Speaking of Psychology: How to combat microaggressions, with Derald Wing Sue, PhD

Microaggressions—the indirect, subtle, sometimes unintentional incidents of racism and bias that members of marginalized groups experience every day—can take a large toll on people’s mental and physical health. Derald Wing Sue, PhD, of Teacher’s College, Columbia University, discusses what makes something a microaggression, why microaggressions are so harmful, and what you can do to disarm and neutralize these everyday instances of racism and bias.

Derald Wing Sue, PhD, is a professor of psychology and education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He’s a pioneer in the field of microaggression research, as well as in multicultural psychology, multicultural education, multicultural counseling and therapy, the psychology of racial dialogues, and the psychology of racism and antiracism. His research has helped elucidate the causes and consequences of microaggressions, as well as to devise strategies to combat them. He’s the author of nearly 200 scholarly publications and 23 books, and he’s won dozens of awards for his research, including APA’s 2019 Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.

Kim Mills: “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” And, “hey, your English is good.” Many of us are familiar with the idea of microaggressions, the indirect, subtle, often unintentional incidents of racism or bias that members of marginalized groups experience every day. Despite the syllable “micro” in the name of these phenomena, psychologists have found that experiencing constant microaggressions can take a toll on people’s physical and mental health. In recent years, they’ve begun to devise strategies that people can use when they experience or witness microaggressions to defuse and neutralize these everyday instances of racism and bias.

So what makes something a microaggression? How do microaggressions differ from simple rudeness? What effects do microaggressions have on those who experience them? Why are they so harmful and in what ways? And what should you do when you experience a microaggression or when you see one directed at someone else? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He’s a pioneer in the field of microaggression research, as well as in multicultural psychology, multicultural education, multicultural counseling and therapy, the psychology of racial dialogues, and the psychology of racism and antiracism. His research has helped elucidate the causes and consequences of microaggressions, as well as to devise strategies to combat them. He’s the author of nearly 200 scholarly publications and 23 books, and he’s won dozens of awards for his research, including APA’s 2019 Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology. 

Dr. Sue, thank you for joining me today.

Derald Wing Sue, PhD: Well, Kim, I’m pleased to be here. And please, call me Derald.

Mills: All right. I will do that, thank you. I gave some examples of typical microaggressions in my introduction a moment ago, but let’s dig into the definition in a little more detail. How do you define a microaggression? What kinds of actions or words constitute microaggressions?

Sue: Well, microaggressions are the everyday slights and indignities, insults, put-downs and invalidations that people of color—when we talk about racial microaggressions—experience in their day-to-day interactions with oftentimes well-intentioned individuals who are unaware that they have engaged in a demeaning or offensive manner towards the individual. The thing that makes microaggressions so powerful is that they are reflections of worldviews, of inclusion, exclusion, superiority, inferiority, and normality, abnormality.

Almost any marginalized group in our nation can be the object of microaggressions. My research has primarily been on racial microaggressions, but there are gender microaggressions, there are disability microaggressions, LGBTQ microaggressions, and so forth. The microaggressions experienced by marginalized groups in our society operate under what we found to be similar social psychological processes, but their themes are quite different. For example, even within racial—within people of color, African Americans are most prone to experience microaggressions of criminality and dangerousness. Asian Americans and Latinx Americans experience themes of perpetual alien or foreigner in your own country. If you skip over to gender, sexual objectification is a common theme that women experience in their day-to-day lives.

LGBTQ individuals have probably a very unusual form because the themes that they experience are themes of sinfulness and pathology. And so while we talk about microaggressions, the type of group or population that we refer to oftentimes experience the different themes that tend to put them down in some way and negate who they are as cultural beings.

Mills: These aren’t the same as overt expressions of racism, right? I mean, they’re things that people say where they’re unthinkingly just saying something without even realizing what they’re doing is somehow denigrating the person they’re talking to, correct?

Sue: Well, actually, this is very complicated, what you’re asking. Microaggressions can be overt and obvious. For example, in our research, we find three forms of microaggressions. Microassault, which is most similar to old-fashioned racism, racial epithets. This is conscious and deliberate. The reason why there is some confusion about this is that the other two classes of microaggressions, which forms the bulk of our studies, are microinsults and microinvalidations, and these tend to be outside the level of awareness.

