Demystifying And Addressing Internalized Racism And Oppression Among Asian Americans

Asian Americans (AAs) are a diverse group who come from many different cultures, backgrounds, immigration histories, geographic regions, and experiences. Unfortunately, AAs are commonly stereotyped as a model minority, used as an intermediary minority, and consequently have been marginalized and left out of dialogues of racism and discrimination. Internalized racism (IR), defined as the internalization of bias and oppression toward one's group, is an especially insidious form of divisive racism that remains largely misunderstood and unaddressed in AAs. In addition to devaluing oneself, IR creates division in communities and reinforces systems of oppression. This paper reviews the extant literature on IR among AAs and discusses the importance of addressing this deleterious issue and its consequences on individual, family, and community mental health. Moreover, I discuss and elucidate how stereotypes about AAs (e.g., model minority, perpetual foreigner, gendered stereotypes, and conceptions of beauty) directly promote and reinforce different types of internalized oppression (e.g., intraracial hierarchies, intraethnic othering, gendered emasculation, and hypersexualization, colorism and Western standards of beauty). Clinical and community recommendations are provided through a multilevel preventive intervention framework.