> Hey. I am sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but just to let you know, your comment comes off as sort of petty and ill-motivated.
That's fair--I was trying to avoid a lengthy rant.
> But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to.
I'll get to AAJC in a moment, but I want to address this first. My conclusion that MacKenzie Scott is a dilettante is based on timing. She donated a bunch of bunch of money to random racial justice organizations just a couple of months after George Floyd was killed, and again shortly after the "AAPI Hate" news cycle after the Atlanta shootings. But she has no track record of involvement with Asian communities or Asian issues in the past. There is no reason to believe she has any understanding of the issues facing Asian Americans, what they want, or who really represents their interests. She just up and decided to donate to a bunch of organizations purporting to represent minorities. That's the opposite of Bill Gates-style "informed philanthropy."
Ordinarily, uninformed donations merely risk being wasteful. In the context of identity-based organizations, however, they can be severely prejudicial to minorities. Asians, Hispanics, etc., all have specific interests. There are myriad internal debates within those groups about everything from policing to welfare. But wealthy white donors like MacKenzie Scott can effectively be kingmakers--their donations can completely drown out grass-roots support. And they create an incentive structure where the most successful organizations end up being the ones that make themselves attractive to donors like Scott, not the ones that are most effective at advocating for Asians or Hispanics.
> Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard.
It's undeniable that affirmative action and movements to end meritocratic admissions hurts Asians. If Ivy League student bodies perfectly reflected the country's composition, you'd eliminate about 60-70% of the Asians. In Silicon Valley it would be over 80%. As shown by the voting on Prop 16, Asian voters oppose such measures even in California. In Virginia, the end of meritocratic admissions at TJHSST resulted in Glenn Youngkin getting half the Asian vote--a remarkable result given that almost all Asians in the state live in heavily Biden-voting liberal Northern Virginia.
It doesn't matter whether you think it's the right thing to do on the whole. If you're an organization purporting to represent Asian interests, it's unconscionable to support policies that reduce Asian representation and are contrary to what Asians themselves want. But AAJC goes further than that. They sought to overturn a federal district court judgment in Virginia that found that changes to the admissions process of a public magnet high school were "racially motivated": https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/virginia/va... (p. 16). In that case, one of the Board members behind the policy indicated in a text message that the policy changes seemed to have an “anti Asian” motivation.
Can you imagine the NAACP ever throwing its weight behind policies intended to reduce Black representation, where there was evidence of "anti Black" motivation? That would never happen.
Matt Yglesias has written at length about organizations that lend Asian identity and political capital to generic progressive causes funded primarily by white mega donors like MacKenzie Scott. See this excellent article from Matt Yglesias about the "Asian" organizations opposing Andrew Yang: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r ("However, I think a more important point about Yang versus the activists here is that it reveals — and not for the first time — that progressive identity-oriented activist organizations often have very little connection to the groups they purport to represent.")
There is a long tradition of this. These organizations purport to represent minority groups, but by necessity work to advance the ideological interests of their mostly white benefactors. Yglesias references an excellent paper by Devin Fernandes at Johns Hopkins that deconstructs this phenomenon in the context of Ford Foundation using its donations to overhaul the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2....
As Yglesias writes about Fernandes: "Ford funds MALDEF because it wants to do Mexican-American political organizing — but it wants that organizing to reflect Ford’s vision, which means the group needs to be somewhat insulated from the views of actual Mexican-Americans."
AAJC is also skeptical of hate crime laws because of their purported impact on other groups: https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/press-release/groundbr.... They have also adopted the rhetoric of anti-Asian groups in calling Asian values regarding assimilation, work, and education, a "model minority myth.”
Scott's uneducated and irresponsible philanthropy contributes to the disenfranchisement of Asians in the political discourse. Her donations to organizations like AAJC not only drowns out the voice of organizations who don't make themselves so attractive to wealthy white people. They enable AAJC and others to actively campaign against the interests of the Asians they purport to represent.