But when you talk about microaggressions, there’s a continuum from conscious, deliberate, all the way to being outside the level of conscious awareness and unintentional. What we find, the reason why we separate this, is that we find that those forms of microaggressions that are most outside the level of awareness tend to produce the greatest harm. For example, a person who is overtly racist towards me, I know where they’re coming from, I can deal with it directly.

But the insidious, unintentional microaggressions delivered by people who experience themselves as good, moral, decent individuals is more difficult to deal with because I’m thrown into a situation where I’m trying to determine, did what I think they meant really happen? Is it that I’m oversensitive, paranoid? And that type of psychological questioning leads to what we oftentimes call racial battle fatigue if we’re talking about racial microaggressions because they are there, and when we try to tell the individual what they’ve just said, why it was demeaning, they deny that was their intention.

Mills: Right, right.

Sue: And they tend to say, you’re just oversensitive. That wasn’t my intention at all. If I accept their explanation, the danger is that I deny my own experiential reality and accept their explanation. And this is what we call the clash of racial realities, where racial realities differ between people of color and well-intentioned white Americans who might, like I was saying, see themselves as really quite the type of individuals that would stand against racism.

Mills: What are the physiological and psychological effects of experiencing microaggressions over time? And for some people, of course, it’s their entire life.

Sue: Yes.

Mills: What happens to you internally, externally? How does it manifest in your everyday life if you’re experiencing microaggressions constantly?

Sue: Okay. That’s an excellent question because this also leads to the thought where people believe that the everyday rudeness or incivilities that the people with power and privilege experience are harmless, trivial and insignificant. Maybe the clerk that mistreated a white individual just had a bad day—just let go of it, it’s not that big of issue. However, there are major differences between racial microaggressions and everyday incivilities that are not group-based. For example, as a racial ethnic individual, a person of color, the difference is that I experience microaggressions from the time I awaken in the morning until I go to bed at night, from the time—people of color experience racial microaggressions from the time they are born until they die.

And they’re constant and cumulative in that—if I was to give an example, which you did at the beginning, about as an Asian American, I oftentimes get complimented for speaking good English. They’ll say, Professor Sue, after I give an address, they’ll say, Professor Sue, that was really interesting. I just want to compliment that you speak excellent English. Now, that appeared to the person, that’s a compliment. But to me, I received what I consider a meta-communication, which is shock and surprise that a perpetual foreigner, someone who looks Asian, could speak that good English. It denies a fact that I was born and raised here. Now if you talk about that alone, then a person will say, yeah, maybe the person misunderstood, but Derald, that’s not a big thing. Let go of it. They don’t realize that might be a microaggression, the third one that I have experienced that day with the same theme, that you are not a true American. And so they become cumulative. Microaggressions are also constant reminders to targeted groups and individuals that they are second class citizens.

They are also reminders of past historic injustices. For example, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, their taking away of land from the indigenous peoples of our society, the enslavement of Blacks. All of these are past historical trauma that are conjured up, and as a result, they have a major impact upon both the psychological and physical wellbeing of individuals. When we, interrupt me if I’m going on and on, but when we published our first major taxonomy on microaggressions, and this was in the American Psychologist in 2007, many of my White brothers and sisters, colleagues, wrote letters into the editor. And much of what they were saying was that microaggressions are macrononsense.

Mills: Wow.

Sue: That they are harmless, they’re no different, like I was saying, between an ordinary insult and that we were portraying people of color as weak and overly sensitive and so forth. But since then, there has been, what is it, meta studies that have been conducted indicating the major harmful impact, increased anxiety in targets, increased depression, lowering of psychological wellbeing when microaggressions occur. And also we find that microaggressions affect a person’s ability to learn and to problem solve, affects a person’s ability to perform well in job related opportunities. One of my colleagues at Yale University, Jack Dovidio, has done a lot of studies on aversive racism and he finds what I call racial microaggressions directed at employees of color, that it drastically diminishes their ability to perform in a work related environment. All of these things add up to effects on psychological wellbeing, physical wellbeing, education or ability to learn in the classroom and also work related issues. But what we find is that microaggressions also account for disparities in employment, healthcare, and education, that they all have this particular impact.

Mills: That’s pretty devastating. Let’s switch for a moment then and talk about how to respond to microaggressions, because sometimes people might recognize that a microaggression has occurred, but in the moment they don’t know what to say or what to do about it. And you and your colleagues have developed what you call microinterventions for those moments. Can you talk about those and what can people do? How can they help?

