too frequent over too long of a period to be considered an active crisis, even in the communities most affected,\u201d wrote<\/a> Armin Rosen in the summer of 2022. Virtually the same thing could have been said about Asians. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there emerged one grainy video after another of Asians on the streets of American cities being beaten, occasionally to death. The victims were typically senior citizens or women, and they usually lived in coastal metropolises with high Asian populations. One attack involved an elderly Asian woman being called an anti-Asian slur before being punched in the head 125 times<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As The Scroll<\/a> pointed out last year, \u201cthe rise in hate crimes [in New York] targeting highly visible and vulnerable groups like religious Jews and Asians tracks to the increase in the overall level of violent crime and disorder in the city.\u201d Many working-class members of minority groups have reacted by advocating for<\/a> stricter criminal justice policies given crime disproportionately affects them. But the groups that claim to speak for these vulnerable working-class Jews and Asian Americans, such as the ADL and AAJC, don\u2019t advocate for these policies because they\u2019re afraid to risk alienating the donor class and progressive base of the Democratic Party\u2014groups that have consistently called for \u201crestorative justice\u201d policies and to defund the police. The ADL and AAJC has chorused those calls, virtue-signaling instead of fighting for the interests of the communities they claim they represent.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Take, for instance, the main targets of the ADL\u2019s activist campaigns. Despite the ADL\u2019s own statistics<\/a> showing that in 2019 more than 55% of the attacks on Jews in New York City were carried out by individuals affiliated with \u201cblack supremacist\u201d ideologies like the Nation of Islam and Black Hebrew Israelites, the ADL, echoing New York City\u2019s former mayor, Bill de Blasio, has focused on white supremacy\u2014an important issue, but not the one most plaguing New York City or San Francisco\u2019s Asian American or Jewish communities. When de Blasio wanted to signal that he was \u201cdoing something\u201d about the explosion of violence against Jews, he appointed an ADL veteran, Deborah Lauter<\/a>, to head a new Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes focused on finding a \u201cholistic approach\u201d to the problem.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, Lauter\u2019s office did nothing to stop the violence because New York\u2019s court system appears unwilling to pursue hate crime convictions, which would signal the city\u2019s seriousness about combating the issue. In one instance\u2014the killing of a 62-year-old Asian woman who died from injuries sustained when she was beaten outside of her Queens home\u2014the murder was not prosecuted as a hate crime \u201ceven though it seemed to have no other motive besides hatred of Asians,\u201d as Armin Rosen put it. As the Crown Heights Jewish activist Devorah Halberstam explained to Rosen, the lack of hate crimes prosecutions is a systemic issue. \u201cIt\u2019s not against the Jewish community. It\u2019s not against the Asian community \u2026 It\u2019s the broader picture.\u201d On the issue of the city systematically ignoring hate crimes, the ADL and AAJC have been silent.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With hate crimes increasing and hate crime charges nowhere in sight, what were these organizations busy advocating for? In the midst of this sustained wave of violence, Jewish and Asian advocacy groups were more preoccupied with chanting fashionable social justice slogans than with actually trying to prevent and punish hate crimes. In 2020, for instance, the AAJC tweeted \u201ctoday we observe the National Day of Mourning in solidarity with all who have lost loved ones due to police violence or white supremacy.\u201d This is not a good way of supporting those Asian American communities relying on police protection for their safety and sense of security. Also in 2020, the New York-based Asian American Federation (AAF) backed the creation of a special Asian Hate Crimes task force in the city. The group\u2019s executive director, Jo-Ann Yoo, said the move was necessary \u201cto help raise safety awareness in the pan-Asian community.\u201d In a city that refuses to prosecute hate crimes, raising awareness is perhaps the best that can be hoped for.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you were one of the people being beaten in the streets or walking them in fear, however, you would have wanted\u2014indeed needed\u2014more from these organizations. This gets at the fundamental problem: The people who run the advocacy NGOs do not view themselves as potential victims of such attacks. Orthodox Jews in New York City, whose attire makes them highly visible, are the prime targets of antisemitic violence. Most have little social capital outside of their neighborhoods, which are often side-by-side with other immigrant enclaves. Secular, progressive Jews who make careers in \u201csocial justice advocacy\u201d tend to see the Orthodox community as a relic.