Microaggressions
“I do not use ‘microaggression’ anymore...A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor...Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.”
Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 14 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Microaggression. This is one of the most common topics I have been asked to write about or discuss over the past few months because microaggressions are so incredibly common. What makes microaggressions different from other rude actions or comments? They're something very specific: the kinds of remarks, questions, or actions that are painful because they have to do with a person's membership in a group that's discriminated against and because they are rooted in stereotypes. A key part of what makes them so disconcerting is that they happen casually, frequently, and in everyday life. Let’s get into it!
Key Terms
Microaggressions: A subtle, often unintentional, form of prejudice. Rather than an overt declaration of racism or sexism, a microaggression often takes the shape of an offhanded comment, an inadvertently painful joke, or a pointed insult.
Microassaults: Conscious and intentional discriminatory actions: using racial epithets, displaying white supremacist symbols—swastikas, or preventing one's son or daughter from dating outside of their race.
Microinsults: Verbal, nonverbal, and environmental communications that subtly convey rudeness and insensitivity that demean a person's racial heritage or identity. An example is an employee who asks a co-worker of color how he/she got his/her job, implying he/she may have landed it through an affirmative action or quota system.
Microinvalidations: Communications that subtly exclude negate or nullify the thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of color. For instance, white people often ask Latinos where they were born, conveying the message that they are perpetual foreigners in their own land.
Implicit Bias: The attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. They are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control and reside deep in the subconscious. The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages, early life experiences, the media and news programming.
Tokenism: The practice of doing something (such as hiring a person who belongs to a marginalized group) only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly.
Toxic Positivity: Positivity becomes toxic when it is implied that we should always look on the bright side at all times and not allow ourselves to feel difficult emotions. The downside of positivity culture is that it can vilify the normal range of human emotional experience. Toxic positivity undermines the pain of others. Example: We are all one human race, I don’t see color. Let’s focus on the positives instead of always talking about oppression.