Sue: Well, first of all, one of the things that when we first started our studies on microaggressions and worked with groups of individuals, regardless of their race, culture, and ethnicity, the constant question that we had was that, yes, we understand microaggressions, but what do we do? What do we do about it when it occurs in the moment? And this question came not only from targets, but from White allies and by bystanders or onlookers. When you’re made aware that a moral transgression has occurred, most of the people we found felt paralyzed. They didn’t know what to do. We refocused our study to microinterventions or antibias strategies that targets, allies and bystanders can engage in to disarm and dismantle microaggressions.

And we went to the literature, conducted a number of in-depth interviews with groups about what did they do when this happened? For example, when you get complimented for speaking good English, when you are asked, “Where were you born?”

When a Black subway rider enters the subway system, why is it that everyone moves away from them? Why is it that only—when you enter the subway, you’re tired and you want to sit down that the most likely empty seat is next to a Black passenger? Now, these are microaggressions and microaggressions can be verbal, nonverbal, or environmental. The nonverbal communication by virtue that I’m not going to sit next to a Black rider is that there’s something wrong with you. You’re dangerous. We don’t associate with people like you. Now, we begin to ask individuals, “When this happens to you, what do you do or what have you done?” And we came out with literally hundreds of different actions that can be taken. The problem was that there was no organization.

We began to do what we called a secondary factor analysis. We grouped all the antibias strategies that were similar into categories, and we came up with four different categories in which microinterventions fell into. The first category was to make the invisible visible. As long as you’re unaware as a perpetrator that you have engaged in a microaggression, you’re not going to change because you simply aren’t—well, I’m complimenting you for speaking good English, I mean, why are you getting so upset? Making the invisible visible was one strategy.

The second strategy was to educate the perpetrator and there were a lot of responses that were aimed at that. The third category was to disarm the microaggression. And what we found was that oftentimes microaggressions are so unpleasant to begin with, the immediate action is that you have to stop it. And the last category was to seek outside support and validation. When microaggressions occur, there is oftentimes a power differential between the perpetrator and targeted individuals or group.

For example, in academia, one of the things that we found when looked at the classroom, and this is something very fascinating. When we did original studies on microaggressions, our intent was to find out microaggressions that had occurred within the classroom between students. What we discovered was that the most frequent microaggressions came from the professor. And you can also talk about this in the world of work that managers, supervisors—what happens when the microaggression comes from someone who holds status, power and privilege over you? There are oftentimes consequences. That last category, seeking outside support and help, was important here. Under each of these four strategies, we identified about half a dozen or more tactics. For example, making the invisible visible.

And we came out with one of them was make the microaggression explicit. When the person makes a microaggressions, point it out. “That was a stereotype, that was a microaggression.” And doing that, it may cause some discomfort, but you are not saying that you as an individual are racist, but what you’ve just said or done is a microaggression should we continue with it there on. There are other ways to make the microaggression more visible and explicit. Several years ago, I was working in the school system with African American teenage girls and we would talk about microaggressions and without even prompting, they could name a number of them.

Mills: Sure.

Sue: One of the most common ones that they experience was a well-intentioned White classmate coming up to them and saying, “You’re pretty for a Black girl,” or “You’re pretty for a colored girl,” or something of that nature. And we begin to talk about how do we respond to that and make the person maybe know what’s happening here? And they were laughing because they came up with a response that was a superb example of a microintervention. Janet, a White student, goes up to Aisha, a Black student, and says, “You’re pretty for a Black girl.” Aisha says to Janet, “Thank you, Janet. You’re pretty for a White girl.” Now, the microaggression here is that you’re pretty for a Black girl is that most Blacks aren’t pretty, aren’t attractive, that you are an exception.

Mills: Right.

Sue: And by reversing that, what they found was that many of their White classmates when confronted with that would step back. And I’ve learned, for example, that someone comes up to me, usually a well-intentioned individual and says to me, “Dr. Sue, you speak excellent English.” I will say, “John, thank you. You do too.”

Mills: Yeah.