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A similar dynamic applies to the relationship between the working-class Asian American immigrants who are the victims of hate crimes and their professional class spokespersons. Recent immigrants from Asian countries often lack English fluency and hold no social or cultural capital. Many struggle with America\u2019s labyrinthine immigration system and are prime candidates for group-based lobbying efforts. Meanwhile, the NGOs that represent Asian Americans are staffed by the kinds of highly educated members of the managerial class who choose to go into the nonprofit sector. The more powerful these organizations become, the more they draw from a national network of affluent individuals and families that have the social and economic capital to let their children study arts and humanities at America\u2019s top colleges.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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American Jews and Asian Americans have been sold out by activist organizations that are more interested in catering to the sensibilities of the wealthy elite that dominates the Democratic Party than in advocating for ordinary people.<\/span><\/p>\n

The same thing is happening in America\u2019s fights over access to education. High Asian enrollment at New York City\u2019s specialized high schools like Stuyvesant has become a problem for the city\u2019s progressive politicians. In 2020, the chancellor of the Department of Education under Mayor de Blasio, Richard Carranza, commented that \u201cI just don\u2019t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,\u201d suggesting that Asians, like the pushy Jews of previous generations, had somehow gotten their spots unfairly. Never mind the open tests they took to get in, that a full three-quarters of Stuyvesant\u2019s students are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and that Asians are, on average, the poorest racial group in New York City.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While there were local organizations fighting to preserve fair and colorblind access to schools like Stuyvesant, at the national level the major Asian and Jewish advocacy organizations have actively supported policies that are biased against their own constituents. Take the affirmative action case now before the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College<\/em>. Progressive organizations have attempted to frame SFFA as a white-led effort, which erases the Jewish background of the lawyer spearheading the suit, Edward Blum, and the historical legacy of quotas limiting Jewish access to Harvard and other elite institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As Jacob Scheer has written<\/a> in Tablet, the leading American Jewish organizations once opposed affirmative action, as numerus clausus<\/em> quotas were once used to keep qualified Jewish applicants out of elite institutions. The \u201cbig three\u201d Jewish advocacy organizations (the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee) filed amicus briefs in Regents v. Bakke <\/em>(1978) taking a firm stand against affirmative action policies. But now the leading Jewish organizations have changed their tune on affirmative action, and the ADL filed<\/a> an amicus brief supporting Harvard\u2019s admissions policies. Similarly, the AAJC has filed<\/a> two amicus briefs supporting Harvard\u2019s de facto anti-Asian discrimination.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The truth is that \u201cour\u201d organizations have become empty mouthpieces parroting affluent liberal talking points in the interest of getting more donations and mainstream media coverage. Rather than advocating for policies that working-class immigrant communities actually support, progressive nonprofits use their influence to regulate language.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In one particularly salient example, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest and most powerful Latino-interest NGO in America, adopted the neologism \u201cLatinx\u201d in their official communications. The organization\u2019s 2019 summit in Washington, D.C., was called \u201cState of Latinx America.\u201d The problem, as detailed in Politico<\/a>, was that while \u201cLatinx\u201d was \u201cfavored by activists and a growing crew of Democrats, consultants and media pundits [\u2026] just 2 percent of Hispanics use the word\u2014while 40 percent are actually offended by it.\u201d While LULAC eventually decided to drop the term, the fact that the organization had felt compelled to adopt it in the first place despite the complete lack of grassroots support suggests that professional activists set the agenda for these groups, and not their beleaguered constituents. For the activists, however, using terms like Latinx is useful insofar as it confirms their membership in the coastal liberal class.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A similar linguistic power struggle is taking place within Asian American communities\u2014indeed with the term \u201cAsian American\u201d itself. In a 2012 Pew survey of people from the six largest groups that make up the Asian American category, fewer than 15% of respondents said they considered themselves \u201cAsian Americans.\u201d As Wesley Yang pointed out<\/a> in Tablet: \u201cthere is no reason to expect otherwise\u201d seeing as \u201cno one chose it for themselves. Others applied it to them.