Anti-Asian Hate, Racial Trauma, and Posttraumatic Growth, with Russell M. Jeung

The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life will present a talk by Russel M. Jeung (SF State), “Anti-Asian Hate, Racial Trauma, and Posttraumatic Growth,” on April 15, 2024, at 5:00pm in UCSB’s McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020). This event is free and open to the public.

In this lecture, Jeung explores COVID-19 racism against Asian Americans, which led to what he terms a period of “collective racial trauma.” Twenty-five peer-reviewed articles have since documented the deleterious impacts of direct and indirect racism on the mental health of Asian Americans. Yet Asian Americans have been resilient in the face of this trauma, and utilized their ethnic and cultural wealth as buffers against anti-Asian hate. Jeung identifies three key ways that Asian Americans responded to this trauma and even grew from this painful time. Asian Americans’ posttraumatic growth, the positive psychological change after trauma incidents, will also be detailed.

Russell M. Jeung is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of many books and articles on race and religion. In 2020, he co-founded Stop AAPI Hate to track instances of bias, harassment, and violence against AAPI people during Covid-19 and to fight racism.