Derald wing sue biography of michael

DERALD WING SUE Derald Wing Sue is Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College and the School of Social Work, Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, and has served as a training faculty member with the Institute for Management Studies and the Columbia University Executive Training Programs. He was the Co-Founder and first President of the Asian American Psychological Association, past presidents of the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues (Division 45) and the Society of Counseling Psychology (Division 17). Dr. Sue is a member of the American Counseling Association, and a Fellows of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Sue has served as Editor of the Personnel and Guidance Journal (now the Journal for Counseling and Development), is Associate Editor of the American Psychologist, Editorial Member to Asian Journal of Counselling, and has been or continues to be a consulting editor for numerous journals and publications. Derald Wing Sue can truly be described as a pioneer in the field of multicultural psychology, multicultural education, multicultural counseling and therapy, and the psychology of racism/antiracism. He has done extensive multicultural research and writing in psychology and education long before the academic community perceived it favorably, and his theories and concepts have paved the way for a generation of younger scholars interested in issues of minority mental health and multicultural psychology. He is author of over 150 publications, 15 books, and numerous media productions. In all of these endeavors, his commitment to multiculturalism has been obvious and his contributions have forced the field to seriously question the monocultural knowledge base of its theories and practices. As evidence of his professional impact, Dr. Sue's book, COUNSELING THE CULTURALLY DIVERSE: THEORY AND PRACTICE, 2008, 5th Edition

My research and work on what we call “racial microaggressions” began through a series of lifelong experiences and observations of interpersonal racial encounters. For example, I am a second-generation Asian American, born and raised in the U.S. Yet despite that fact, I receive constant compliments for speaking “good” English. On crowded New York City subway trains, with all seats taken, I noticed that there would always be an empty one next to a Black passenger. These examples and countless other incidents are racial microaggressions.

Microaggressions are the everyday slights, insults, put-downs, invalidations and offensive behaviors that people of marginalized groups experience in daily interactions with generally well-intentioned people who may be unaware of their impact. Microaggressions are reflections of implicit bias or prejudicial beliefs and attitudes beyond the level of conscious awareness. Social psychologists have studied implicit bias for decades, along with the role it plays in human behavior. Almost any marginalized group can be the object of microaggressions. There are racial, gender, LGBTQ and disability microaggressions that occur daily toward these groups.

Most individuals who commit microaggressions view themselves as moral and decent human beings who never would consciously discriminate against another person. Yet it is important to acknowledge that none of us is immune from inheriting the racial, gender or sexual orientation biases of our society. Let us return to the two opening examples to understand more fully the manifestation, dynamics and impact of microaggressions.

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Microaggressions oft

In October 1997, in televised testimony before President Clinton’s Advisory Board on Race, the multicultural psychologist Derald Wing Sue urged Americans to conduct “an honest examination of racial prejudices, racial stereotyping and racial discrimination” and accept “responsibility for changing ourselves, our institutions and our society.”

Midway through, he dropped the we and our.

“One of the great difficulties with white Americans . . . is that they perceive and experience themselves as moral, decent and fair people — and indeed, they are,” said Sue, whose father emigrated from China to the United States. “Thus, they fail to realize that their beliefs and actions may be discriminatory.” For society to change, he declared, white people must undergo “a personal awakening” and work to “root out these biases and unwarranted assumptions related to race, culture and ethnicity.”

Sue took pains in his remarks not to blame whites. People are not born racist, he said, but become so “through a painful process of social conditioning.” Yet he was deluged with angry mail, ranging from accusations that he was a “racist of a different color” to threats that his “tenure on this earth” would be “limited.”

“I was stunned,” he recalls. “What I said seemed so mild and was all vetted by the Clinton staff. But my wife, Paulina, said, ‘You’ve been living in a bubble, speaking to other academics. You need to get out there and talk to the public.’”

It was a turning point for Sue, the beginning of his metamorphosis from change agent in his field to a man on a mission to reveal — not to the haters, but to the more reasonable people who vehemently denied the reality he described — how people of color experience racism on a daily basis.

For some time, he had been pondering the concept of “microaggressions,” a term coined in 1970 by Chester Pierce, a black psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School (and the first African American full professor at Mass