490 Ethnic Minorities
was that professionals need to feel competent, thus they will
practice in areas of competence and avoid areas of actual or
anticipated failure.
To implement an overall change, the director was awarded
a generous grant from NIMH for a three-year continuing ed-
ucation program for providing school mental health services
in schools with poor, ethnically and racially diverse students.
Concomitantly, the staff was redistributed so as to be more
equitably available throughout the city. The combination of
encouragement through training, mandate through agency
directive, and greater satisfaction for the professional
through practice of greater variety, resulted in a positive out-
come. The changes were favorably received by school
personnel and led to a fairer availability of help to all of the
city’s children.
The field of psychology has been a part of the country’s
whole, including its sad racial past. It is now only 81 years
since the first doctoral degree was awarded to an African
American, 136 years since the ending of slavery. The period
then and later has been earmarked by cruel discriminations
against African Americans, and the support of such oppression
by psychologists with bogus “science.” But as the number and
influence of African American and other ethnic minority
psychologists has grown, so too has psychology’s reach into
previously unserved communities, and its positive influences
on the community at large. A promising start?Organization Efforts by Asian Americans in Psychology
STANLEY SUEDuring the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, I was a graduate stu-
dent at UCLA intent on becoming a clinical psychologist treat-
ing patients with schizophrenia. At this time, I was exposed to
the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam
War. My consciousness was raised over the injustices and op-
pression faced by African Americans, Latinos, and Native
Americans. The ideas of Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez,
and Malcolm X were provocative and challenging. With re-
spect to Asian Americans, not much was known about the pop-
ulation. The prevailing belief was that Asian Americans were
successful in education and occupational status, relatively
unobtrusive, and free of problems. Yet, many of us who were
familiar with Asian Americans felt that most of the issues and
problems besetting other ethnic groups were applicable. Asian
Americans had suffered the same kinds of historical and con-
temporary mistreatment as other groups (e.g., discriminatory
laws, hate crimes, inability to become citizens). Other Asian
American students complained of ethnic identity conflicts,
feelings of marginality, and difficulties in adjustment.
It was during the last two years of my graduate work that I
became interested in the psychological study of Asian Amer-
icans and other ethnic minority groups. I began to read the
works of Gordon Allport, Tom Pettigrew, and Kenneth Clark
because there was little literature on Asian Americans. What
really peaked my interest in Asian Americans was Harry
Kitano’s article (1969) on Japanese American mental illness.
The effect of this article on me was profound. I was able to re-
late personally to the cultural analysis, the reluctance of Asian
Americans to use mental health services, and the problems in
the delivery of effective services. Although other psychologi-
cal research has stimulated me either intellectually or person-
ally, Kitano’s article did both. I felt that I could contribute
something to this area of research and began my career at the
Psychology Department at the University of Washington.
It was not easy to conduct research on Asian Americans.
One major problem was the lack of other Asian Americans in
the field of psychology and of researchers interested in this
population. For example, I was told that in 1971, I was the
only tenure track Chinese American faculty in an APA ac-
credited clinical psychology program in the United States.
Collegial support and stimulation from other researchers or
from other Asian Americans were largely unavailable. Unlike
today, APA conventions did not involve many ethnic minori-
ties in general or Asian Americans in particular.
Those of us interested in Asian American research tried to
collaborate with other ethnic minority scholars. I was able to
work with Carolyn Attneave, Guy Seymour, Amado Padilla,
and Art Ruiz, to name a few. The alliances with other ethnic
scholars were very important in helping to forge collaborative
relationships and friendships. We were able to define ethnic is-
sues and to find commonality and differences in the issues fac-
ing Asian Americans as opposed to other ethnic groups.
Fortunately, my brother Derald, who was also a psycholo-
gist, had similar research interests. We could test ideas out on
each other, and my first publication was a coauthored paper
(Sue & Sue, 1971). At the University of Washington, where I