Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center: A Model of Collective Leadership and Community Advocacy

Introduction

Since its launch on March 19, 2020, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center has garnered national media attention for its tracking of hate, violence, adult harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying toward Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. The center's first press release, on March 26, 2020, provided documentation of stories circulating across Asian American communities about the ways people of Asian descent, and Chinese descent specifically, were being targeted abroad and in the United States. The number of documented cases, moreover, raised awareness among media outlets about the backlash.¹

This essay provides a brief overview of how Stop AAPI Hate emerged as a national and global resource for advocacy against anti-Asian racism from a collaboration between university researchers and community activists. As Diane Fujino concludes from her historiography of the Asian American movement, the success of that movement was based in collective leadership, people-powered resources, and ties between the local, national, and international movements.² The success of the Stop AAPI Hate collaboration likewise is based in a tradition of Asian American activism that prioritizes community needs and community experiential knowledge, while also drawing upon the research expertise of Asian American studies scholars.

Establishing the Center

Although Stop AAPI Hate formally began in 2020 as a response to the global pandemic, the three organizations that together founded the project trace their roots to the 1969 Asian American movement in California. Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) was founded in San Francisco in 1969 specifically to "advocate for systemic change that protects immigrant rights, promotes language diversity, and remedies racial and social injustice" for the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. ³ The Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON) emerged as a federation of new groups forming in the 1970s out of earlier pan–Asian American organizing.⁴ The Asian American Studies department at San Francisco State University (SFSU) was formed as part of the College of Ethnic Studies that resulted from the Third World Liberation Front student strike in 1969.⁵ For this essay, I interviewed the three cofounders of the reporting center, Dr. Russell Jeung, Director Cynthia Choi, Director Manjusha Kulkarni, and a graduate student, Sarah Gowing. I also draw upon my own experience as a volunteer through April...