In their article in Stigma and Healthopens in new window, stigma scholars Mary Bresnahan, Yi Zhu, Anne Hooper, Sarah Hipple, and Lucas Savoie examined 50 articles describing and evaluating acts of discrimination directed toward Asian Americans as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The FBI, Stop AAPI Hate, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other sources have reported a substantial increase in the frequency and intensity of anti-Asian hate crimes that began in 2020 with the pandemic and has continued to the present.
Numerous articles on anti-Asian violence have appeared in scholarly journals in multiple disciplines during the past 2 years. Bresnahan et al.’s goal with their study was to bring together a representative subset of this substantial body of social and behavioral studies documenting the effects of anti-Asian stigma on health. Their review of this scholarship would then help to communicate to scholars, health care providers, and policy makers the magnitude of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic and illustrate the negative physical, emotional, and psychological effects of anti-Asian stigma.
The authors created inclusion criteria for selecting the final set of 50 articles, which were evaluated using thematic analysis. They identified five themes describing the data: enactment of stigma, health consequences of stigma, stigma in social media, Asian American stigma in education, and policy and political consequences of anti-Asian stigma. These studies revealed that Asian Americans have been called “perpetual foreigners,” “a foreign threat,” “a not-so-model minority,” “others,” “outsiders,” “disease spreaders,” and “bat and snake eaters.” In numerous cases, the experience of stigma and violence has affected Asian Americans’ mental and physical health and caused psychological stress and racial battle fatigue. Many of the studies included in this analysis described the irresponsibility of people in positions of power who encouraged anti-Asian stigma by directing inflammatory rhetoric and accusatory and manipulative public discourse against Asian Americans. The result of the misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 has been the amplification of suspicion and distrust of Asian Americans. Digital racism reflected in the “hate multiverse” is an especially pernicious problem. The ease of posting and transmitting hateful public comments on a variety of social network sites has facilitated the spread of blatant prejudice against Asian Americans.
The authors concluded that the studies they analyzed showed that hate and violence directed against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders can be addressed at both the public and the private levels. At the public level, numerous community-based groups have been instrumental in opposing anti-Asian violence. Further, legislation criminalizing anti-Asian hate crimes, such as the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act (passed on April 22, 2021), empowered the U.S. Department of Justice to expedite the prosecution of anti-Asian hate crimes. At the personal level, confronting stigmatizers has been shown to reduce prejudice and improve self-esteem. Also, people targeted for discrimination do not have to stand alone: Bystanders who find anti-Asian harassment offensive are encouraged to step in to help stop verbal and physical aggression.
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