Dismantling Discrimination Through Data and Policy
The Fight Against AAPI Hate.
Photos by Patrick Strattner.
Dismantling Discrimination Through Data and Policy
The Fight Against AAPI Hate.
In February 2020, when Los Angeles still had only one known case of coronavirus, a middle school student in the city was confronted by classmates, called a “COVID carrier,” and told to go back to China. He was punched more than a dozen times in the head, bruising his face and sending him to the emergency room. In the wake of the incident, his devastated family considered returning to South Korea, their homeland.
MANJUSHA KULKARNI (’95) learned about the family’s experience through a colleague who worked with the boy’s mother. Kulkarni was shocked and saddened and knew that this family—and many others—would need the support of their neighbors since racism against Asian Americans seemed to be spreading even more quickly than the virus. As the executive director of the AAPI Equity Alliance and advocate for the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, she stepped in, holding a press conference alongside elected officials to speak out against hate. The public outpouring encouraged the family to stay.
Still, Kulkarni wanted to quantify how many others had faced a similar incident. When the California Attorney General’s Office declined to gather data, Kulkarni created an online form asking people to share their stories of hate and discrimination and sent it to the alliance’s members, a group of more than 40 community-based organizations serving LA’s 1.5 million AAPI residents. The responses poured in. People were being harassed on public transit, refused service in restaurants, bullied, and assaulted. Within months, they had heard from thousands of people spanning every state, documenting an apparent surge in discrimination directed toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
By March 2020, Kulkarni cofounded Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition formed to bring attention to the rise in anti-Asian animus and to support her community, which was suddenly being scapegoated once again. In this wave of xenophobia, there were familiar echoes of past injustices, including the 19th-century Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II.
In the five years since the coalition was formed, Kulkarni has led its fight against injustice, giving voice to those who experience racism without recourse and using the law and policy to address the institutional failures that allow injustice to persist. For her, the law is a tool for changing behavior and establishing guardrails that can prevent the incidents of hate that pervaded the country during the pandemic—and continue today.
I want the law to do what it did for my parents and what it has also done for my clients.
“I don’t need to change the hearts and minds of people,” she says. “What I want is for them to not discriminate. Other people can be in the business of changing those hearts and minds, but for me, in my career, I want the law to do what it did for my parents and what it has also done for my clients.”
Kulkarni was born in Pune, a city with a population of seven million, a few hours from Mumbai in western India. She was two when she came to the United States with her mother and father, both physicians, following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which finally put Asian immigrants on equal footing with Europeans after years of quota-based discrimination. After her parents finished their residencies, they moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father helped open a neonatal intensive-care unit.
In 1980, when her mother interviewed to join a family practice group, the panel asked only one question: “Why do you foreigners come to the US and take our jobs?” She responded by hiring an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center to bring a civil rights lawsuit, which turned into a class action once it became clear the practice made a habit of rejecting immigrants. The case settled within months, the hospital changed its ways, and Kulkarni had her first glimpse of the law’s power. Her parents were initially disappointed when she changed her mind about a career in medicine and decided to pursue law school instead. But, she told them, “It’s kind of your fault, because you brought this lawsuit and you challenged injustice.” She was intent on doing the same.
At BU Law, Kulkarni tangled with the concept of hate crimes prosecution, a practice she long supported as a positive signal to society but whose efficacy she now questions. The vast majority of hate confronting the AAPI community—or any group that faces discrimination—doesn’t come in the form of a crime, she says, but is no less pernicious. Her focus, instead, is on the structures that condone or even carry out discrimination in its myriad forms.
After graduating and moving to LA, Kulkarni spent three years at a civil rights firm, handling investigations as part of a consent decree with Denny’s over its practice of refusing service to Black customers. The restaurant chain had instilled a systemic culture of discrimination, and she helped enforce its reformation. Following a decade at the National Health Law Program, she joined the South Asian Network, an LA-based organization focused on direct service to clients in civil rights, violence prevention, and healthcare access. In 2014, she was honored by the White House as a “Champion of Change” for educating the AAPI community on the Affordable Care Act. She saw that advocacy is a critical complement to client service.
