The model minority stereotype is often dismissed as a “compliment” but creates real harm for Chinese Americans and Asian Americans more broadly. New data from the 2025 State of Chinese Americans survey reveals Chinese Americans who regularly encounter these assumptions report 68% more psychological distress than those who face no discrimination at all. These seemingly positive assumptions mask significant disparities—and the harm compounds.   

Join Committee of 100 for the third installment of our 2025 State of Chinese Americans webinar series, featuring new survey data on how these “positive” stereotypes are associated with measurable psychological distress and mask significant mental health disparities within Asian American communities. Derald Wing Sue, a pioneering researcher on racial microaggressions and Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University, and Emma Zang, a State of Chinese Americans researcher and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University, will unpack why this stereotype persists, who it hurts most, and what practitioners and policymakers can do differently. 

This webinar is for anyone who has heard the model minority stereotype and wants to learn more about its consequences. Attendees will come away with new survey data and a deeper understanding of how this stereotype shapes mental health, public attitudes, and institutional blind spots, and practical guidance for more culturally responsive engagement with Asian American communities. 

Derald Wing Sue
Professor of Psychology and Education
Teachers College, Columbia University

Derald Wing Sue is Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, and served as a training faculty member with the Institute for Management Studies and the Columbia University Executive Training Programs. He was the Co-Founder and first President of the Asian American Psychological Association, past presidents of the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race (Division 45) and the Society of Counseling Psychology (Division 17). Sue is a member of the American Counseling Association, Fellows of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and past member of the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology.

Sue can truly be described as a pioneer in the field of multicultural psychology, multicultural education, microaggression theory, psychology of racial dialogues, multicultural counseling and therapy, and psychology of racism/antiracism. 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 marginalized populations and multicultural psychology. He is author of nearly 200 scholarly publications, 23 books, and numerous media productions. In all of these endeavors, his commitment to multiculturalism has been obvious and his contributions have forced the field to seriously question the monocultural knowledge base of its theories and practices.

Emma Zang
Associate Professor of Sociology
Yale University

Emma Zang’s research interests intersect at the nexus of health and aging, family demography, and inequality, employing advanced data science and statistical tools. Her scholarship has primarily dealt with how families shape inequality in the United States and China. This focus has led her to study: how intra-household dynamics shape inter-household inequality; how family policies, including marriage laws and flexible work arrangements, mitigate or exacerbate gender inequality; how early-life family experience affects later-life health; and, finally, how family affects the aging experience.

She also develops and evaluates statistical methods to model trajectories and life transitions, aiming to understand health disparities from a life course perspective. Her research primarily focuses on employing Bayesian approaches to: modeling trajectories; integrating multiple data sources; and constructing multi-state life tables using high-dimensional survey data. Additionally, her work evaluates classic demographic and sociological methods, including the Age-Period-Cohort Intrinsic Estimator and the Diagonal Mobility Model.

Her work has appeared in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Population and Development Review, Psychological Methods, and JAMA Internal Medicine. Multiple of her projects have been funded by the National Institute of Health.

Her research has received media coverage from over 100 outlets in the United States, China, South Korea, India, and Singapore. She is a Butler-Williams Scholar and an IMPACT Faculty Scholar of the US National Institute on Aging, and a Next Generation Leader of the Committee of 100. Her work has received multiple academic awards from the American Sociological Association, the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility, IPUMS USA, the Southern Demographic Association, and the Social Science History Association.