Hate with Dylan Rodriguez

Transcript

Hate with Dylan Rodriguez

Emmaia: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. This episode with Dylan Rodriguez takes a look at the Stop Asian Hate campaign, and some of the organizations behind it, as a way to consider hate as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. This is also the first of several episodes we hope to bring you where we’ll talk about the intersections of Asian and AAPI politics, in the US and globally, as they intersect with Zionist politics. Dylan’s article, which is the basis of our conversation, is called “How the Stop Asian Hate Movement Became Entwined with Zionism, Policing, and Counterinsurgency.” It’s on the website of the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and it’s also linked in the show notes.

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who, as he says, has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He’s faculty in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. We know him as an incisive critic of empire and militarism in culture, and as a member of the ICSZ collective.

Dylan, thanks for being here.

You recently wrote an article on the Stop Asian Hate campaign, which began as a hashtag and is now a project that’s funded, and undertaken by non-profits… And it may not be completely obvious why that would be the subject of a conversation about Zionist politics. So let’s explain: there are actually two different strands of conversation here, two things that you’re writing about. One is the way that the Stop Asian Hate campaign carries out what you call “militant liberalism” — and that will get us thinking about the hate crimes framework itself. And the second is how the hate crimes framework is connected to Zionism, and the way that Zionist institutions kind of stitch themselves into civil rights talk in order to do their work.

Can you start by telling us about this article and the situation?

Dylan: I wrote this piece because of a concern I have with the rise of a social justice industrialized ecosystem that links nonprofit organizations to specific public facing campaigns, to academic and research initiatives, to electoral politics and state initiatives, specifically state initiatives and governmental initiatives that link police power to notions of social justice. The rise of the Stop Asian Hate movement seemed to tie all those things together in a neat little social justice bow.

So as soon as Stop Asian Hate became a hashtag around March of 2021, after the so-called Atlanta spa shootings, it immediately aroused my skepticism because at that point a lot of folks in kind of radical, anarchist, abolitionist, and other militant radical communities were doing an assessment of how the uprisings of 2020 were in the moment of being domesticated in various ways. And Stop Asian Hate pops off as a reaction to a mass shooting that immediately gets housed under the rubric of a hate crime. So the first place my mind went to was the ways in which any campaign that’s structured around hate calls on police power, it calls on criminal justice, it calls on prosecution, and what that does is it neutralizes the possibility for a deeper public analysis and movement that actually takes the roots of deadly, gendered, misogynist, racism more seriously.  

So that’s, that’s what spurred this particular article but, the argument that I’m making in this article is, addressing this larger emergence of a social justice regime in the 2020s. 

Emmaia: You begin by naming a whole host of movements within AAPI communities that are confronting various forms of state violence and racialized violence. So like Asian American Feminist Collective, Freedom Inc., Asian Solidarity Collective. These are groups that confront policing, confront racism in intimate connection with anti-queer and gendered violence, name capitalism as a condition that produces these kinds of violence, and try to build other ways of being. 

You’re contrasting them with the Stop Asian Hate movement and the work that comes out of The Asian American Foundation. And what you write is “Stop Asian Hate’s state-focused, liberal social justice orientations hinge on a redemptive political fantasy. And” — I’m going to condense a little — “a reformed US nation building project in which police power, public policy, elected officials, and prosecutors protect AAPI people from hate and other forms of racial hostility. So the distance between those two visions of “safety” is pretty enormous.

And there’s also a real difference in what kinds of community organizations are doing this work: there are grassroots movements working without a lot of public fanfare, often not covered by news media; and groups like TAAF are very different: big-funding NGOs that become very visible as they work with corporations and policymakers — takng up the role of ethnic representation in the US political sphere. This so closely parallels how Zionist organizations move to claim that they represent Jews. Can you walk us through what’s happening here? And what’s the problem with having powerful NGOs represent, define, and represent an ethnic community?

Dylan: One way to address this would be to look specifically at an entity like the Asian American Foundation, TAAF. Folks need to pay attention to this. It’s closely related to the concept that you actually familiarized me with — astroturf organizations. TAAF, which is one of the focal points of this article, ends up springing forth in 2021. And it’s immediately capitalized, by which I mean a billion dollars, it attracts a billion dollars from a variety of primarily corporations and they’re major corporations: we’re talking everything from, you know, Google was involved, Amazon’s involved, Coca Cola. I mean, major global corporations are funding this foundation. So the reason why it’s important to focus on something like a foundation is that the purpose of the foundation is to, it creates a new lever of social movement formation, it literally can dictate the contours of what a social movement says, what it does, what its campaigns are pushing for and the rhetoric that the campaign and the movement fixates on. So TAAF becomes a primary apparatus through which Stop Asian Hate fixates on hate as its primary political term, as its primary term of mobilization, and campaigning, and social movement.

