SILICON VALLEY, CA About 900 Asian American business leaders across the country signed onto a campaign to stand against the recent rise in hate incidents targeting Asians and Asian Americans.
The "Stand With Asian Americans" pledge calls to fight violence against Asians, support Asian employees and ensure representation, and has the signatures of top executives at tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple and at other prominent brands such as Amazon, Nike and Airbnb.
The group is expected to launch a website on Wednesday and publish ads in mainstream publications.
Justin Zhu, the co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Iterable, helped organize the campaign he described as an "organic, underground spread" motivated by the mass murder earlier this month at three Atlanta spas that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.
Zhu and fellow Silicon Valley tech executives Dave Lu, managing partner at Hyphen Capital, and Wendy Nguyen, senior vice president at Propeller Health, are frustrated by what they believe is an inadequate response from mainstream media and corporations to the rise in anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. They seek to unite as many Asian American business leaders as possible to form a collective voice.
"The goal is to bring this issue into the mainstream because for our community to be safe, it's not just donations or passing new policies," Zhu told Patch. "The 300-plus million people in America need to recognize that Asian racism is not OK. This is about a culture shift that needs to happen because donations aren't going to cut it. It's really in the hearts of Americans."
Early backers of the pledge included Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, and Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, Zhu said. Others quickly joined them.
The website's homepage featured a picture of Xiao Zhen Xie, the older Asian woman who fought back after being attacked in San Francisco earlier this month while she waited at an intersection. Across the header is the word "enough" in all caps.
"We, the Asian American business leaders of America, are tired, angry and afraid and not for the first time," the site said. "We are tired of being treated as less than American, subject to harassment and now, every day, we read about another member of our community being physically attacked simply for being Asian."
The site asked visitors to sign up as either an "Asian" or "Ally" and to donate to the Asian Pacific Fund. It also listed the names of all the business leaders and allies who have signed on in support.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rise in hate crimes targeting Asians, including countless documented attacks against older Asian people in the Bay Area. The Stop AAPI Hate organization reported more than 3,700 incidents of anti-Asian hate in the country since the pandemic began.
Zhu was born in Shanghai and immigrated to Canada at 8, moved to the U.S. for middle school and became a citizen in 2012. But he said he never quite felt like he belonged. Zhu landed a software engineering position at Twitter right out of college; two years later, he founded Iterable, which is now a 400-employee cross-channel marketing platform that raised more than $140 million in funding, according to CrunchBase.
"When I walk on the street and someone sees me, I'm seen as another Asian person," Zhu said. "We don't walk outside with our job titles."
Asian Americans make up half of the Bay Area's technology workforce, The Mercury News reported, based on U.S. Census data. But the tech industry's response to anti-Asian hate has been "lackluster," Zhu said. Some people signed the pledge but then removed their names because their companies had policies restricting political statements, he added.
"We've had companies who are essentially preventing their employees from speaking their truth," Zhu said. "This is our experience. It's nothing about politics. This is about our elderly, our women just not feeling safe."
Zhu wants the movement to help ease more Asian Americans into positions of influence. Asians held only 13.9 percent of executive positions at tech firms despite making up a much larger proportion of the workforce, The Mercury News reported in 2016. And even fewer Asian Americans are elected to political office.
"We need to change that," Zhu said. "If you don't have people at the table who are making the laws, who are making decisions, making sure our interests are shared, that our stories are shared it's just a lack of awareness that becomes insensitive of Asian needs, because they're not aware of it."
Many Asian Americans who emigrated from countries where speaking up politically is risky don't historically organize. "The first thing we have to do is strengthen the Asian American movement," Zhu said. "This is us moving the movement along until it gets to the critical mass. Then it can fuel itself."
Continued here:
Silicon Valley Tech Executives Pledge To Stand Against Asian Hate - Patch.com
