Reimagining Activist Data: A Critique of the STOP AAPI HATE Reports through a Cultural Rhetorics Lens

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Contents

Introduction

Outlining the STOP AAPI HATE Initiative

Linking the STOP AAPI HATE Reports and Cultural Rhetorics

Assembling a Cultural Rhetorics Methodology: Decolonial, Indigenous, and Feminist Theory

Critiquing the STOP AAPI HATE Reports

Reimagining Future Options for STOP AAPI HATE Data

Imagining a Cultural Rhetorics-Informed Future for Technical Communication

References

About the Author

Introduction

At the start of 2020, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak quickly became a critical international issue, sowing fear as the disease spread indiscriminately into communities around the world. As the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic, the general public began to shift its focus towards the site of the initial outbreak: the Chinese city of Wuhan. This widely-accepted fact of COVID-19’s Chinese origin quickly morphed into a central point of racial blame in popular media conversations. In their initial COVID-19 coverage, many news outlets initially complemented their articles with images of Chinese citizens wearing protective face masks, even if the content itself had nothing to do with China. In his press briefings, United States President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” before explicitly blaming China as the pandemic began to negatively impact the U.S. 

Historically, the Trump administration’s negative treatment of China mirrored the U.S.’s xenophobic attitude towards Chinese immigrant railroad workers in the late 1800s. According to Reny and Barreto (2020), “Chinese immigrants have been stereotyped as culturally exotic and as dirty acute vectors of disease” (p. 7). Due in part to these inaccurate stereotypes, the U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law to bar an immigrant population based on its ethnicity. Additionally, the nationally-backed Geary Act of 1892 renewed the terms of the Exclusion Act and required all Chinese Americans to carry proof of U.S. residence. If a Chinese immigrant failed to produce this proof, the immigrant would face either deportation or a sentence of hard labor. Both of these restrictive laws, not fully repealed until 1943, serve as examples of longstanding institutionalized racism against Chinese immigrants in the U.S. The current COVID-19 pandemic has reignited this anti-Chinese, contagion-based xenophobia in America. With anti-Chinese rhetoric quickly being disseminated and normalized by media and authority figures, all AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) are once again becoming targets for racial abuse.

As an Asian American graduate student and full-time office worker, I experienced this anti-AAPI attitude firsthand when a worker in my building explicitly attributed my small cough to the “Chinese coronavirus,” encouraging their other coworkers to avoid me for the rest of the day. Although this was a singular occurrence, I remember still feeling hurt, lost, and alone days after the encounter. Thankfully, I was taking my first graduate course in cultural rhetorics at this time, where we routinely discussed the field’s four core pillars: stories, relationality, constellation, and decoloniality. Inspired by these conversations, I began thinking about digitally telling my own story, or sharing my own experience within an online community. My search for this space eventually guided me to the STOP AAPI HATE website, a digital activist initiative that gives victims of anti-AAPI rhetoric a chance to share their stories with the public via submitted “incident reports.” On a mostly consistent schedule, STOP AAPI HATE releases a summative technical document which outlines trends within submitted incident reports, while also sharing selected AAPI accounts within those reports.

In this article, I assert that the STOP AAPI HATE reports are technical communication documents that engage with the pillars of cultural rhetorics by sharing AAPI stories and by giving voice to resistance that opposes dominant anti-AAPI narratives in coronavirus-related media. Using these pillars, along with decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist theory, to inform my methodology, I then critically examine how STOP AAPI HATE gathers and presents data in these reports, explaining how these current practices unknowingly limit user access to valuable AAPI stories. Ultimately, by suggesting solutions that reimagine the presentation of STOP AAPI HATE summative report data, I will demonstrate how a cultural rhetorics approach can bolster both the accessibility and reach of technical communication documents.