Derald Wing Sue

Derald Wing Sue
Born	Portland, Oregon, U.S.
Occupations	Professor, author
Awards	APF Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Public Interest (2015); APA Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (2019); Division 45 Distinguished Career Contributions to Research Award (2022)
Academic background
Education	Oregon State University University of Oregon
Academic work
Discipline	Psychology
Sub-discipline	Counseling psychology
Institutions	Columbia University
Notable students	Kevin Nadal

Derald Wing Sue is an American professor of counseling psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. A scholar of multiculturalism, race, and racism, he has authored 24 books, the most recent published in 2026, and more than 200 scholarly publications, including Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practice, Overcoming our Racism, and Understanding Abnormal Behavior and popularized the concept of the microaggression.

Described as "without doubt the most influential multicultural scholar in the United States," his research has been cited more than 83,000 times on Google Scholar.

Personal life

Derald Wing Sue was born in Portland, Oregon, into a Chinese American family. His family lived in a middle class, predominantly white neighborhood, with his parents, four brothers and one sister. He remembers being teased due to his ethnicity during his early childhood. The discrimination and prejudice made him feel like an outcast, and he would often turn to his brothers for support. He attributes these early racist experiences as motivation for his professional interest in racism and anti-racism.

Sue and his brothers would often discuss what it meant to be Chinese living in America, talking about the hostility of an invalidating society and its harmful consequences on their self- esteem and standard of living. Although the prejudice had a negative effect on Sue's self-image, it increased his interest in multiculturalism. He was later influenced in his studies by the Black Power Movement and by individuals like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

He married his wife Paulina in the 1972. They have two children, Derald Paul and Marissa Catherine, and four grandchildren.

Professional life

Derald Wing Sue was majoring in food technology, part of the biological and chemical sciences, at Oregon State University when he took a psychology class and became fascinated. He switched to psychology and obtained his bachelor's from Oregon State University, then an M.S. and Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of Oregon.

After completing his degree, he became a counselor at the University of California, Berkeley counseling center, and was known as the counselor who supported Asian American students. During his time at Berkeley, he conducted mental health studies on Asian Americans

In 1972, Sue and his brother psychologist Stanley Sue cofounded the Asian American Psychological Association due to the lack of research on Asian American mental health. Derald Sue was the founding president of the organization.

In 1981, Sue published Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practice. This book became a lightning rod for controversy because of his philosophy on multicultural counseling. The text emphasizes understanding the sociopolitical nature of counseling and social justice counseling. Now in its 9th edition (2022, Wiley), it has been identified as the most frequently cited publication in the multicultural field.

Sue co-authored the multicultural counseling competencies, first published in 1982, as a position paper in The Counseling Psychologist and expanded it in 1992. Both publications were considered significant for establishing a core framework that was subsequently adopted by professional organizations.

He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the American Counseling Association. He served as Editor of the Personnel and Guidance Journal (now the Journal of Counseling & Development).

Sue joined the editorial board of American Psychologist as an Associate Editor effective January 1, 2007, as noted in the editor’s note accompanying the original article.

Professional leadership

Sue has held leadership roles in several major psychological organizations. He co-founded and served as the first president of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA) in 1972, the first such organization in the United States. He served as president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race (Division 45 of the American Psychological Association) and as president of the Society of Counseling Psychology (Division 17 of the American Psychological Association).

In 1996, Sue testified before President Bill Clinton's President's Advisory Board on Race. His testimony was controversial in that he indicated "no one born and raised in this society was immune from inheriting the racial biases of their ancestors". It led to his book Overcoming our Racism: The Journey to Liberation.

Sue's 1981 and 1992 works on multicultural counseling competencies were formally integrated into the accreditation standards of the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) beginning in 1994, and were extended across all eight of CACREP's core content areas by 2001.

The American Psychological Association built directly on Sue's framework when it published multicultural guidelines coauthored by Sue in 2002. The American Counseling Association's Code of Ethics subsequently required the infusion of multiculturalism and diversity into all courses and workshops, and adopted the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies, which explicitly extend Sue's 1992 standards; CACREP reaffirmed and updated these requirements in 2024.