What that does then is it serves as a lever of marginalizing, defunding, and potentially obsoleting, you know, all of these other Asian American Pacific Islander organizations that have been doing grassroots work attempting to address the global roots of gendered racism, oppression of refugee peoples, of the conditions of undocumented peoples across the Asian Pacific Islander diaspora dealing with geographically specific forms of policing, gendered racist policing. Those organizations which are not fixated on the terms of hate, which are challenging the centrality of police power as a primary mode to address oppression and actually state violence in the communities, those organizations get pushed off to the side, unless they adjust and comport themselves to the demands of something like the Asian American Foundation. And this has been happening since the 1970s. Robert Allen taught us this in his great book, Black Awakening in Capitalist America. I mean, this was an intentional collaboration, it was a coalescence between foundation elites, I’m talking the major foundations, Rockefeller, Mellon. Ford, and various levels of the state, from the local to the federal, to domesticate, pacify, and liberalize movements that were demonstrating commitment to radical and even revolutionary change.

So what these foundations have done in the last 60-ongoing, 70 years at this point, is they’ve developed a what we now understand as a social justice funding stream, it ebbs and flows, right? But we’re in a moment in which it’s accelerated. So there’s a social justice funding stream that comes from these foundations, nonprofit organizations, NGOs, and academics for that matter, they attract funding if their efforts, their campaigns, their research projects fit within a particular liberal agenda that relies on a re-legitimation of state power, a marginalization of radical analysis that might challenge the legitimacy of state power, policing, and so forth. So there’s a kind of logic to this, a political economy to this. The foundations end up becoming the political architecture of these social movements. 

Emmaia: This really echoes critique of “the hate frame” more broadly, which objects to the way that hate has become the primary way that we talk about racism, gender injustice, anti-immigrant violence. And the way that talking about these things simply as “hate” undermines the work that social movements have done over decades to bring recognition to anti-Blackness, colonialism, capitalism, the ways that gender is tied up with those — how that has been coopted and boiled down to something like “don’t be intolerant.” 

So you’re talking about it from the perspective of funders and building the infrastructure of ethnic representation, which is kind of the standard way that  politics gets done in the US. I want to ask: how are Zionist institutions involved in this? I mean, in other contexts where you’re talking about this, the connection between AAPI politics and Zionist institutions may be more secondary than concerns about how grassroots organizing is being steamrolled. But for Critical Zionism Studies, this is our key question: how is Zionism working here? You write about relationships between Zionist institutions and the Asian American Foundation. And then in the course of trying to get this article published, Stop AAPI Hate tried so vigorously to claim they weren’t connected to Zionist institutions that your first publication got spooked and pulled the piece. So I think it’s really important to talk about what you found the connections to be and why they matter. 

Dylan: Yeah. So the connections are very direct between one of the most powerful and historically influential pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian, Zionist organizations, and that of course being the Anti-Defamation League, which you’ve written about so forcefully and rigorously. So, you know, for folks that are listening to this that are not already familiar with the history of the Anti-Defamation League and, you know, don’t read it at face value, and go read Emmaia’s article that breaks down how the Anti-Defamation League has its roots in the repression of, you know, revolutionary, radical, anti-colonial and Black liberation movements. It’s been an anti-communist organization and it’s pushed forward the kind of US domestic sphere of Nakba, anti-Palestinian repression, you know, for shoot is going to be, going on 80 years, in a minute, right? It’s influence is just really far reaching.

So the Anti-Defamation League is the major point of connection here to the Stop Asian Hate movement. And there’s a couple of ways in which the ADL is directly involved. One is that with the Asian American Foundation, which I can’t say it enough, gets capitalized a billion dollars in its first year of existence. I dare people to find another pop-up foundation that gets capitalized a billion dollars in its first year of existence. I challenged somebody to find that, okay. One of the primary reasons why it got capitalized so quickly is that, as the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt has said over and over again, he and the ADL played a foundational role in convening and constructing the Asian American Foundation. So this is what we’re talking about when we think about the political economy of something like the social justice regime. And in this case, the so-called hashtag Stop Asian Hate social justice regime that there’s a direct connection, a foundational connection, to the Anti-Defamation League.

