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

Linking the STOP AAPI HATE Reports and Cultural Rhetorics

With context now established, I will now show how the STOP AAPI HATE summative report, a technical document in both content and design, links with the field of cultural rhetorics. In general terms, cultural rhetorics’ central assertion is one that “[views]...rhetorics as always-already cultural and cultures as persistently rhetorical” (Powell et al., 2014, p. 3). By viewing rhetoric and cultures as interconnected entities, cultural rhetoricians focus on how all cultures are rhetorical and vice versa, exposing how certain systems of power influence (and often oppress) languages and practices within various communities. Cultural rhetorics can help clarify the treatment of AAPIs during the COVID-19 crisis: a culture of xenophobia and manufactured anxiety, encouraged by popular media and the federal government, normalized the use of anti-AAPI rhetoric within local communities across the U.S. 

In practice, cultural rhetorics aims to prove that all cultures and rhetorical traditions have value, not just the dominant ones that have been privileged and normalized within society. The cultural rhetorics field compares this inclusive attitude to the idea of “constellation,” which encourages all communities (even those who are presently silenced) to share their unique perspectives with the world (Powell et al., 2014, p. 5). Additionally, this practice of constellation aims to demonstrate that all cultural knowledges exist in a shared network of meaning and thus have equal value to the world. 

Ultimately, an important goal of cultural rhetorics is to “even out” unequal cultural power balances with this constellative mindset: critiquing powerful and oppressive rhetorical traditions while also elevating and making visible the voices of disempowered or oppressed communities. Knowing this, it is clear that the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports are doing cultural rhetorics work by providing the victimized AAPI community with activism-oriented data that seeks to quell rising anti-AAPI rhetorics. More specifically, the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports engage with various tenets of cultural rhetorics by sharing stories and providing embodied AAPI experiences in their rebuttal to dominant anti-AAPI sentiments in the wake of the coronavirus.

Both the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports and cultural rhetorics as a practice place great importance on stories and storytelling. According to Maracle (1990), “...story is the most persuasive and sensible way to present the accumulated thoughts and values of a people” (p. 3). By allowing people in oppressed communities the opportunity to share their unique experiences and perspectives, stories provide valuable insight into the overall mindsets of cultural communities. In other words, these AAPI stories, when viewed collectively, form a constellation and shared network of meaning, producing more-informed insights and complicated conclusions. With its incident reporting forms, the STOP AAPI HATE initiative empowers racially abused AAPIs by inviting them to submit their own stories, and, in essence, raise their voices from within a U.S. society that has recently taken to negatively stereotyping their broader cultural community. 

Even though these submitted stories detail seemingly everyday occurrences from anonymous authors, cultural rhetorics recognizes the power of stories to collectively elevate the overall voice of a community and drive social change. According to Cruikshank (2002), “narrative is grounded in...everyday life and capable of addressing large questions about the consequences of historical events” (p. 5). While Cruikshank is not specifically a cultural rhetorics scholar, her emphasis on the importance of narrative here aligns with cultural rhetorics’ respective elevation of stories. With its collection of submissions, STOP AAPI HATE is able to point out the real-world consequences of anti-AAPI rhetoric in a COVID-19 environment, detailing various data trends concerning the treatment of AAPIs in each report. STOP AAPI HATE is effectively demonstrating an active cultural rhetorics approach by constellating and sharing stories to change the overall societal conversations surrounding AAPI communities.

Both the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports and cultural rhetorics show that it is important to critically listen to dominant stories while tuning our ears for unheard stories as well. As mentioned in the previous paragraph regarding a constellation’s shared network of meaning, cultural rhetorics asserts that “it's important to keep all traditions/stories/histories in play” when conducting research (Powell et al., 2014, p. 8). Cultural rhetorics primarily uses this call for equivalent multiplicity to counter academic reliance on singular and/or dominant traditions or histories. However, the field’s elevation of multiplicity can also be extended to stories and storytelling.  For example, Powell et al. (2014) state, “…we have to have a solid understanding of as many stories as possible if we're going to be able to say anything at all about the practice of rhetorics over the past 10,000 years” (p. 7, emphasis mine). As evidenced by this statement, cultural rhetorics prioritizes an academic shift away from dominant traditions, histories, and stories, favoring multiple, equally-important options instead. 

