Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

The stuff that piles up and wears you down-microaggressions


photo Youdontactlike_zps4b6b345a.jpg

(photo: Kiyun)




Dr. Chester Middlebrook Pierce, Emeritus Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School put an academic name to racial stressors. He wrote about:

the effects of racism, first proposing the concept of racial microaggressions in 1970. Microaggression usually involves “demeaning implications and other subtle insults against minorities”. He described these subtle nonverbal exchanges as ‘put-downs’ of blacks by offenders and suggested they may also play a role in unfairness in the legal system as microaggressions can influence the decisions of juries.

Most of us are aware of racism. There are big, flaming in your face, cross-burning, spewing, blatantly racist moments in time that almost everyone you know can see, and react to. Those are easy-almost. But the things that wear at you, tear at you, day-in-day-out tend to be smaller, shrug-offable, till they pile up, drop by drop, irritation by irritation.

Those of us who are forced to bear with them and bear up under them rarely get a chance to be vindicated, and are often chastised for being “overly sensitive” or “imagining it all” when we finally speak up to put a stop to yet another “diss” or put-down.

For visual representations, take a look at 21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis


Photographer Kiyun asked her friends at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus to “write down an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.”




There are too many pictorial examples to post here so I’ve only sampled a few.




photo canyousee_zps1fd072ac.jpg

photo gaveaspeech_zps873d82fd.jpg

photo smelllikerice_zps423603f6.jpg

photo soundwhite_zpsaae9619b.jpg

Dr. Derald Wing Sue, author of Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life, explains what a microaggression is, how it manifests itself, how it impacts people, and what can be done to address it.


He illustrates microaggressions involving ethnicity, gender, and race. He explains that it is a world view of exclusion and inclusion.

Simply stated, microaggressions are brief exchanges that send denigrating messages to marginalized groups. Any group can be guilty of delivering microaggressions, but the most painful and harmful ones are likely to occur between those who hold power and those who are disempowered. Often times, microaggressions are unintended or come from a place from good intentions. For instance, a professor who says to a student who speaks with a foreign accent “I’m impressed you speak English so well” is guilty of a microaggression because although the professor means that statement as a compliment, the statement assumes that people with accents do not normally speak English well. A further example would be a female physician who is wearing a stethoscope being mistaken as a nurse, with the underlying assumption being that women in hospitals are more likely to be nurses.

He points to things each of us can do to combat it-learn from your own biases and fears, don’t be defensive, be open to discussion, and be an ally.

There are many more examples being collected and updated on the tumblr site “Microagressions: Power, Privilege and Everyday Life“.

About This Project

this project is a response to “it’s not a big deal” – “it” is a big deal.  “it” is in the everyday.  “it” is shoved in your face when you are least expecting it.  “it” happens when you expect it the most.  “it” is a reminder of your difference.  “it” enforces difference.  “it” can be painful.  “it” can be laughed off.  “it” can slide unnoticed by either the speaker, listener or both.  “it” can silence people.  “it” reminds us of the ways in which we and people like us continue to be excluded and oppressed.  “it” matters because these relate to a bigger “it”: a society where social difference has systematic consequences for the “others.”