The reason why this works is that the ADL famously, infamously, boasts of being the world’s largest organization that polices hate, by which of course it only means its own Zionist definition, which we need to frame that way. We cannot take their notion of antisemitism at face value because it’s a deeply Zionist conception of antisemitism. But because they’ve capitalized on the rhetoric of hate and because they’re so profoundly powerful financially, politically, and otherwise, the ADL plays a highly influential role in capitalizing and politically legitimating various campaigns that are fixated on hate, hate crimes, hate incidents, and hate acts. So that’s the Asian American Foundation. 

On the other hand, you have an organization like Stop AAPI Hate which is the second organization I write about extensively in this piece. Stop AAPI Hate, first of all, they’re the organization that primarily objected to the original version of this article, which led to Truthout retracting it. Very disappointing. You know, that’s a whole other story. I’m grateful that Critical Ethnic Studies Journal published the article right away and they also published all of my responses to Stop AAPI Hate’s objections to the original article. So really just gave me an opportunity to compile even more receipts. 

So with stop AAPI hate, number one, were funded at least 1 million from the Asian American Foundation around 2022. Stop AAPI hate says that since 2022, it has severed ties with the Asian American Foundation, has no more relationship with them. This does not negate the fact that Stop AAPI Hate would not exist in the way it does if it were not for this 1 million grant, right? So there’s that direct connection that we were just talking about a couple of minutes ago, you know, the way that the funding apparatus becomes a kind of lever to shape both political marginalization of diasporic decolonial and anti-colonial organizations, as well as to actively empower and fund this form of militant liberalism, which will oftentimes call itself something else. So Stop AAPI Hate is founded as an apparatus that is intended to compile what it calls hate incidents, and I believe now it’s calling them hate acts. 

But it’s a more expansive conceptualization of anti-Asian hate that was constructed during the COVID-19 pandemic by this coalescence between two major nonprofit groups, AAPI Equity Alliance and Chinese for Affirmative Action, right. Two longstanding, well-established nonprofit organizations and San Francisco State University’s Department of Asian American Studies, primarily through one senior professor Russell Jung. So they found Stop AAPI Hate in March of 2020, in response to what they saw as rising anti-Asian racism what they called xenophobia and bigotry that was coming out of the Trump, administration right-wing organizations, et cetera, during the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic. And so they call themselves in a kind of direct echoing of the Anti-Defamation League, they refer to themselves as the United States primary, largest data collection center on anti-AAPI, at that point, they called them hate incidents, now they call them hate acts. And they were expanding the framework to go well beyond FBI’s narrow definition of hate crimes.

Since that time and since receiving that $1 billion grant from the Asian American Foundation, Stop AAPI Hate in relation to Zionism has this kind of productive contradiction. On the one hand, this organization since October 2023 has issued multiple statements that are ostensibly in solidarity with Palestinians, in solidarity with people who are targeted by Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian, racist, gendered violence, and otherwise, they’ve called for a ceasefire in Gaza, et cetera. So on the one hand, the organization very proudly does that, you know, and they feel that they should be credited for doing that. On the other hand, if you look at the short life of this organization, their links to Zionists, have been through sharing platforms both with Anti-Defamation League actors, as well as state and police actors, including actual FBI agents. 

So what you have with Stop AAPI Hate is this kind of structuring contradiction. You have a political signaling, you know, I would argue it’s a form of branding actually, as a progressive solidarity coalition-type organization that is down with the kind of social justice moment, in which people all over the world are expressing such strong solidarity with Palestine and criticism of the ongoing Nakba, what people are now calling genocide, on the one hand. Ond then on the other hand, you look at its ongoing history into 2024, by the way, right, so this goes beyond October 2023, in which this organization continues to share platforms with, you know, officials of the so-called carceral state as well as having this history of sharing platforms with actors from the Anti-Defamation League. It’s a structuring contradiction and it seems to be ongoing. 

Emmaia: We see a similar pattern in Zionist institutions, not just the ADL but others, the American Jewish Committee, Stand With Us, and others — and also there’s a sort of new universe of Zionist organizations who enter the room as civil rights or anti-hate organizations. Through them, Zionist politics leans not only on the language of civil rights and fairness, but also on the language of marginalized groups struggling to point out the ways that they’re being subjected to violence and repression. For those who study the history of Zionist politics, this is familiar. One of the practices that has been endemic to Zionist politics since the 1960s-70s in the US — in fact since the US civil rights movement made antiracism a core idea in US politics — is taking up whatever language is most current in the world of social justice. Taking very deliberately progressive language like indigeneity and inclusion. And just sort of mashing it around the core purpose of defending Israel, defending colonialism, and portraying that also as a way of defending the United States and democracy. 