“If we’re talking about liberation and ultimate salvation, we have to change the conditions under which folks live,” she says.
Kulkarni has carried that understanding to the AAPI Equity Alliance and Stop AAPI Hate, where she’s documented the rise of anti-Asian discrimination and taken an approach to addressing it that doesn’t accept hate crimes prosecution as a salve. In 2021, Stop AAPI Hate’s work encouraged California to invest over $150 million in its Asian and Pacific Islander Equity Budget, funding community organizations that offer victim services and prevention efforts.
These are all things we want, just like any other person, that are not quite within our reach, because we, just like other communities of color, have to deal with the ways that racism disfigures our lives.
The Equity Alliance also backed the recent passage of measures that will establish an independent redistricting commission for the city of Los Angeles and expand the LA county board of supervisors, both of which will help put more members of the AAPI community in positions of power, according to Candice Cho, managing director of policy and counsel for the alliance. Despite composing roughly one-sixth of LA’s population, the community is “dramatically underrepresented” at the state and local levels of government, she says.
“We all want to live somewhere we can be safe and free. We all want to be treated on our own merits as individuals,” Cho says. “What Manju’s work has helped do, alongside the work of so many other community leaders, is elevate that that’s true for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, too. These are all things we want, just like any other person, that are not quite within our reach, because we, just like other communities of color, have to deal with the ways that racism disfigures our lives.”
Kulkarni is ambitious in her desire to change that reality. She wants California’s changes to expand nationally and eventually to broaden the protections offered by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Following the recent election, though, she acknowledges the immediate future may require “a very defensive posture.”
Anti-Asian sentiment has persisted beyond the pandemic and is now being embraced and codified by political leaders. At least two dozen states have passed or proposed laws to ban Chinese nationals from owning land—an effort with roots dating back to the 19th century. Bob Chang, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and collaborator on the BU Law Antiracism & Community Lawyering Practicum, says President Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban and the US Supreme Court’s decision to uphold it created fertile soil for the type of targeted efforts now being pursued.
Chang and CAITLIN GLASS, director of the BU Law practicum, worked with their students this spring to support challenges to “alien land laws.” When the hate Kulkarni and her colleagues have spent years tracking begins manifesting in laws like these, Chang says, “that’s when it gets really dangerous.”
“It’s critical that we intervene now, because we don’t have the luxury of waiting,” he adds.
Even as Kulkarni works to combat the rise in hate facing her community, she recognizes the need to empower Asian Americans. Spread AAPI Love, a new campaign from her coalition, brings to light the stories of community members who have overcome racism and discrimination. She points to the work of Sunayana Dumala, who started Forever Welcome, a nonprofit that advocates for inclusive communities, after her husband was killed in an anti-immigrant attack in a Kansas bar in 2017. Dumala is one of many Asian Americans, including Kulkarni herself, whose stories of resistance the campaign celebrates.
“It was important to change the narrative for people,” she says. “It’s exhausting to think about and worry about hate all the time.”
Kulkarni speaks optimistically about the possibilities for change. She believes in institutions and in the law as a tool for justice—even if it can sometimes be a tool for injustice.
Several years ago, she began teaching at UCLA, including a class on South Asian American communities. On the last day of the semester, she likes to share with her students Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again.” “Let it be the dream it used to be,” Hughes writes, as a voice in the dark, representing the poor, the immigrant, the Black and brown, “there’s never been equality for me.”
Every day, Kulkarni is amazed by the courage of people who fight for the dream of what America has never truly been and yet still could be.
“When I feel really discouraged, what keeps me going is that dream people have. That’s what people struggle for. People have died in pursuit of that,” she says. “And that’s what I went to law school for.”
