Thousands of Business Leaders Commit $10 Million to AAPI Organizations Fighting Racism

Like many in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, Dave Lu found himself horrified at the Atlanta shootings that left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian women.

Anger. Hopelessness. These emotions and more were publicly voiced by many. And even living in faraway San Francisco — his home of two decades — Lu felt them all, too.

“A lot of us were like, I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “We felt hopeless.”

And like many in the AAPI community, Lu turned to his own networks to rally support. Lu’s networks, however, are perhaps more jaw-dropping than most. Lu, co-founder of the food staffing app Pared and a managing partner at the AAPI-connecting Hyphen Capital, put out the call to Silicon Valley, and titans of industry answered.

Highly placed AAPI business leaders and their allies, from Google, Walmart, Zoom, the Golden State Warriors, TikTok, the Brooklyn Nets — even Pizza Hut — signed onto Lu’s joint letter stating, “Enough,” which published in the Wall Street Journal as a full-page advertisement on Wednesday.

Read the full letter here.

“We, the Asian American business leaders of America, are tired, angry and afraid — and not for the first time. 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 letter reads.

Those business leaders, now numbering at nearly 3,850 signatories and counting, committed to fund efforts to support AAPI communities. At first, Lu asked for $1 million from his network, but the response was so great that he adjusted that total to $10 million in support over the next year.

The letter name-checked organizations like Stop AAPI Hate, which is tallying incidents of hate against the AAPI community, AAPI Women Lead, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice network, Association for Asian American Studies, and more, all of which were nodded to as beneficiaries of the fundraising effort.

Lu was joined in this effort by Yul Kwon, a senior director of product management at Google, who is also the first Asian American winner of the reality TV show “Survivor.” Speaking to KQED, Kwon acknowledged both he and Lu have a perhaps loftier reach than most, but said they had a responsibility to use those connections to help their community.

“Regardless of how much we’ve succeeded, people have seen us as foreigners,” Kwon said. “I’m just as worried about my friends and my parents, I’ve had friends just punched in the face walking down [in] San Francisco.”

“None of this success protects us from violence and hate,” Kwon said. And he isn’t the only one speaking out in his family. His wife, Sophie, helped organize a Bay Area rally against hate just last weekend.

In Silicon Valley, Kwon said, people tend to lump all the diverse cultures who identify as Asian together. But they represent “the richest to the poorest,” and need to band together to support the broad spectrum of the community.

Lu said that manifests as educating their own communities, from Silicon Valley to the readers of the Wall Street Journal, where their joint letter ran.

“Do you guys even know, like, what’s happening to Asians?” Lu said. “We’re not going to be invisible anymore. I think we’re standing up and rising up together. I think seeing the names on this list kind of really encourages a lot of people to do that without fear.”

Some of the signatories — from Rick Welts, president of the Golden State Warriors, to Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, or Kenneth Lin, CEO of Credit Karma — have “huge platforms,” Lu said.

“These have folks have thousands and thousands of employees that are the ones who are listening,” Lu said. “So if they put their names from pen to paper, or a digital kind of paper, and they report this, it makes people take note.”

Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, said it was too early to tell how much of a funding boost their effort netted from Lu’s WSJ ad — it was only the first day.

Still, she said, “we have seen an overall increase in support,” in their funding of late.

Between March 19, 2020 and Feb. 28, 2021, there were at least 3,795 incidents of anti-Asian hate across the nation, ranging from physical assault and verbal harassment to various civil rights violations, according to data collected by Stop AAPI Hate.

More than 700 of those incidents took place in the Bay Area.

That’s no surprise to Kwon — his own mother encountered community racism just a few weeks ago.

Kwon’s mother, a decades-long Concord resident who emigrated from South Korea, drove to Martinez to get a COVID-19 vaccination at a local Kaiser Permanente hospital. Lost, she stopped at a gas station to ask for help, only to find her car blocked in by an aggressive stranger.

“When she asked him, ‘Can you please let me go?’ He basically yelled at her, ‘You can’t tell me what to do, this is my country,’ ” Kwon recalled. She locked herself in her car and waited for him to leave.

But Kwon has some hope. “I asked my mom, are you scared of white people now? She said no.”

After the man left, a white woman inside the gas station came out and comforted Kwon’s mother and helped guide her to the Kaiser hospital personally.

“She had my mom follow her in her car … that was just such an extraordinary act of kindness, of humanity,” Kwon said. “I’d like to believe that most people in my own experience, most people are good here.”

And for those who aren’t? Lu and Kwon hope their efforts will drown them out, and help amplify those doing good works for the AAPI community.