Sue: Now that reversal, now there’s a lot of these strategies that are used that aren’t necessarily aimed at confronting. And for those of you who are interested, we have publications and books. In fact, I have this microaggression toolkit. I think it was written up in giving specific examples under each of those categories. Again, there are many, but the most basic aspect of educating the perpetrator is separating out intent from impact. Oftentimes when you point out a microaggression, the person will say, “But that wasn’t my intent at all.”

Mills: Right.

Sue: And if you take the person on the battleground in terms of intent, you’ve lost the battle because you can never prove intent, but you can do something that has changed the field of where the discussion occurred and say something like, “I know you meant that to be funny, but it really hurt Joanne,” or “It really hurt such and such. I know you mean well, but think about how your words did—.” What you’ve done is you’ve separated out the intent from the impact so that you can now talk about the impact and get the person to work back in terms of understanding what might’ve gone on. Microinterventions are not meant to be long involved actions. They are meant to stop the, almost like in a game of a chess, you check the behavior. And it can be as simple in terms of disarming the microaggression as something like, you know how when people step on your toes, you say “Ouch.”

Mills: Right.

Sue: And so someone says that those people are always so lazy, ouch. It’s a response you make. It does several things. It may be simple, but it indicates to the person who made the microaggression your disagreement and the fact that it isn’t the way you perceive the situation. You don’t have to get into a long, elaborate argument with the individual. And the last type of microintervention is a category that I indicated, seeking outside support and help. Oftentimes there may be major consequences to you pointing out a microaggression, especially if there is a difference in status and power relationships. To the professor who makes a microaggression, to point it out, well, you may get a bad grade, you may be labeled a troublemaker. If you’re an employee and a manager makes a microaggression, well, pointing it out can cost you that promotion, that raise or perception that you have.

This is where you have to begin to think about what social supports and allies do I have that can help me address this situation. If you’re an employee of color and a White manager makes a microaggression against you, and you note that this person is not going to be receptive to you pointing that out, you can go to another manager who you have a good relationship with, maybe enlist the aid of that person in order to have them have a discussion. But there are many things, and this last strategy that oftentimes people of color and women tend to point out is that it’s a sign of weakness on my part. And I have to convince them that—fight your battles when you’re ready and use the strategies that are available to you. Don’t think about you betraying your sense of integrity.

And so we have found that when we put people through this training—and training has to be done because simply pointing out what can be done isn’t enough, it has to become a part of the person’s repertoire of responses that occurs automatically because microaggressions are so automatic, occur so quickly that by the time you consider what to do about it, it’s over. And so however, if a person is telling a racist joke and getting to the punchline, if you can immediately say, “Whoa, let’s not go there,” “Danger, quicksand ahead,” or “I’m not sure I want to hear the punchline” and walk away, it is so powerful because it puts that jokester on guard. But microaggressions oftentimes occur in front of a large audience. If everyone remains silent, that silence may communicate to bystanders or onlookers that it’s okay. But if you intervene, you tell people, “I don’t think it’s okay.” And you model to other individuals of what actions can be taken to end, disarm, or stop the microaggression from occurring.

And when we studied microaggressions, we studied all the negative impact. We began to study microinterventions and we found positive—macropositive impact. For example, one of the things that are so detrimental to targets is a feeling of powerlessness, helplessness, and even self-flagellation. You should have said this, you should have done that. You’re a coward. However, when we teach them microintervention skills, we find that they feel empowered and their self-esteem and self-concept increases. We find the same thing with White allies. Now, a White person listening to a racist joke may disapprove of it, but they may not know how to deal with it. They too feel that they are acting inconsistently with their own values. However, when they engage in a microintervention, it validates their integrity and internal values. And with bystanders, when we teach them microinterventions, they increase what we call critical awareness, critical consciousness. Bystanders oftentimes don’t know that a microaggression has occurred. They would think, that’s just a compliment. That’s just a funny joke. But once you begin the training, they develop this awareness that begins to change the way they see the world and other people. And these are all positive events that happen.

Mills: In the last few years in particular, I think the discussion about microaggressions has moved out of academia and become part of a larger societal conversation about race and racism. Then there’s been some backlash, I think, to this whole idea. One criticism has been that focusing on microaggressions makes it more difficult for people to have open and honest conversations about race and ethnicity because they’re worried about unintentionally committing a microaggression. How do you respond to that?