In its 2019 award citation, the American Psychological Association described Sue's scholarship as foundational to the creation and implementation of APA's Multicultural Guidelines, and characterized Counseling the Culturally Diverse as a seminal resource and one of the most frequently used texts in multicultural counseling and psychology training programs.

The Derald Wing Sue Distinguished Contributions to Multicultural Counseling Award has been conferred by professional bodies in the field; recipients include his 1992 co-author Patricia Arredondo who received the award in 2019.

Beyond these formal roles, Sue is widely credited with helping establish multicultural counseling as a recognized subfield within counseling psychology rather than a peripheral specialty. The repeated institutional adoption of his competencies — by CACREP, APA, and ACA, across more than three decades —reflects the extent to which his framework has become central to the field.

Awards and honors

• 2013: APA Public Interest Award
• 2013: Social Justice Award, 30th Annual Winter Round table on Cultural Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
• 2015: American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest.
• 2017: Morton Deutsch Social Justice Award for Distinguished Scholar-Practitioners
• 2019: APA Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology —APA's highest award.
• 2019: Henry Tomes Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to the Advancement of Ethnic Minority Psychology, Council of National Psychological
• Associations for the Advancement of Ethnic Minority Interests (CNPAAEMD
• 2022: Division 45 Distinguished Career Contributions to Research Award
• 2022: Communicator Award for the 21-Day Plan for Disarming Microaggressions (SunShower Learning)

A 2012 study titled "Legends of the Field: Influential Scholars in Multicultural Counseling" identified Sue as the most cited scholar across 28 multicultural counseling textbooks, describing his influence on the field as "profound."

APA Division 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology) formally endowed an award in Sue's honor in 2017. At endowment, the award was named the Derald Wing Sue Award for Outstanding Contributions to Multicultural Counseling; Division 17's current award description page lists it as the Derald Wing Sue Award for Distinguished Contributions to Counseling Psychology.

Research

Sue's research has focused on multicultural counseling and therapy, the psychology of racism and antiracism, microaggression theory, microinterventions, the psychology of' racial dialogues, and multicultural education. He conducted extensive multicultural research and writing in psychology and education long before the academic community perceived it favorably.

In 2003, Sue published Overcoming Our Racism: The Journey to Liberation, which extended his earlier work on multicultural counseling into a broader argument aimed at helping white readers recognize and confront their own racial biases and complicity in systemic racism. Rather than treating racism solely as a matter of overt prejudice, the book framed it as embedded in everyday attitudes, institutional structures, and unexamined assumptions. a theme that would later become central to his work on microaggressions. The book positioned antiracism not as a one-time realization but as an ongoing personal and professional practice, asking readers to continually examine their own biases rather than treating bias awareness as a fixed endpoint. This framing racism as systemic and pervasive rather than incidental, and antiracism sustained practice rather than a single corrective act became a throughline across Sue's subsequent scholarship, linking his earlier work on cultural competence to his later research on microaggressions and, eventually, microinterventions as concrete antiracist action.

In 2007, Sue published a paper in American Psychologist that provided the first taxonomy of racial microaggressions. the brief, everyday verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that communicate denigrating messages People of Color. This work made "the invisible, visible" by validating the experiential realities of marginalized groups and providing them with a language to describe their experiences.

the 2010 book, Sue extended the 2007 framework to book length, taking up gender and sexual orientation alongside race. His argument there that microaggressions operate across multiple identity dimensions simultaneously pushed the framework beyond its original racial focus.

Sue's 2007 paper organized everyday racial slights into three categories: microassaults (conscious and intentional derogations), microinsults (unintentional communications that convey a hidden insulting message), and microinvalidations (unintentional communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of marginalized groups). That taxonomy gave clinicians and researchers a shared vocabulary for phenomena that had previously been treated as anecdotal. Within a decade, the term "microaggression" had migrated from the specialist literature into corporate diversity training, K-12 education, and university orientation programming.

The 2007 taxonomy paper drew drew on a roughly ten-year program of research conducted Sue and his team at Teachers College, Columbia University

Sue's book Microaggressions in Everyday life: Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation. (Wiley, 2010) received the 2010 National Diversity and Global Inclusion Book Prize Award from UnitFirst.com.

His microaggressions research has been adopted in professional training contexts, including a recorded workshop for the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work on microaggressions in educational institutions.

