Indian billionaires in the U.S. are not Asian?

Once again successful Indians in the U.S., especially billionaires, have shown they have little or no interest in giving back to society, this time to help fellow Asians.

Last month, after a spate of violent attacks on Asian Americans in the U.S., some prominent Asians in the country set up The Asian American Foundation (TAAF). Its mission: Now is the time for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities to create unity and claim power…fight against racism and hate, and create a permanent and irrevocable sense of belonging.

“If the economy is well, the Asian Americans play by the rules, prosper together with everybody else, that’s fine,” Joe Tsai, a TAAF founding member, told CNBC today. “But if there’s a crisis — if there’s a pandemic, if there’s a war or if there’s an economic downturn — Asian Americans get scapegoated,” he added.

Totaling more than 23 million, Asians are about 7% of the U.S. population. Yet less than 0.5% of charitable giving in the U.S. is directed towards Asian Americans.

Joe Tsai is among TAAF’s founders who said they will collectively donate $125 million over the next five years to enable the foundation to convene, incubate and fund acceleration of opportunities and to be “a catalyzing force for belonging” for Asian Americans in the U.S.

The foundation has also secured commitments from U.S. companies who say they will spend $1.1 billion on projects aimed at pursuing similar goals to those of TAAF. The companies include Amazon, Coca Cola, Google, Merck and Walmart.

A co-founder and executive vice chairman of the Chinese technology giant Alibaba, Joe Tsai was born in Taiwan. He came to the U.S. at the age of 13 to study at the Lawrenceville school in New Jersey, where the current annual fees for boarding students is $71,000. Tsai earned bachelor’s degrees in Economics and East Asian Studies from Yale and a J.D. from Yale Law School. A Canadian citizen, he has a net worth of $11 billion, according to Forbes.

Besides Tsai, TAAF’s founders include Asian American billionaire Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!, and Li Lu, who runs Himalaya Capital. Lu, who is known as the Chinese Warren Buffett and manages multi-billion dollars in investment funds, is the chairperson of TAAF.   

There are more than four million Indians in the U.S., making up over 17% of the Asians in the country. Yet unlike Tsai and Yang, Indian American billionaires are missing from the list of founders, board members, donors and advisors of TAAF.   

Eight Indians, each with a net worth of over $2.1 billion, are on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. They include Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, with a net worth of $2.7 billion, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Unversities; Niraj Shah, net worth $3.9 billion, the co-founder of Wayfair, a Boston based online home furnishings retailer, whose parents are immigrants from India; and Jay Chaudhry, founder of Zscaler, a cybersecurity firm with a net worth of $12 billion, according to Forbes. Chaudhry, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, grew up in an Indian village in the Himalayas with no electricity or running water.   

There are also dozens of Indian Americans with a net worth of more than $1 billion and hundreds with a net worth greater than $100 million. They, like the Indians on the Forbes 400 list, have all gained from education, career and business opportunities in the U.S. Yet, while most Indian billionaires and millionaires in the U.S. talk about how they succeeded in America, they give back little or nothing to the community.

TAAF’s advisors include Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo; Fareed Zakaria, author and host of GPS on CNN; and Shamina Singh, president of MasterCard’s Center for Inclusive Growth. While their involvement is commendable, they are the only three Indians among the 31 advisors.

In addition, five Indian couples are among the individual donors to TAAF. The Ila and Dinesh Paliwal Foundation is also a donor. In 2019, this foundation donated $646,000 to Miami University and other philanthropies, according to Cause Iq. Paliwal was the former CEO of Harman, a vendor of audio equipment for cars and other products, which is now part of Samsung, the South Korean company.

Sonal Shah (in photo) is TAAF’s president, running the foundation’s operations. She was a deputy assistant to former President Barack Obama and a former employee of Google and Goldman Sachs.   

Unlike Nooyi and Paliwal, many Indians in America, including billionaires, apparently view themselves as not being Asian. This was put bluntly, for instance, by an Indian teenager in a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, the TV show hosted by John Oliver. There are some Indians like Gurbir Grewal, the Attorney General of New Jersey, who see themselves as Asian Americans.

While most Indians in the U.S. may not consider themselves Asians, the haters evidently do not grasp such subtleties. Grewal has spoken bluntly about the racism he often faces in supermarkets, shopping malls, airports and on the streets.  

One in two Indians in the U.S. faced discrimination recently, with bias based on skin color being the most common form, according to the results of a 2020 survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The survey’s results were published last week.

The number of Indians facing discrimination in the U.S. is likely higher because of under-reporting by those born in India. As the Carnegie report notes, “Indian Americans born in the United States are much more likely to report being victims of discrimination than their foreign-born counterparts.”

To receive Global Indian TImes stories kindly connect through either:

LINKEDIN: HTTPS://WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/COMPANY/GLOBAL-INDIAN-TIMES/?VIEWASMEMBER=TRUE

TWITTER: HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/GLOBALINDIANTI2  

FACEBOK: FB.ME/GLOBALINDIANTIMES

EMAIL: CONTACT@GLOBALINDIANTIMES.COM

(c) Global Indian Times. Prior written permission required to reproduce any content. All rights reserved under U.S. copyright laws.