The Backlash Is Not New
Dr. Derald Wing Sue on Fear, Fatigue, and the Long Arc of the Movement
I was speaking with Dr. Derald Wing Sue about his new book, Breaking the Deadly Dance of Racism, and I asked how he feels watching decades of civil rights progress get dismantled in real time. He acknowledged that it is painful to experience, and, he suggested that we put this backlash into a historical context.
Dr. Sue is a Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and his work has been cited more than 48,000 times. He has spent his career naming what others avoided naming. Over the past decade, I've worked with him closely to produce eLearning courses based on his work. He is a unique researcher who brings the data and his heart into his work.
Make America Great Again Is a Racial Project
Dr. Sue replied that the current political backlash isn't random. It isn't simply policy disagreement. It is a structural response to demographic change. The US is shifting and within 30 years or so, white people will be in the minority and People of Color will be a majority.
This shift is triggering fear inside systems and communities built on the assumption of permanent white dominance, that they will always be dominant. And that fear, he said, wants a return to a place women knew their place; where LGBTQ people were classified as pathological; where marriage was defined as between a man and a woman. Yes, a mythical MAGA place in the past where white men were dominant and everyone else knew their place.
Backlash Has Always Followed Progress
Dr. Sue reminded me that this backlash is not new. Every time we have made meaningful racial equity and social justice progress in this country, a counter-movement rose to reverse it. Reconstruction was followed by Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Act was followed by the War on Crime. The election of Barack Obama was followed by a coordinated normalization of open racial hostility in national politics.
The current moment is the same pattern at an elevated scale, but having that context doesn't make the harm less real.
Their Fear of Progress Shows Where True Power Lies
Dr. Sue said MAGA and those who comply with Trump's attacks on DEI and People of Color are not attacking us because we're powerless. They're attacking us because we have power. Our movements, our scholarship, our organizing, our growing numbers, all of it represents a genuine threat to the existing order. The ferocity of the response is proportional to the threat we pose.
Racial battle fatigue is a term that scholar William A. Smith introduced in 2003 to describe the cumulative effects of racial hostility. It likens the collective experiences of people of the global majority who are subjected to racial hostility to that of soldiers who experience combat stress. Dr. Sue acknowledged that the fatigue is legitimate. I have often heard from people who are engaged, or used to be engaged in the work of DEI, are exhausted at having to push so hard for small gains, or to hold onto small turf. So many of my clients have been fired or had their DEI positions closed and been moved into other departments.
He mentioned that younger people may feel like this is a total collapse because they came into their careers during a period of relative progress and weren't part of the previous push. Dr. Sue suggested we see this through the eyes of our ancestors. They refused to give in to the backlash of their era. Each of us carries that lineage. The movement is not the journey of one individual. It's the journey of all of us together.
Lastly, Dr. Sue warned that if you fight on your own, you will burn out. When you have others who are nurturing you, encouraging you to move forward, you can continue moving. So he suggested - Find your people. Stay involved. Be in community with like-minded people. That's one of my goals with this newsletter and my work at SunShower Learning.
About Dr. Derald Wing Sue
Dr. Derald Wing Sue is a Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is one of the most cited multicultural scholars in the United States. 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 mental health and multicultural psychology.
Dr. Sue and I worked together for more than a year to develop Disarming Microaggressions, an eLearning program built directly from his research. He is unique. He has the ability to speak about his personal experiences and also bring in the research he has done to make his points.
His most recent book draws together decades of research from social psychology, political science, and the psychology of racism to give people a framework for understanding how racial hierarchy perpetuates itself and how to interrupt it.
In my next post, I will report back on the webinar I hosted with Dr. Sue and his co-author, Dr. Spanierman.
