Where's the critical love? A pilot STOREY (STOrying Racism to Empower Youth) intervention for critical racial literacy development and dismantling anti-Blackness among Asian American emerging adults.

STOrying Racism to Empower Youth (STOREY) is a pilot intervention to promote the racial literacy development of Asian American emerging adults. STOREY harnesses the power of digital storytelling mediums (racism-related stories) and critical group dialogue to guide the exploration and promotion of Asian American college students' ethnic-racial identity and antiracism interests. In STOREY sessions, once the digital storytelling content stimulates participants' emotions and internal beliefs on racism and anti-Blackness, a group-based critical dialogue is employed to further reexamine those internally held beliefs and draw out their empathy to reinforce their future engagement in antiracism advocacy. To understand the impact on the participants in greater depth, we adapted Sealey-Ruiz's (2021) six components of critical racial literacy development framework (critical love, humility, reflection, historical literacy, archaeology of self, interruption) and engaged in a deductive qualitative analysis of data (N = 21; ethnically diverse; Mage = 20.46 [SD = 2.45]) to map the empirical change agents and processes underlying the potential critical racial literacy development that occurs through the STOREY sessions. Results provided empirical evidence of the six critical racial literacy development components (interruption, archaeology of the self, historical literacy, critical reflection, critical humility, critical love) at play in and through their engagement with this intervention. Each component serves as an important ingredient that can foster greater interest and orientation toward (and by also removing barriers that discourage individuals) enacting antiracism advocacy and cross-racial solidarity. Our findings provide implications for refined intervention development and employment at multiple levels (e.g., individual, school, community, institutional). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).