So, I don’t want to overly impose parallels between Zionist institutions and the Stop Asian Hate approach. But I’m curious about how deliberate it is for the the Asian American Foundation and Stop AAPI Hate. Is there a deliberate effort to mimic the Zionist tactic of co-opting civil rights talk for the purpose of increasing carceral power, strengthening empires, etc.? Or is this just a function of living in a Zionist world, where new organizations mimic the norms that have laid down by organizations like the ADL?  

Dylan: I think in a sense, it’s a combination of all those things. But there’s a logic to that combination that helps make sense of the tensions and contradictions when you, as you put it, when you smush all this stuff together. And that is: in the contemporary moment maybe the last 15 or so years of the construction of what I’ve been calling this kind of social justice regime is that so much of it is premised on a particular public-facing branding exercise that draws on, relies on, what you’re naming as a kind of civil rights lexicon. You know, notions of rights, notions of hate — confronting and opposing hate, notions of justice for that matter, that tend to fall back on state, criminal justice forms of justice administration and so forth. So, on the one hand, there’s a branding that uses these terms but which also require a kind of virtue signaling effect that there’s an advancement towards social transformation, right? I think it’s become a kind of liberal term in which when people say social transformation, they don’t actually mean a transformation, you know. What they’re actually talking about is maybe at most liberal reform of the state or racial capitalism or a so-called disparity. 

There’s the pronunciation of whether it’s abolition, whether it’s Stop Asian Hate, whether it’s something else. There’s the pronouncement of that virtue, of that commitment. And then there’s the actual activity, right? And what I’m saying is that there’s a dishonesty, right? A political incompatibility between the social justice branding and what organizations and campaigns are actually doing, right? 

Emmaia: Well, let’s go back a little bit. When I asked you if it was if it Stop AAPI Hate is a mimic of Zionist tactics, or if the appearance of these organizations just a feature of living in a Zionist world, I think that deserves a little clarification.

It’s important to identify that the idea of hate crimes itself comes out of Zionist work, right, that’s not something that we talk about very much. The very brief history of what we call the hate crimes framework  is that it emerges out of a moment of crisis in the late 70s, early 80s, of anti-Black racism where there’s white supremacist vigilantism and people are getting hurt. And law enforcement almost entirely refuses to respond. So the idea of hate crimes comes up as a way to legally force the state to address racist violence.

The ADL and the Americal Jewish Committee see this crisis as an opportunity. They attach their own interests to it, which is a thing that happens in politics.  They’ve been frustrated by the fact that Israel is increasingly understood as a colonial, imperial project, including by Black civil rights leadership; and that European Jews in the US are no longer viewed as marginalized people who need a state of Israel to rescue them. They’re frustrated that it’s not only Palestinians, but now Black-led movements, the left, and to some extent US politicians who are saying no, this is colonialism.

So hate crimes law becomes a vehicle for asserting that US Jews are actually marginalized, in order to rekindle support for Israel. So the very genesis of the hate crimes framework is already kind of a cooptation of conversations about racism. It very materially takes the focus off of anti-Black violence, turns attention away from questions of who has power, and it takes state violence out of it entirely, right. So that’s why hate crime statistics don’t measure police violence. And as it develops, it actually replaces our conception of racist violence, gendered violence, class violence. It becomes about just hostility toward someone who has a particular identity, without looking any more deeply at why they might be in conflict.

And right now, we are seeing the logical conclusion of this in efforts to push the IHRA definition of antisemitism into law and policy. IHRA definition is the basis for saying that protesting Israeli genocide is somehow antisemitic: it allows no analysis of power, no analysis of state violence.

This is all background to your work. Can you give us your analysis of what it means for Stop Asian Hate to be replicating this hate crimes framework at a moment when it’s being deliberately used to support colonialism and genocide? 

Dylan: Let me start with this. Reflecting back your point that if we trace the origins of the concept in the state administration of hate crimes, it’s an attempt to individualize anti-Black violence, by which I mean, rather than inviting a serious and rigorous analysis of the foundational and institutionalized systemic structuring of anti-Backness in, you know, the United States as a nation state and all of the different institutions that have constituted it. What hate crimes do is they attach anti-Blackness to individual acts. Okay. So that’s, that’s principle. 

