OLYMPIA — A mailer sent to voters in Washington and across the country this week, appearing to target Asian American voters, has drawn local and national criticism for claiming equity policies discriminate against Asian American and white people.
The mailer, paid for by the America First Legal Foundation, calls equity a “code word for excluding people from jobs, college admissions, government and financial benefits based solely on the color of their skin.”
America First Legal is led by Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to President Donald Trump.
The mailer has arrived in mailboxes as the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases concerning affirmative action in college admissions, and as the country prepares for the 2022 general election. It has drawn condemnation for relying on racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian Americans.
One side of the mailer says that President Joe “Biden and the left want to decide who gets hired — and who gets fired according to their skin color,” and features pictures and headlines from news stories.
The other side says “Joe Biden and left wing officials are engaged in widespread racial discrimination against white and Asian Americans … even though it’s against the law.”
It’s not clear how many people may have received the mailers in Washington.
Rep. My-Linh Thai, D-Bellevue, did.
She said her first reaction was as an elected official; she recognized that it was sent by a national organization that didn’t understand the state or its demographics. As a person, she said it made her angry.
Thai and state Sen. Joe Nguyen, D-West Seattle, said the mailer was intended to divide the Asian American community.
“They just know that this is a politically viable tactic to pit people against each other,” Nguyen said. “So Asians are basically being used as pawns again in this fight.”
Nguyen said that he hadn’t received the mailer but saw pictures of it and had seen a similar video ad online. He said conservatives have long been trying to court Asian American voters, and that he’d been on the Washington Senate floor advocating for policies that would benefit Asian Americans and Republicans had voted against those efforts.
“When it’s politically convenient, Asians count as white, in this case,” Nguyen said of the mailer. “When it’s not politically convenient, you know, who cares about Asian hate?”
Officials with America First Legal did not respond to efforts to contact them through their website.
Sandeep Kaushik, a political and public affairs consultant at Sound View Strategies in Seattle, received the mailer on Monday, which he called “racially divisive and inflammatory.”
Joseph Shoji Lachman, policy manager at Asian Counseling and Referral Service, said the mailer was “disappointing” but not surprising “to see the same, I would say, worn out and racist tactics used in this kind of propaganda that’s been going on for years now, attempting to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other communities of color.
“This has been a common tactic by the far-right and white nationalists trying to divide our communities when really we should be working together to dismantle racism.
“There’s a pernicious myth that Asian Americans do not support affirmative action, which is not the case,” Lachman said. “To put it mildly, everything on the flyer is a lie. Either a distortion or outright lie.”
Beth Daranciang, vice chair of the King County Republican Party, said that her husband, who is Filipino, received the mailer this week.
“I’m not going to speak for my husband, but I think he just looked at it and was like, ‘Well, yeah,’” she said. “He kind of just agreed with it.”
Daranciang, who is white, said she and her husband vote Republican, and that she worked to oppose a 2019 effort to reinstate affirmative action via ballot measure in Washington. The opposition to reinstatement also included members of the state’s Chinese American community, who lobbied against it at the Washington Legislature earlier that year.
The America First Legal mailer paints Asian Americans with a broad brush stroke, said Nadia Belkin, executive director of the Asian American Power Network, a coalition of local organizations that mobilize and build Asian American and Pacific Islander political power in battleground states.
“There’s no understanding of the fact that we’re 30 ethnicities, plus we speak over 100 different languages,” Belkin said.
She said the timing of the mailer coincides with early voting opening across the country.
“It’s not an accident that these mailers are hitting at this moment in time,” Belkin said. “And really, I think it is in response to the way that the Asian American community has turned out and the way that Republicans understand the electoral math. Given our immense population growth, if Asian Americans turn out, they could be and will be the margin of victory in many races.”
She said the mailer could dissuade some Asian Americans from voting.
“One of the biggest things that we know about the Asian American community is a reason that they don’t turn out to vote is because they don’t have access to information about the candidates or the policies,” Belkin said. “So this mail piece really doesn’t offer the voter anything except for ‘You should be afraid.’”
