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AAPI Equity Alliance’s program brings together culturally-focused groups that help Asian Americans heal from hate attacks by seeking to make sense of their experiences with racism, primarily within the Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Korean community groups.
The pilot program led by AAPI Equity Alliance is creating culturally-focused community groups as healing spaces for five distinct Asian American communities to have safe spaces, experts said during a briefing held by Ethnic Media Services.
This program is an adaptation of the “Radical Healing Framework” of Black Liberation psychologists, which helps African Americans overcome generations of racial misexperiences; the program is called Healing Our People Through Engagement (HOPE), which draws on people’s strengths and the cultural practices of their communities to grow a shared understanding and collective response to current racism, bringing communities together.
Michelle Sewrathan Wong, managing director of programs for AAPI Equity Alliance, explained that this new program created with Asian American communities in mind is a coalition of more than 40 community organizations dedicated to improving the living conditions of Asian Americans in Los Angeles County.
Sewrathan Wong said these communities suffered from a brutal increase in racism and discrimination in the wake of the pandemic, where politicians made them scapegoats for the transmission of COVID-19 and they were subjected to violent physical attacks, making them feel unsafe and unwelcome in their own community in an intimidating way.
“We knew from our reporting and data the profound emotional and mental suffering they had experienced, and we wanted to explore the root causes further, so we turned to the Radical Healing Framework, a team-developed psychological framework that goes beyond individual-level approaches to addressing racial trauma, leveraging the collective experience of both pain and joy to deepen their resilience in the face of hate,” Wong said.
Similarly, she explained that the innovative pilot program is based on a framework of healing and hope that fosters ethnic pride, community empowerment, and reinforces that racism does not only occur at the individual level, but that communities also suffer as a group, which is why it has been implemented in 5 communities in Los Angeles, where the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, providing community members with a space where they can feel safe, supported, and heard.
Anne Saw, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at DePaul University and former vice president of the Asian American Psychological Association, said it's important to heal racism in Asian American communities that have suffered for decades, as psychological and other research shows racism harms both physical and mental health.
Acts of hate can trigger symptoms of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and can make people experience feelings of incomprehension, isolation and powerlessness, hence the need for healing that has become increasingly urgent in communities.
“It is the first community-based program developed from the framework of radical healing psychology and is one of the first community-based programs to address the effects of racism on the mental health of Asian Americans. It was developed by a multiracial team of psychologists of color and was published in 2020 in The Counseling Psychologist journal and the framework itself is based on decades of theorizing and research by Black Latinx and other researchers of color,” explained Anne Saw.
Japanese Americans are unique because they have very different generational experiences, and in the show you have Asian immigrants who are having to deal with some loss of culture, loss of ways of life, and then the way that all of that was connected, so they have very unique issues that need to be addressed.
This resource is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to AC vs Hate.
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