Veronica Wu and protestors/Photo courtesy of Nextshark
Veronica Wu, an Asian-American executive, resigned after calling BLM activists racist in an email.
Wu worked for VF Corp., which owns brands such as North Face, Timberland and Supreme. She was elected to the board of VF Corp in 2019. She also launched her own venture capital firm called Hone Capital, investing mostly in the tech space.
After Wu was informed that Juneteenth would be a company holiday back in June 2020, her e-mailed response was quite telling.
Axios was the first to receive the leaked email, and in it, Wu said she was not “particularly in support” of the idea of a Juneteenth holiday, although she had to be informed of what it was. She then made claims that many racists made during America’s racial reckoning.
“I don’t believe in Black Lives Matter. If anything, I think they are the true racists trying to stir up things to make this country going [sic] to socialism or even communism potentially,” Wu wrote.
This was not Wu’s first rodeo with racism. A former employee of Hone Capital alleged that in a conversation about why there are not more Black people in tech, Wu said it was due to laziness and not wanting to work.
The danger in Wu’s personal philosophy goes beyond BLM. In Wu’s position at Hone Capital, she was on a team that reviewed candidates for executive positions. Although racists in c-suites are not uncommon, Wu’s hubris in expressing her racism is rather alarming.
Further, Wu, who is Chinese comparing BLM’s fight for justice, the same justice that gave Asians the space to create #StopAsianHate, to communism is intellectually dishonest. As a Chinese person, she is surely informed on the difference between exercising the democratic right to vote, a right that she and other Asians would not have were it not for Black people, and communism.
According to her LinkedIn, Wu received her bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics. However, how she sat on the board of a company responsible for one the biggest Black fashion trends (Timberland), yet thought she could possibly escape the consequences of her racist diatribe in a work e-mail does not compute.
VF Corp. has claimed that Wu resigned for reasons unrelated to the email. Wu has not responded to requests for comment.