During President Biden’s re-election campaign, I helped to spearhead Asian-American fundraising. In gratitude for my tireless efforts, the party exploited me as a racial caricature.

At a February 2024 fundraiser for Joe Biden, Shekar Narasimhan, the chair of the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Victory Fund, posed a “question” to then-President Biden. In reality, the question was actually a sycophantic compliment so servile that I felt secondhand embarrassment. It went along the lines of this: Mr. President, your reign has been so successful, and your accomplishments legion. Tell us, leader, which triumph fills you with the greatest pride?

Such questions were run of the mill at DNC-sanctioned events. They were never genuine inquiries but opportunities to kiss the ring and curry favor with Biden and his staffers who conferred political favors and White House invitations upon palace courtiers.

Flattery and favor-trading are the currency of identity-based organizations, which thrive on access like parasites on a host. Groups such as Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, Latino Victory Fund, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign and Shekar’s AAPI Victory Fund prioritize enriching their leaders over advancing their stated goals. In exchange for donations, politicians deliver access and photo ops. This sustains the identity-group executives’ lavish lifestyles. Meanwhile, the communities they claim to champion remain unchanged or worse off.

Consider Bel Leong-Hong, AAPI Victory Fund’s co-founder. I have lost count of the times she has solicited me for money for some pointless event. These events are dressed as philanthropy and priced according to the donor’s desperation for access — $100,000 for a fleeting brush with presidential power, $10,000 for the precarious possibility of an invite to the Veep’s dinner party.

The realistic prospect of positive impact is an afterthought.

Politics has always been pay-to-play. But Democrats have made it their whole ecosystem. Every organism — consultant, professional outrage merchant, corporate DEI officer — feeds on the same minority carcass while pretending to heal it.

Democrats have draped the ancient hustle for money in the garment of justice. Their victims are the very people Dems deem the most marginalized: minorities, LGBTQIA+ communities, first-generation Americans. Everyone except white men, who were deliberately left out. By carving society into ever-narrower identity silos, progressives transformed diversity from a strength into a hammer that would shatter communities. Then they monetized it.

Strip away the Democrats’ performative empathy, and the transaction remains as old as Tammany, as cynical as Andrew Jackson’s spoils system. The same Democratic lineage that once rewarded loyalists with public offices now rewards them with consulting contracts, DEI sinecures and virtue-laundered donor dollars. Only the costume has changed.

I know this, because the DNC imprisoned me in a racial silo of my own. They placed me on the DNC Ethnic Council in 2016 and unsuccessfully tried to recruit me for the AAPI Caucus. They subjected me to the very racial profiling they profess to abhor. I was rammed into a fundraising group with others who shared none of my concerns. Our only link was that we had vague ancestral origins in the Eastern Hemisphere. My worldview could not have been more different from theirs, yet the party only saw pigment and provenance.

In May 2024, I cohosted a Biden fundraiser at the Mayflower Hotel. I wanted this to be a serious, thoughtful affair. Imagine my surprise when a fleet of Chinese lion dancers suddenly took the stage and began undulating for the crowd. The woke brigade had completely blindsided us.

If I had been asked, I would have told the Dems that these dancers did not represent me or my fellow Asian Americans. I grew up dancing to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, not vibrating lions. But the DNC sees only racial caricatures and reduced me to the faux multiculturalism they shoved down everyone’s throats. They could not pause for even one second their obsessive compulsion with race and desire to “other” us at every opportunity.

The golden lions also served another purpose: shielding Biden from substantive questions. Instead of participating in a policy discussion, my guest watched in bemused disbelief as drums pounded and beasts leaped around in a spectacle of red and gold. This display ate into the time set aside for real conversation. We wanted substance, not fabric and cymbals.

I am grateful for my Chinese parents and the heritage that has shaped my work ethic, self-discipline, family values and conservative principles. But I have also worked hard to become American and to assimilate into this country I love.

The DNC refused to believe it was possible for me to do so. I disappeared behind the golden lions. In the DNC’s world, I could never be a part of America.

Lindy Li is the author of “Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse.”