Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders face new, yet familiar wave of COVID-inspired prejudice
by Julius Rea | edited by Kyle Parsard
June 2020
Introduction
The newest wave of anti-Asian sentiment calls for a politically-minded mental health awakening within Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. At least three new AAPI support groups have emerged in the Bay Area in the wake of increased racial targeting during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Current Situation
“We’re experiencing everything from microaggressions to blatant harassment and community violence right now,” says Filipino-American psychologist Dr. Jean-Arellia Tolentino. “At the core of it is, How do we see each other? How do we be witnesses for each other during this time and let our community know that we are here? That we validate, that we support them?”
The Walnut Creek-based psychologist is one of many AAPI mental health professionals starting support groups in the area in response to the rise of anti-Asian sentiment.
In March, an Ipsos survey by The Center for Public Integrity found that 32 percent of respondents “witnessed someone blaming Asian people for the coronavirus epidemic.” That same month, the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council partnered with Chinese for Affirmative Action to launch STOP AAPI HATE, a campaign that tracks race-based incidents targeting Asians. By May 13, the campaign had made over 1,700 incident reports.
“For me, I was like, ‘Yeah, we need to talk about this now,’” says Tolentino. “We need to really figure out how to support others who are just hearing about it and who are experiencing it.”
A History of Discrimination
Asian-American communities in the West have long come up against the myth of the “Yellow Peril,” which holds that they constitute a persistent social, cultural, or political threat. And while the nature of the supposed threat changes within different historical contexts, the notion of Asians as vectors of disease has been a recurring theme.
In their 2009 paper, “Racialized Toxins and Sovereign Fantasies,” Berkeley professor Mel Y. Chen discusses how media imagery and historical prejudice can produce a mythical, racialized account of a crisis called a “master toxicity narrative” which serves to reinforce nationalist and white supermacist ideologies.
During the late 19th century, Chen writes, “a perceived threat to white domesticity came in the form of activities believed to reside exclusively in [San Francisco’s] Chinatown: prostitution and opium dens.” In this case, it was syphilis and leprosy that aroused fear in the local white populace, who believed that contraction occurred through direct contact with Chinese people.
Echoes of this sentiment were being felt in the early 2000s, when the outbreak of SARS led to renewed Anti-Asian fervor. A 2003 article in The British Medical Journal reported that Asians in Toronto were subjected to various forms of racial targeting during the crisis, with the media playing a crucial role in perpetuating racist myths of disease transmission.
“Health authorities warn of airborne transmission through coughing and sneezing, while the media saturate us with images of East Asians wearing masks,” writes Dr. Justin Shram, the article’s author. “The associations of airborne contagion and Asian merge to generate vague perceptions of risk, which drive misguided practices of protection.”
Chen recounts a similar situation from 2007, when the United States experienced a “lead panic” over the supposedly widespread contamination of Chinese-made toys. Again, imagery used by contemporaneous media played into and perpetuated existing Anti-Asian prejudices. In addition to stoking racial hatred, Chen notes, this type of coverage failed to provide practical advice for avoiding lead intoxication or facilitate a scientific understanding of the condition.
Approaches
With the current president of the United States referring to the virus in patently racial terms (“Chinese virus”), it’s clear that the myth of the Yellow Peril is alive and well, and that it is causing significant distress for Asian-American communities. Meanwhile, the limitations of Western psychology has created a gap for the complexities of the Asian-American experience.
The need for a psychological framework that adequately addresses the effect of white supremacy on the mental health of Asian-Americans has been noted for decades.
A 2001 article in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling explored the tools needed for mental support around Asian-American identities. The paper called for a more expansive rationale for addressing the psychological mindsets present when individuals create an Asian-American racial identity inside of a predominantly White culture. This need for an extended mental health vocabulary for Asian Americans was tied to a long history of systematic oppression since the 1880s
Some of these attacks included “the 1885 anti-Chinese riots in Rock Spring, Wyoming; the armed expulsion of South Asian laborers from Live Oak, California in 1908; and the 1930 anto-Pilipino riots in Watsonville, California.”
Despite the differences in these events, all have ties to the previously stated narrative “that present an economic, academic, social and/or cultural threat to a White majority.” The weight of this sentiment has culminated in the recent wave of sentiment, which has mirrored the other cultural changes related to the coronavirus outbreak.
Dr. Jean-Arellia Tolentino
Tolentino, a third-generation Filipino-American, focuses on the connection between social justice and mental health in her practice. She sees psychology as “surface-level processes” saying “that social justice gets to the root causes of a lot of mental health concerns.”
“And when I’m working with a client, if there’s concerns about body image or domestic violence or those kinds of issues, for me, it’s not thinking ‘Oh, they’re experiencing PTSD’—because they could be, yes—but underlying it is patriarchy,” she says.
For Tolentino and many other psychologists, the traditional practice of pathologizing a diagnosis through therapy is underpinned by racism, sexism, and white supremacy.
“All of that, to me, is the mental illness in a lot of ways,” says Tolentino. “we haven’t been able to name those root causes of oppression as the illness because we are limited in a very Western white psychology.”
Dr. Vickie Chang
“[This is] not just an opportunity for Asians to be working with their own internalized racism and the forces of systematic oppression, but to realize that this has been happening the whole time to other groups, and our part in that,” says Dr. Vickie Chang, a Chinese-American psychological based in Berkeley and Oakland.
A psychologist in Berkeley, Chang was born and raised in the Bay Area by immigrant parents who were born in China and raised in Taiwan. Her parents first moved to Hawaii before settling in San Francisco.