Secondly, it relies on police power. Right. So you’ve done two things in formulating the concept of hate crimes. One thing is that you’ve taken a massive historical problem, in this case anti-Blackness and you’ve turned it into a problem of dreadful individual behavior. You’ve individualized something that is vastly historical. What you’ve also done is you’ve said that the only way to address, to track, to solve and understand this is through policing, it’s the criminal justice. So once we understand that, that is the foundation of the concept of hate crimes, it leads to another set of conclusions. To fixate on the terms of hate tends to deflect an analysis of state violence as well as state sanctioned extra-state violence, right? And again Stop AAPI Hate, despite its branding and virtue signaling, focuses by its own terms on hate acts, right? Individualized incidents usually by individualized people.

That undermines an analysis of much larger dynamics that cross geography, that are historical and that require like much more than simplistic one to one thinking. That’s the problem that we’re actually having to address is there are problems that are much deeper, much vaster, much more historical than a set of individual incidents. 

Now, what’s the point of giving that background? Well, what it leads to in direct response to your question is this, the moment that we’re in here, you know, in terms of the way in which the IHRA definition of antisemitism has become its own mode of warfare. It’s become its own mode of anti-Palestinian repression and it pushes on us the responsibility to understand that things like the rhetorics of hate, is the intellectual and cultural front of Zionist political repression and Israel, US, anti-Palestinian warfare. These terms, hate and antisemitism, people keep saying that these terms are being weaponized. That understates the case. These terms, hate and antisemitism, there are themselves already activating a very specific form of warfare, a conquest of how people apprehend of what people understand to be social justice movements, anti-racist movements, or anti-hate type movements, right? This is the intellectual and cultural front of actual warfare. 

Emmaia: Let’s turn to a different piece of this conversation: I want to talk about safety, and what kinds of ideas about safety are being mobilized here? We know that data about hate crimes is notoriously bad. Some communities don’t report anything at all, some communities report way more than others, especially when they have an invitation to do so, as do US Jews. The data we do get is often manipulated — as in the $25 million Blue Square ad campaign that suggests that Jews, who are 2.4% of the US population experience 55% of of hate crimes. That’s a fudge because they’re actually talking only about religion-based hate crimes, which are less than a 5th of the total. So it turns out it’s not 55% of hate crimes that are reported as antisemitic, but closer to 9%. And sometimes the data are just made up, as when the ADL counts anti-genocide protests as antisemitic incidents. We have this machinery of NGOs who are feeding questionable or manipulated data to policymakers, which then incites policymakers to pursue “solutions” that are quite destructive and carceral.

But there’s another thing going on as well. And this is a big part of what’s happening with college campuses, which is that people who see these statistics, and don’t necessarily assess whether they’re valid, begin to actually feel unsafe, right? This has been talked about a little bit. What hasn’t been talked about so much is the way that that presumes that everyone should feel safe and does feel safe all the time. And that seems to me an extremely racialized presumption that’s not as universal as the hate crimes discourse would have us think.

Dylan: Yeah. Entitlement to safety, which is uneven, an uneven distribution of the feeling of entitlement to safety.  

Emmaia: So that’s what I want to ask you about. When I look at how Zionist organizations are defining safety, it’s very white, right? Their definition of safety includes, like, I can call the police and they won’t harm me. I can do anything I want and no one is allowed to be mad at me or say anything about me. It’s an expectation of safety that so far has been largely unquestioned, at least in public conversation about the notion that people feel unsafe because of anti-genocide protests. I wonder if you have thoughts on what the content is of the AAPI narrative of hate crimes and safety?

Dylan: These calls to galvanize policing and to administrative action against people who are declaring solidarity with a geography and population that is being aggressively targeted for elimination at this moment, right, under the rubric of, protecting other people’s safety. You know, this replicates a problem that is arguably as old as the civilizational project itself. And that is the idea that such calls to militarize around a specific populations, not their safety, but their entitlement to feel safe.

It usually has nothing to do with their actual physical safety. It has to do with their entitlement to feeling safe. That shit is slippery, right? Cause that means, that means you are now organizing state power and state violence around feelings, right? Which is somewhat ironic, because one of the favorite phrases of the right wing in this moment is fuck your feelings.