Instead of elevating a single story, both cultural rhetorics and the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports focus on giving stories (plural) equal visibility. By displaying a collection of AAPI stories that detail various types of racial abuse from many different personal perspectives, the STOP AAPI HATE initiative practices this “decentralization” by positioning shared stories equally in each of its summative reports—no one story gets more attention than the others. Ultimately, both STOP AAPI HATE and cultural rhetorics understand the importance of recognizing the multiple stories of those affected by U.S. xenophobia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aside from engaging with story, cultural rhetorics and the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports are also linked through their recognition of embodied experience and relationality. Specifically, when situated in cultural rhetorics, the concept of embodiment focuses on how research and story affect the bodies and relationships of both researchers and community members (Riley-Mukavetz, 2014, p. 109). Many first-hand accounts highlighted within the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports focus specifically on AAPI bodies and reactions against them. 

For example, one AAPI account in the April 23rd report states, as shown in Figure 6, “I was getting in my car after shopping wearing a mask and gloves. A truck drove by and threw a...drink on my back and yelled ‘hey chink, you’re f--king nasty’” (Jeung & Nham, 2020, p. 10). This is a clear example of an embodied experience: the victim tells of how they were discriminated against based on their outward appearance (“mask and gloves”), while also describing how their own body was physically (“drink on my back”) and verbally (“chink”) assaulted. 

This embodied experience demonstrates how the STOP AAPI HATE initiative encourages relationality between its readership and the affected AAPI community. According to Riley Mukavetz (2014), “... practicing relationality is partly about how we embody and carry stories and relationships with us, it’s important to recognize how stories impact bodies” (p. 116). Cultural rhetoricians use embodiment and relationality to reveal commonalities between constellated communities and themselves, developing newly-informed knowledge from this shared pool of experiences throughout the process. 

By sharing anonymous embodied accounts, the STOP AAPI HATE report indirectly encourages the reader to imagine themselves (more specifically, their own body) in the AAPI victim’s place, aiming to foster empathy for the AAPI lived experience. According to Mignolo & Walsh (2018), one of the goals of relationality is to “...enter into conversations and build understandings that both cross geopolitical locations and colonial differences” (p. 1). This point is particularly relevant because the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports have free digital availability, allowing for a wider range of people to read about and relate to lived AAPI experiences in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the summative reports are available online, they can presumably be disseminated all over the country (and more boldly, even the world), exposing new readers to the hardships facing AAPI communities. With its embodied accounts in digital circulation, the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports use relationality as a far-reaching tactic to undo inaccurate AAPI stereotypes, changing the negative perception of AAPIs in other communities. The STOP AAPI HATE summative report shares a wide variety of racist encounters towards AAPIs in each technical document, encouraging other communities to relate to AAPI experiences in a COVID-19-impacted world and ultimately seeking to form more informed relationships with dominant communities. 

Importantly, I believe that the STOP AAPI summative reports, in their present forms, are only loosely connected with the cultural rhetorics pillar of decoloniality. As Driskill states, decolonization “... includes struggles for land redress, self-determination, healing historical trauma, cultural continuance, and reconciliation” (Powell et al., 2014, p. 8). Further supporting Driskill’s point, Tuck and Yang (2012) also assert that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” contending that decolonization only concerns itself with the issues of Indigenous land repatriation and sovereignty (p. 1). Based on these two clarifying statements, the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports cannot be labeled as decolonial documents because they do not primarily engage with the reclamation of physical, nor Indigenous, land. 

However, while these reports are not specifically decolonial, I argue that the STOP AAPI HATE reports allow marginalized AAPIs to reclaim space and fight for sovereignty, aligning with decolonial principles. While the STOP AAPI HATE summative reports do not engage with the reclamation of physical land, I contend that the initiative as a whole allows marginalized AAPIs to carve out a much-needed digital space online, where they can freely share their stories and counter dominant racist narratives within the U.S. In regard to AAPI sovereignty, Alban (2018) asserts that decolonial resistance happens when human groups make visible racialization, exclusion, and marginalization, prioritizing dignity and self-determination (Mignolo & Walsh, p. 16). With its efforts to raise awareness of anti-AAPI racism and to enact future policy changes using statistical data and personal stories, the STOP AAPI HATE initiative has created a space of resistance, using its summative reports to destabilize the negative, harmful stereotypes surrounding AAPI communities and people. Ultimately, while I contend that the initiative fights for similar outcomes, such as the reclamation of space and sovereignty within an oppressive system, I also recognize that STOP AAPI HATE reports fail to engage directly with cultural rhetorics’ concept of decolonization. However, in the following section, I will explain how decolonial theory actually helps to inform the cultural rhetorics methodology that I use to critique these same reports.