\u201d The reason for choosing such terms is to generate the appearance of a powerful and coherent political and electoral bloc out of what were (and are) a number of fractious groups pursuing their own interests. In one sense the strategy worked: While there is still no organic \u201cAsian American\u201d identity which binds together people of Chinese and Bangladeshi background, the category has given the class of spokespeople who claim to speak for \u201cAsian Americans\u201d power within the political system.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The term Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) is even more absurd. AAPI originated<\/a> within the federal government\u2019s Office of Management and Budget, when it formalized the term\u2019s usage in 1977 as a way to decide which ethnic groups along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border were eligible to apply for special loans. Yet somehow this archaic bureaucratic term escaped the dustbin of history and now sits alongside BIPOC<\/em> and Latinx <\/em>as one of the newest progressive shibboleths. Imagine trying to explain to an actual living \u201cAAPI\u201d immigrant why Koreans, Indians, and Samoans are all considered part of the same group, while Kazakhs and Afghans are not?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The answer, obviously, is that it has nothing to do with \u201ccommunities\u201d and everything to do with politics. Under the leadership of the managerial class, identity-based NGOs have become appendages of the Democratic Party machine. The ADL, Liel Leibovitz wrote<\/a> last year, has abandoned its founding mission and transformed into a \u201cstealthy progressive, partisan operation\u201d that \u201cactually puts real Jews in danger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In one sense it has worked: In recent years the ADL has seen a massive surge in revenue<\/a>. On the other hand, the ADL is so far off course that it couldn\u2019t even issue a statement last November<\/a> when hundreds of Black Hebrew Israelites chanted \u201cWe are the real Jews!\u201d in a show of solidarity with Brooklyn Nets player Kyrie Irving. Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL\u2019s director, never condemned the march, but hours after it ended, he was attacking progressive activists\u2019 public enemy of the month, Elon Musk, for not doing enough to safeguard Twitter from \u201chate, harassment, and misinformation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A few weeks later, Greenblatt appeared on the popular radio show the Breakfast Club<\/em> and made a fool of himself trying to discuss hate crimes without offending anyone. The comments section<\/a> beneath the video, meanwhile, filled up with people spewing every antisemitic trope in the book.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A similar phenomenon has taken place in the case of the organization Stop AAPI Hate. Like the ADL, Stop AAPI Hate aggregates instances of hate and promotes a sanitized, corporate-donor-friendly style of Asian activism meant to be shared on the Instagram stories of white collar professionals. The group\u2019s website declares that \u201cour approach recognizes that in order to effectively address anti-Asian racism, we must work to end all forms of structural racism leveled at Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.\u201d This is the type of thing one says to win acceptance in a freshman comp lit class or corporate DEI seminar\u2014not to give hope and confidence to working-class Asian Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Kulkarni Manju, meanwhile, appeared in a video two months after six working-class Asian immigrant women were murdered in Atlanta spas to argue that Asian Americans were striving for \u201cWhite-adjacency\u201d and that there was \u201csignificant levels of anti-Blackness in our community,\u201d showing how the interests of the Asian activist class and the Asian working class diverge.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This reveals something essential about the true purpose of these organizations. While they appear to lobby the powerful in Washington on behalf of ethnic communities, their true purpose is exactly the opposite: to provide the power elite in Washington with ethnic branded communications platforms that they can use to sway these communities toward supporting parties and policies working against their own interests.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Sheluyang Peng<\/strong> is a writer living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. His writing can be found at societystandpoint.substack.com.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Double Crossed SHELUYANG PENG Organizations that claim to represent minority groups are really working for the managerial elite. . Dr. Mai Khanh Tran, center, stands with her husband, Manh Phi, while mourning at a vigil for those who lost their lives in the Atlanta spa shootings, at Community Center Park in Garden Grove, California, on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102967"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102967"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103146,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102967\/revisions\/103146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}