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Indian in America
If I’m labeled as an Indian American, do other Americans think of me as one of them or am I still an outsider?
I have lived in America for close to forty years, almost my entire adult life. I’ve been an American citizen for decades and I think of myself as an American first and an Indian second. In my younger days I never gave the question of this hyphenated identity any thought. I wasn’t offended when another mother, whose children played with mine on a daily basis, introduced me to her friends as, “she’s my Indian neighbor.” I didn’t think twice when someone asked me where I was from and simply answered, “I’m Indian.”
But lately I’ve begun to wonder if I’m labeled as an Indian American, do other Americans think of me as one of them or am I still an outsider? So why am I questioning my identity now? The answer is simple – it’s because in the past few years I’ve sensed a palpable sense of otherization directed at me and other members of our community and I’ve become much more conscious of the implications of my Indianness.
31% of Indian Americans feel at risk of Racial Discrimination
An article published in the Washington Post brought to light that instances of racial abuse and discrimination against South Asians are on the increase. The authors of the article had conducted a survey in 2020 and their findings revealed that they found “31 percent of Indian Americans believed that discrimination against people of Indian origin was a major problem in the United States – while 53 percent thought that it was minor problem. Measuring respondents’ lived experiences with discrimination revealed that 1 in 2 Indian Americans reported being subjected to some form of discrimination over the previous 12 months.”
Of course, we can argue that these incidents should not occur and that our community must stand up and assert our right to equality, but the reality is that the with rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric such incidents are bound to increase too.
So, the question before us is – how do we heal when we have been the victims of such forms of physical or emotional abuse or hate crimes? A briefing hosted by Ethnic Media Services (EMS) in May, experts talked about how the Asian American community has used the technique of Radical Healing to help the victims of hate crimes to recover. This got me thinking if this might be a technique that could work for our own community?
What is Radical Healing?
Radical Healing involves being and becoming whole in the face of identity-based “wounds” which are the injuries sustained because of our membership in an oppressed racial or ethnic group. Radical healing techniques differ from traditional therapy methods in that they stress upon the process of healing on a much more collective way, rather than having the focus on each individual victim of a hate crime. According to an article published in the journal Psychology Today “radical healing incorporates strategies that address the root causes of the trauma by building on the strengths of individuals and engaging the general and culture-specific practices of their community that promote resilience and wellbeing. Such strategies can include community healing circles, intergenerational storytelling, and advocacy work.”
An AAPI Initiative
The EMS briefing focused on a new program titled HOPE, which stands for Healing Our People through Engagement, which AAPI has spearheaded. According to Michelle Wong of the AAPI Equity Alliance, “at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020, the Asian-American community endured episodes of brutality, not seen for generations in this country. They were scapegoated by politicians for transmission of COVID-19, targeted for violent attacks, and made to feel unsafe and unwelcome in their own communities.” Wong explained that the HOPE program gave the members of the five largest ethnic minorities in the Los Angeles area, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Korean, and Cambodian communities, a safe space to share their experiences and feel safe, supported, and heard. She gave empirical evidence that showed that even though the program is still in its early stages the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Dr. Anne Saw, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, and a designer of the HOPE program, stated in her presentation that her field research has shown that many members of the AAPI community have reported experiences of racial trauma, such as depression and anxiety symptoms, and physical symptoms such as headaches and trouble sleeping.”
According to Dr. Saw, in the Asian American community there is often stigma attached to mental health issues and an in-built cultural bias against talking openly about such struggles. Another significant hurdle encountered by those who have been victims of a hate crime or faced incidents of microaggression is that even if they want to seek therapeutic help, they face a significant “lack of available culturally and linguistically appropriate care.”
The HOPE Program
The HOPE program is meant to bridge these key lacunae. As the first community-based program of its kind, it puts into practice decades of theoretical research in psychology. The basic premise here is that through sharing their experiences of racial bias, the process helps the healing process. The program “emphasizes healing rather than coping,” and it does so by organizing safe community forums. The discussion at such meetings is moderated with the help of a trained facilitator who encourages the members of the community to share the details of the kinds of discrimination or microaggressions they’ve experienced. The facilitators reported that through months of such open exchange, they observed how the participants had begun to feel a sense of belonging in the group and also the whole process had helped them heal from the earlier trauma.
South-Asian Communities can learn from HOPE
Although the EMS briefing focused entirely on the trauma sustained by the various subsections of the East-Asian communities during the pandemic, valuable lessons learned through their efforts can help the South-Asian diaspora. How many times have we been singled out for our accents, told to “go back to where you came from,” or type-cast based on negative stereotypes?
How do these incidents affect our collective psyche? Like East-Asian cultures, South-Asians also consider open discussion about mental health issues to be a taboo topic. The findings of a study by J. Burr published in Science Direct state, “Low rates of treated depression and high rates of suicide in women from South Asian communities are evident in epidemiological studies in the UK.”
Burr argues that often mental health care professionals constructed cultural differences that resulted in treating Britain’s South Asian communities as inferior.
Healing from trauma
Given that there is a significant increase in racially motivated acts of microaggressions and even outright hate crimes and a built-in cultural insensitivity in the existing mental health system, how will our community of South Asians heal from similar trauma-inducing experiences?
The answers may lie in methods adopted by other Asian American communities. The framework of Radical Healing discussed in the EMS meeting was devised by experts from Black, Latinx, and Asian American communities. The thread that ties all our experiences together is that of our minority status and the physical and emotional violence we sustain as a result of it.
The panelists stated that though this system is not a substitute for traditional counseling or talk therapy techniques, it may be an appropriate starting point for the victims to begin the process of healing. Maybe, we too can begin to collectively not just fight against racial biases but also collectively heal from the wounds inflicted upon us.