#and simultaneously “stop asian hate” was used as a counterinsurgency tool to relegitimate carceral state power

[marxism-lelouchism]

Why Is the Stop Asian Hate Movement Following the Lead of Zionists and Police?

By Dylan Rodríguez, Truthout

Stop Asian Hate’s state-focused liberal social justice orientations hinge on a redemptive political fantasy: a reformed U.S. nation-building project in which police power, criminal jurisprudence, public policy and earnest carceral state actors (including elected officials and prosecutors) strengthen and expand the state’s obligation to protect people of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent from “hate,” “hate crimes,” “hate incidents,” and other forms of racial animus.

Developed to compile and analyze data reflecting “incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying,” Stop AAPI Hate’s data collection framework relies on the terms and methods of criminology, atomizing “anti-Asian hate” by conceptualizing — and thus narrating — such violence as a matter of discrete events and interpersonal encounters.

By generating an original national dataset, Stop AAPI Hate attracts significant financial and political support from foundations, police and elected state officials, well-funded Asian American nonprofits, and Asian American celebrities, academics, industry executives and cultural/social media influencers.

Confoundingly, the organization asserts that it’s “grounded in the belief that we must confront racism at its root with comprehensive, non-carceral solutions to effectively prevent and respond to anti-AAPI hate.” Directly contradicting this stated ambition, Stop AAPI Hate’s state-focused advocacy and data curation reproduces rather than disrupts carceral notions of violence, justice and criminal deterrence.

The presence of Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on [The Asian American Foundation's] board reflects a key political and organizational influence on the foundation’s mission.

Since its founding in 1913, the ADL has functioned as a watchdog organization that ostensibly identifies antisemitic activities and calls on institutional leaders, state officials, corporations and media outlets to condemn, fire or otherwise disaffiliate from those it deems culpable. Crucially, the ADL endorses a definition of antisemitism closely aligned with the one adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which has been subject to mounting scholarly, legal and activist criticism for conflating criticism of Israel and the ethno-supremacist political ideology of Zionism with antisemitism.

Nonetheless, Stop AAPI Hate, TAAF and other Stop Asian Hate organizations not only tacitly comply with the ADL’s positions, but also replicate its organizational fixation on “hate” as the primary unit of analysis, public discourse and liberal state intervention. As Stop Asian Hate replicates the ADL’s methods, it’s worth raising a key question: What are the consequences of these organizations’ shared frameworks of “hate” victimization?

While it does not feature a similar group of advisers, Stop AAPI Hate quietly maintains strong ties to organizations with histories of punishing critics of Israel as well as people involved in Palestinian solidarity organizing.

Stop Asian Hate effectively advocates a form of populist criminology that calls for an inclusive, aggressive, equity-oriented response from the domestic warmaking state. This amounts to a reformist mandate to re-legitimate anti-Black, colonial, carceral state violence in a moment of crisis. In this sense, Stop Asian Hate represents an early-21st century Asian Americanist equity grievance that looks to the state as its arbiter, protector and militarized authority figure.