“This might be a generalization, but it feels—historically and currently—a lot of Asian Americans have not engaged in so much systematic oppression as it affects non-white people in American culture.”
Chang notes the substantial need for mental health resources for Asian Americans during the quarantine. When she started a support group with a fellow Chinese-American therapist, Dr. Sand Chang, the two quickly found themselves with a waitlist.
“As I was screening people, some of the people have been like ‘I’ve never done anything like this!’ or ‘Oh, I haven’t thought about race that much,’” she said. “I think that this is an opportunity for Asians to engage around this issue in a way that perhaps they haven’t before.”
Dr. Connie Wun
A local organization called AAPI Women Lead works towards the evolution of political identity by focusing on colonialism as a unifying experience for Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities. Its co-founder and executive director, Dr. Connie Wun, emphasizes that all Asians and Pacific Islanders in America are immigrants or refugees; in other words, they are all “survivors of colonialism.”
“It helps us to understand Guam as an occupied territory like Samoa, Japan, all of these are territories that are Pacific Islander territories. And not everyone is calling them occupied,” she says.
Wun notes that Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are more drastically impacted by coronavirus in California, and that Southeast Asians are also highly vulnerable. Within the state, Pacific Islanders “have died from the virus at a rate 2.6 times higher than the state population–the highest death rate of any racial or ethnic group.”
AAPI Women Lead has partnered with other local organizations to create a basis for collecting resources, information, and clarification on the different identities of the many groups that collectively make the AAPI community.
“So, we knew there was a need for us to gather because, if we were going to be isolated, we knew there were going to be a lot of needs,” says Wun. “And then we knew that our communities were equipped to meet some of those needs.”
Their efforts have culminated in the Community Care Series, a series of workshops and interviews led by community leaders and centered around personal, social, and political health during the pandemic. This is structured as a form of “mutual aid,” an exchange of services and resources for mutual social benefit.
“We have to recognize the differences in the experiences first before we’re able to collect the resources,” says Wun. “We have different health concerns, we have different economic concerns.”
Lauren Ito
A variety of mental health resources is emerging to meet the complex political needs of AAPI communities. For Bay Area poet and curator Lauren Ito, the journey of exploring Asian identity in America is entwined with history, visibility and therapy.
Before California’s shelter-in-place orders went into effect, Ito was curating “Political Inheritance,” an art show to be produced at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with the Asian American Pacific Island Cultural Center and the Asian American Women Artists Association. The show explores the “intersection of political identity as it relates to the Asian American Pacific Islander experience.”
In relation to low Asian representation in voter participation, Ito says the current conversation, which focuses on translation services for registration material, does not adequately address the cultural barriers around political engagement.
“There’s so much nuance to unpack, and I don’t see that showing up anywhere in this conversation,” she says.
According to Ito, some AAPI immigrants will experience a fear of voting as a result of past repression in their home countries. Others may believe that it is improper to vote on an individual basis, if they come from a political system where each family sends one representative to vote.
“… [We are] really asking ourselves: what have we inherited that has affected our ability to see ourselves or not see ourselves in the political systems around us, given that Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the U.S. have voter and political participation rates [that are] disproportionately low,” says Ito.
Ito, who is fifth-generation Gosei Japanese-American, was raised with her own set of hang-ups. The trauma of internment left Ito’s family with a deep anxiety around seeking mental health services, since “having explicit documentation that you are mentally unwell is a mark on your record that could follow you around.”
“There are undercurrents of nervousness in our community,” she says. “And when you look at the historical context and the narratives that are being passed down in families, it’s very obvious as to why [people do not reach out for mental health or social resources].”
Ito was inspired to explore this context through art and therapy after surviving a racially-motivated hate crime in Golden Gate Park in 2017.
In the aftermath of the attack, she repeatedly faced roadblocks to filing a report from two SFPD officers who were not empathetic to the situation. It was not until reaching out to the San Francisco chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League that she was able to connect with a female Japanese-American officer who would take her case seriously.
The JACL has also helped Ito find a therapist, which has enabled her to process her anxieties and traumas, and to better channel them into artistic expression.
“And that’s what really art has done for me: provided me with community, provided me with space to process, access to language, and the ability to externalize things that are very unhealthy to keep bottled up inside,” she says. “...there are things that we, as communities and cultures, need to come together to heal from collectively and that no one of us, in isolation, can really do alone.”
George Floyd and Asian/Black relations
Ito, Wun, Tolentino, and Chang all note that, for Asian-Americans to understand the impact of racism on their lives, they must also understand the weight of oppression on other Black and Brown bodies.
“There is a binary when we think about the ways Black and Brown folx have been pitted against each other in so many ways. [Asians are] usually using this binary of ‘White vs. Black,’ and that spectrum isn’t really opened up in a lot of ways for how Asians are a part of that,” says Tolentino.
With the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, many in the AAPI community have been forced to reconsider their role in American society. The image of Hmong-American officer Tou Thao standing guard as Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck has become a powerful symbol of the ways in which Asian Americans can uphold white supremacy in this country.
“One of the tenets of our organization is that—and we’ve been saying this more consistently—is that we recognize anti-Asian violence is made possible through anti-blackness and anti-indignity and a colonial world order,” says Wun regarding AAPI Women Lead.
Chang notes that, especially in large urban areas, Asians enjoy a certain degree of privilege and that “they have been perpetrating, also perpetrators, of violence against Blacks and other groups—just like there is a lot of racism against Asians in Black communities and within indigenous communities.”
“These systems of oppression are in each of us,” she says. “It’s not just in the white people, it’s in everybody, including me, including all of us. It doesn’t matter what identity you hold. That’s what it means to be living in a [racist] culture: it’s in you.”
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