Sue: I don’t believe it. Let me tell you why. One of them is that people of color have always had to remain silent. And part of free speech is the ability to point out microaggressions. And while it might have immediate impact on people of color, in essence feeling like I’m walking on eggshells is better than obliviousness and not acknowledging what is going on. And so what I honestly say is that the reason why you feel so self-conscious of what is going on is that your old ways of reacting and behaving, which have been harmful and detrimental, are no longer functional if you really want to have a free, open dialogue. The reason why you’re feeling so much difficulty is that you’ve got to learn new ways of talking about things in an open and non-defensive manner. And this goes directly to another series of research that we had, which is on race talk, the conspiracy of silence.

I did a book in a number of studies on it, and we find in some way that there already exists difficulties and White people acknowledging and talking openly about race. And the studies that we did was that why is it so difficult for people to openly and honestly dialogue on race? And we came up with four different layers that created. First of all, the exterior layer is that people are afraid. Well, people with power or privilege are most afraid of talking openly about race because they’re fearful that whatever they say or do will make them appear racist. They engage in what I call strategic colorblindness, or by pretending you don’t see differences, avoiding a racial topic, talking around the entire topic so that you won’t appear racist. The problem that social psychologists found was that by doing this, you engage in what you call rhetorical incoherence. That from the person who is taking protective strategies that they stammer, they stutter, they are obtuse, it makes them appear more racist.

When you ask someone how do you feel about interracial relationships and they talk around the topic, believe it or not, they appear more racist. That’s one layer that we work with individuals to get through, but then it’s a second layer, and I’m not sure I have time to talk about that. The second layer is the fear that you do harbor racial biases, that it challenges your image as being a good, moral, decent individual. And that is the scary thing for them that yes, you may be one that has stood against overt expressions of racism, but to suddenly not acknowledge the fact that you harbor stereotypes and biases shatters this image.

Mills: Right.

Sue: You’ve got to work that through. And then the third level that we found was this whole area of White privilege. That once you go through the first two levels, the third level is the challenge of the myth of meritocracy, that sometime through your own efforts and work, you’ve succeeded and you deny Whiteness and White privilege as the unearned benefits that made you start and move forward here. And the last level, I’m going quickly on this because I know we’re losing time here.

Mills: Yeah, yeah.

Sue: The last level is summarized in this statement that the ultimate White privilege is the ability to acknowledge your privilege and do nothing about it. This is a fourth level, which being non-racist is different from being antiracist.

Mills: Mm-hmm.

Sue: This is a work of Janet Helms that talks about you can go through all three of these levels, but still not take antibiased actions because of the fear and threat of the consequence that will come to you. And our research now really is looking at overcoming these fears and consequences.

Mills: Just to wrap up quickly, I want to ask you this because you’ve been working in this field for a long time. I want to know your impression.

Sue: Too long.

Mills: Your overall impression, are things moving in a positive direction or a negative direction? Can you tell?

Sue: What we’re witnessing now, and there’s a pendulum swinging back and forth beginning in the '50s to the '60s, the civil rights movement, that’s one way. And now the pendulum reversing. I mean, you’re asking me not just a scientific question, but a social political one. And let me give you my thoughts quickly on this. What we’re witnessing is an increase in overt expressions of bias, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia. And you have to understand what has happened here. The MAGA movement, Make America Great Again, tapped into a wellspring that many in the United States feared the changing demographics. That sometime between the years 2030 and 2050, people of color will become a numerical majority, and a way of life would be lost. What did the MAGA label implicitly promise? It was Make America White Again, make America again, a time where LGBT individuals were in the DSM and considered pathological. Make America, again, a world in which marriage is between a man and a woman. Make America, again, time where women knew their place and were not uppity. Now, that’s the meta communications going on here. And the battle that is being fought here in the culture wars, they call them, is something that is going to lead to what I think happened in the '60s and '70s when the demonstrations occurred in Newark, in Los Angeles.

And I am optimistic by nature, but also realize that the pain and hurt that is going to occur in the society may be a necessity to improve our society, but we’re in a major struggle right now, Kim.

Mills: Well, Dr. Sue, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting. I appreciate the work that you are doing. Thank you so much.

Sue: Okay, thank you.

Mills: You can read more about microinterventions and strategies to combat microaggressions in APA’s magazine, Monitor on Psychology. For links, visit our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org. You can also find previous episodes there or on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. 

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.