Anti-Asian Hate and Moral Injury: Social Healing through Reclaiming Moral Virtues, Collective Action, and Meaning Making

This paper will focus on the experiences and movements that emerged from anti-Asian racism and hate that swelled during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to unprecedented and deepening health inequities and racial trauma for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. In dialogue with testimonies, reports, and reflections on anti-Asian racism and the social and political galvanization of the Asian American community and movements like Stop AAPI Hate, we assess the morally injurious components, causes, histories, and realities for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, as well as methods and lessons on social healing from impacted communities. Specifically, we will explore how reclaiming moral virtues, collective action, and meaning making have been integral sites of communal processing and recovery among Asian Americans, and how they offer expansive frameworks and insights on recovery to the moral injury field.

We will begin with a brief overview of the context of anti-Asian racism during COVID-19, noting the political, global, economic, and social crises that foreground the immense violence enacted and amplified against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. We will draw connections and distinctions between racial trauma and moral injury through the lens of Asian American experiences and narratives of invisibility and exclusion, and how the gendered, ageist, and xenophobic nature of anti-Asian hate violence exposed the already tenuous moral codes of American society.

We will then provide a summary of how Asian Americans responded to anti-Asian racism and violence through the movements of naming, reclaiming, and flocking. By reporting hate incidents and sharing publicly about their experiences, Asian Americans raised collective consciousness within communities and with communities of solidarity, raising a moral clarion to America’s complicity and history of exclusion, fear mongering, and scapegoating. In connecting to cultural moral traditions and spiritual resources for moral centeredness, Asian Americans reclaimed cultural and spiritual practices for meaning making. Finally, by enacting community care, collective action, and movement building, Asian Americans flocked together to build inter and intra communal trust, centering on relationships for resilience building.

We will note lessons on social healing among Asian Americans by focusing on the significance of collective meaning making and a restorative justice approach to accountability. Vigils and rituals were instrumental sites for communal processing and building interracial, pan-ethnic, interreligious, and intergenerational movements. And as movements focusing on anti-Asian hate employed alternative, non-carceral or non-punitive paths for accountability and recovery, they demonstrate the challenges and possibilities of navigating systems and institutions that are complicit with and/or often sources of moral injury for people of color in the United States. We will share how these examples provide insights, questions, and hope for individual, communal, and collective recovery in the face of structural and interpersonal violence.