Standing with our colleagues, standing against hate

In the wake of growing violence against people of Asian descent around the world, Executive Chair Ajay Banga and CEO Michael Miebach shared the following message with our employees.

With the weekend news comes more stories about growing violence against people of Asian descent around the world. In America alone, we’ve heard reports of a 52-year-old Chinese woman in Queens shoved to the ground, a man stabbed near NYC’s Chinatown, an 84-year-old Thai man murdered in San Francisco. According to groups such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice, more than 3,000 anti-Asian attacks have occurred in the U.S. since March, compared to 100 annually in years prior.

Once again, we are confronted with the ugly fact that people are being verbally and sometimes physically attacked because of how they look. We have seen racist, xenophobic hate before – and we have seen it too often of late.

At Mastercard, hate is not welcome and discrimination of any kind is not tolerated. Where you come from and what you look like doesn’t matter here; we look to what you do and how you do it, because decency is who we are and what guides us.

If the past year is any indication, our journey toward equality and inclusion may never end. There will always be more for us to understand and do. But we progress in the right direction every day that we choose to bring our decency to the forefront of every interaction, to listen to people, to see them for who they are and what they need, to find ways to level the playing fields and build pathways to opportunity for everyone.

Hate has never built anything good. Hate has never saved lives or made things better. Hate only gives way to more hate and more destruction. Hate cannot and will not be the way forward.

This is where we stand: with all of you and against these acts of violence and all acts of hate, racism, sexism and discrimination. And when we stand together, we stand stronger.