But like nobody’s feelings matter more, right? It immediately leads to this whole set of counter-narratives from the overwhelming majority of the people on this planet who will talk about how their vulnerability, their alienation from any notion that they’re entitled to feel safe, right, is part of normalized everyday existence. You know, if we think about, anti-Palestinian violence and repression in this moment. It’s a very specific thing, but, there is, I think, a broadly shared alienation from the idea that one should be entitled to feel safe. It’s absurd to mobilize a university administration, not to mention a state or police apparatus, around a group of people’s entitlement to feel safe. It’s almost like a morbid form of satire.

Emmaia: I  feel very lucky, Dylan, that you are writing about this and that your writing is so widely read. One thing it’s done is mobilized and heightened solidarities. So, for example, there was a protest in New York City in mid-May against the Asian American Foundation by Asians for Palestine, objecting to TAAF’s alignment with Zionist organizations as a means of addressing racism and violence. 

There was also a protest at GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, by ACT UP New York, which also called on GLAAD to drop its ties with the ADL, to stop using the ADL’s hate crime statistics as if they were supportive of queer safety.  And these protests included Palestinians in leadership and expressed deep solidarity with Palestinians and anti-colonial struggle.

 So it seems potentially like a moment of transformation when support for Zionism can’t be presumed anymore, Zionism is not actually compulsory but challenged. So in this environment, as for the Asian American Foundation and Stop Asian Hate, can you lay out what should happen? Like, what does doing better actually look like? 

Dylan: I appreciate the spirit and the political will and the militancy with which there’s been widespread protests against the Asian American Foundation for having Jonathan Greenblatt on its board, for having this direct tie to the Anti-Defamation League, et cetera. I appreciate that. I support it. Of course I support it. It’s a good demand. It’s an important demand. And the demand is not unlike, you know, trying to remove the oil from the egg roll. You know what I mean? It’s like trying to remove the tomato from the salsa you know, trying to remove the pork from the Filipino. You can boot Greenblatt from your board and TAAF doesn’t necessarily change in any essential way.

If you look at who’s on the TAAF board and advisory committee, it is directly tied to racial capitalism and the military industrial complex. Condoleezza Rice is on there, part of their advisory committee, like prominently displayed. Right? So this is, this is the point I would make. The problem is not merely the connection to the Anti-Defamation League. The problem is the existence of the fucking Asian American Foundation itself. This is how this conversation started, right? Like what I was pointing out is you have something like this entity, the Asian American Foundation that pops up, is capitalized with a billion dollars in about a year, and then begins to actively shape this Asian American activist, social justice ecosystem marginalizing much more serious and rigorous organizations. Like, the one I’ve been working with for a long time AAPI Women Lead based in Oakland with Dr. Connie Wun, Jenny Wun, you know, Lavender Phoenix, Asian Solidarity Collective based in San Diego. 

These organizations get pushed all the way to the side. Why? Because they’re fucking principled, they’re principled, they’re serious, they’re rigorous, and they actually look at who the funders are. TAAF doesn’t want to fund them anyways, because they know that they’re too rigorous and serious, right? So the problem is actually TAAFt itself. A move needs to be made here. Maybe we start by addressing connections between the Asian American Foundation, Jonathan Greenblatt and the Anti-Defamation League. Yes, we begin with that. That analysis needs to broaden into an understanding of the policing role, political domestication, political discipline, the kind of economic leverage that it wields. What this probably should morph into is a boycott of Asian American Foundation’s funding. Like I’m really proud of the membership of the Association for Asian American Studies, which a couple of weeks ago with the openness and cooperation of the Association’s leadership rejected the grant that they had already received from the Asian American Foundation. They gave it back. Right. 

I think that the next stage here would be to start to refuse their funding, to start to reject their funding. The next level is to actually address the existence of these entities in and of themselves. They’re actually the problem. It works to actively marginalize and sometimes criminalize other forms of political work. And this is again, this is what’s happening, I think in this moment around the terms of abolition, for example, but it’s much more than that. This is part of this whole social justice regime that we’re talking about.

This is the logic. What’s happening I think in the US in particular, but I think at this point has become a global regime that is tied to NGOs, global foundations, and global corporations as well. 

Emmaia: Thanks so much, Dylan, for this conversation and for your work. Listeners can read Dylan’s article, How the Stop Asian Hate Movement Became Entwined with Zionism, Policing, and Counterinsurgency on the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal website, and it’s linked in the show notes. We will undoubtedly be having more conversations about the hate crimes framework and the idea of safety, and their relationship to Zionist institutional politics. We hope you join us for that. 

Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.