The 2007 paper has been cited more than 11,500 times, and by June 2022 Google Scholar recorded roughly 334,000 scholarly articles on the topic of microaggressions.Between 2007 and 2022, the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database logged more than 12,000 theses and dissertations on the topic. Psycinfo recorded only two to three publications on microaggressions before the 2007 taxonomy; since then, more than 1,120 have appeared.

Other researchers have used Sue's taxonomy to develop more than a dozen named measurement instruments, including the Racial and Ethnic Microaggression Scale, the Racial Microaggression Scale, the Microaggression Distress Scale, the Female Microaggression Scale, the Microaggression in Health Care Scale, the LGBQ Microaggressions on Campus Scale, and the Ableist Microaggression scale.

Microaggressions in Everyday Life has been translated into Korean and Japanese, with a Chinese translation in progress.[ Sue's 2019 paper in American Psychologist introducing microinterventions had been cited more than 1300 times by 2026.

In 2015, Sue published Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race, a book that addresses the practical mechanics of facilitating difficult racial dialogues in classrooms, workplaces, and other settings. The book introduces the concept of a "conspiracy of silence" — the unspoken agreement among people of goodwill to avoid discussing race, which Sue argues perpetuates racial inequity. Drawing on a decade of research, the book provides concrete tools for educators, trainers, and facilitators to break the silence and guide productive conversations about race. This work is distinct from Sue's microaggressions taxonomy and multicultural competencies framework: rather than categorizing discriminatory acts or defining professional standards, it focuses on the practical dialogue skills needed address race in real-time interactions. The University of Pennsylvania's SNF Paideia Program featured a dedicate analysis of the book as part of its Decolonizing Dialogue reading series describing it as based on a decade of research.

Beyond his academic work, Sue has served as a consultant to government agencies, public schools, and mental health organizations, working with practitioners, faculty, teachers, community leaders, and corporate executives.

Beyond academia, the concept of microaggressions entered mainstream usage. In 2015, the Global Language Monitor named "microaggression" its Word of the Year, and in 2017 Merriam-Webster formally added the term to its dictionary.Sue received a Telly Award for excellence in video and television for Disarming Microaggressions, and he collaborated with MTV on its Look Different campaign, producing seven public service videos educating young audiences about the harm of microaggressions. A 2014 New York Times feature article about so-called "racial microagressions" referenced Sue's work directly, and he authored an invited article on the topic for Scientific American. He has also been interviewed by Everyday Health by the PBS Newshour, by NPR affiliate KUOW in Seattle.

His more recent work has expanded to microinterventions - concrete anti-bias strategies that targets, allies, and bystanders can use to disrupt, disarm, and dismantle microaggressions and macroaggressions in everyday settings.This framework is detailed in Microintervention Strategies: What You Can Do to Disarm and Dismantle Individual and Systemic Racism (Wiley, 2021).The book introduces a formal framework categorizing microinterventions into three types — microaffirmations, microprotections, and microchallenges offering concrete, practical guidance for targets, allies, and bystanders responding to microaggressions and macroaggressions. Sue co-authored the book with four of his doctoral students at Teachers College Sarah Alsaidi, Cassandra Calle, Elizabeth Glaser, and Narolyn Mendez — who published it around the time of their own graduation in 2021While centered on race, the framework explicitly extends to other forms of bias and discrimination, including sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism.The authors define microinterventions as the individual actions that ordinary citizens can take to voice disapproval, educate others, and pressure those in authority to make changes. Sue's research identified recurring meta-communication themes experienced by different groups: perpetual foreigner status for Asian and Latinx Americans, assumptions of dangerousness and criminality for African Americans, assumed sinfulness for LGBTQ people, and sexual objectification for women.

The 2019 microinterventions framework organizes anti-bias actions into four strategic goals: disarming the microaggression, making the invisible visible, educating the perpetrator, and seeking external reinforcement or support — with particular emphasis on bystander intervention training.

Consultation and training

In 1982, Sue incorporated his private practice under the name "Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D., A Psychological Corporation." Through this firm, he has consulted with hundreds of organizations across business, industry, education, and mental health agencies over more than 45 years.

See also

• Cross-cultural psychiatry
• Cross-cultural psychology
• Racism in the United States