Experts in Self-Serving Racial Manipulation

      

I am sure you, as I, learned in early elementary school that science is a special human endeavor executed by rational, committed professionals who relentlessly follow the truth wherever it leads.  We were told that scientists objectively collect data through valid and reliable methods, perform valid and reliable experiments, and report results without bias.  We were led to believe that scientists choose their professions out of love of their subject, not due to preconceived, emotionally charged conflicts that they must work through.   No one ever suggested to us that scientists racially proselytize, probably because racial proselytizing is not and never has been science.

If you accept my aforementioned premises about science and scientists, you may be interested to learn about Derald Wing Sue, an Asian American, who was recently selected as a distinguished career contributor to psychology by the American Psychological Association (APA) for his work in “racial-cultural bias.”  Since I do not know Dr. Sue personally, I base my comments on the bio written about him in the November, 2013 American Psychologist, APA’s flagship journal.   Let’s see whether our “distinguished career contributor” sounds like a dispassionate truth seeker.

In the bio we are told that Derald has six siblings, three of whom obtained psychology doctorates.  “Sibling rivalry” is cited and presumably was assuaged somewhat in that the psychologist brothers allegedly “found validation in one another’s ideas” about the ethnocentrism of American psychology.  In fact, the brothers so reinforced each other’s race-oriented preoccupations that “colleagues would often confuse the Sues for one another, and this caused mistakes in crediting the works of one brother for those of the others.”

It appears then the Sue boys helped overcome their sibling rivalry by finding a common enemy: ethnocentricity, a word that in this case is a euphemism for racism.  Derald also blamed his conflicted ethnic identity for "feeling like an outcast" and "recalls allowing himself to feel ashamed of his racial/cultural heritage and battling a sense of racial inferiority."  When bothered by those emotions, "He would often turn to his brothers for support because they were the only ones who seemed to understand these feelings; they would often talk about the meaning of being Chinese, the hostility of an invalidating society, and the harmful consequences it had on their self-esteem and standard of living.”    

During the course of his psychology career, Derald Sue’s racial obsession caused interpersonal problems for him.  Because of it, psychologist colleagues tried to have him removed from editorship of the Journal of Counseling and Development.

Given his history, one might question Dr. Sue’s racial objectivity.  But no one would be surprised to learn that “racial microaggressions” (defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group.”) has been Derald’s signature professional preoccupation and the reason for both his acclaim and censure.  The acclaim has come mostly from Sue’s APA establishment cronies and the censure from rank and file professional psychologists such as Kenneth R. Thomas who rebutted Sue in his article “Micrononsense in Multiculturalism.”  (American Psychologist, Vol 63(4), May-Jun 2008, 274-275.)

The “data” of racial microaggressions actually are purely subjective opinions determined by persons with a vested, determined interest in making a social point, namely that white people are responsible for the ills of all other peoples on earth.  If a white person hesitates, glances away, or cuts short an interaction with a non-white, that white person is guilty of microaggression racism.  The methods of racial microaggression studies always involve alleged victimization only of non-whites.  I literally never have seen one study that investigates the possibility of racial microaggressions against white people.  In fact, I have never found a single APA study that has addressed anti-white racism as a subject in and of itself.  It is as if no “person of color” ever has harbored racist feelings or performed racist actions against whites.

In my opinion, Dr. Sue is the kind of psychologist and racial microaggresssion is the kind of concept that undermines public faith in the “science” of psychology.  Like Barack Obama, Derald Sue has managed to parlay his own racial obsession into notoriety by appealing to some “people of color” who, like he, seize upon any reason to blame whites for any of their own personal shortcomings and by appealing to some racially masochistic whites desperately seeking a warped sense of racial vindication.

I suggest that Dr. Derald Wing Sue and the American Psychological Association investigate crime statistics that document the fact that black-on-white aggression is exponentially higher than white-on-black aggression.  And I am not talking about phony, subjective racial microaggression, I am talking about violent crime—homicide, aggravated assault and rape.  Perhaps a little more time and effort can be spent on solving those race-based “social problems.”   Maybe someday in the very remote future an investigator will be recognized by APA as being a distinguished career contributor to psychology for his or her work concerning real, objectively documented anti-white aggression perpetrated by so-called people-of-color.