but “it” can create or force moments of dialogue.  

~~~~~~~~~

This blog seeks to provide a visual representation of the everyday of “microaggressions.” Each event, observation and experience posted is not necessarily particularly striking in and of themselves. Often, they are never meant to hurt – acts done with little conscious awareness of their meanings and effects. Instead, their slow accumulation during a childhood and over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.

This project is NOT about showing how ignorant people can be in order to simply dismiss their ignorance. Instead, it is about showing how these comments create and enforce uncomfortable, violent and unsafe realities onto peoples’ workplace, home, school, childhood/adolescence/adulthood, and public transportation/space environments.

Knowledge and awareness are the first steps towards change. Let’s take those steps-together.

Cross-posted from Black Kos


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 24 Comments

24 comments

  2. JanF

    My daughter is Asian but she has not shared with me any racial comments that she has heard directed at her or her Asian friends (she has non-Asian friends also). But we live in a pretty progressive place and I suspect that once she leaves the shelter of our K-12 schools she will find some.

     

  3. bubbanomics

    smells like rice?

    married to a Chinese woman, i’ve become overly sensitive to the asian stereotypes as well as rather deeply exposed to the diversity of facial features, skin tones, and physical sizes of Asian peoples.  Many whites still hold the WW2 cartoon-japanese view of asians.

    sounds white?

    good heavens when will that go away.  A southern hick who did grad school at Brown, I had some funny experiences that gave me a small sliver of the stupidity that minorities must endure all the time.  I had colleagues tell me I had “a northern mind,” which I supposed was meant as a compliment.  I had a friend tell me “you may become a researcher someday, but I’ll always think of you as a southerner.”  for those four years I got a very small dose of what minorities in America face daily, and it really made me think about these issues much more than I had in the past.

    I’m also reminded of the issue of stereotype threat.  There’s pretty solid evidence that all of these microaggressions and macroaggressions build up to enormous influences on people.  from the wikipedia entry:

    In 1995, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson performed the first experiments demonstrating that stereotype threat can undermine intellectual performance.[4] They had African-American and European-American college students take a difficult verbal portion of the Graduate Record Examination test. As would be expected based on national averages, the African-American students performed less well on the test. Steele and Aronson split students into three groups; stereotype-threat (in which the test was described as being “diagnostic of intellectual ability”), non-stereotype threat (in which the test was described as “a laboratory problem-solving task that was nondiagnostic of ability”), and a third condition (in which the test was again described as nondiagnostic of ability, but participants were asked to view the difficult test as a challenge). All three groups received the same test.

    Adjusted for previous SAT scores, subjects in the non-diagnostic-challenge condition performed significantly better than those in the non-diagnostic-only condition, and the diagnostic conditions. In the first experiment, the race-by-condition interaction was marginally significant. However, the second study reported in the same paper found a significant interaction effect of race and condition. This suggested that placement in the diagnostic condition significantly impacted African-Americans compared to European-Americans.[4]

    Steele and Aronson concluded that changing the instructions on the test could reduce African-American students’ concern about confirming a negative stereotype about their group. Supporting this conclusion, they found that African-American students who regarded the test as a measure of intelligence had more thoughts related to negative stereotypes of their group. Steele and Aronson measured this through a word completion task. They found that African-Americans who thought the test measured intelligence were more likely to complete word fragments using words associated with relevant negative stereotypes (e.g., completing __mb as “dumb” rather than “numb”).[4]

    This makes me want to cry.  what have we done?  why can’t we start to get it right?

  4. HappyinVT

    I can safely say I have not and am genuinely surprised that folks still have these notions.

    Having said that we still see untold instances where people are judged even before being seen by their name.  I work with a guy whose daughter’s name is Shanice.  She is fourteen and already concerned about getting a job because people will assume she is a POC.  Her dad said you can tell when people who don’t know her call her name in a crowd because they are scanning the room for the black girl.  We still see comments even from folks on the Left who suggest that people should consider this when they name their children.  Uhhh no, how about people not prejudge anyone for any reason.

  5. Portlaw

    diary but would think that a microaggession or a macro is having someone on TV say that Santa is white. Holey moley, what about all those kids? Let’s face it, Santa looks just like their parents. Exactly like them. Talk about being beaten down. Or at least that’s my take.

  6. sricki

    to Dr. Sue’s work in a class I took a few years ago. We used Counseling the Culturally Diverse as our base text. It was a revelation to me. Thorough, insightful, and informative, it paints a picture of the United States and its citizenry that the majority culture tends to overlook — or ignore. I’m guilty of that too. Prior to the class, I was totally ignorant of many forms of covert discrimination, and even now, a lot of things probably go over my head. I will be the first to admit that I get tunnel vision and tend to be a bit oblivious to my surroundings. Obviously, I would like to think I’ve always known better than to commit the more egregious examples of microaggression, but I know that isn’t saying much.

    I can list off a lot of the obvious ones. I know not to refer to non-White persons as “articulate,” as some sort of bizarre congratulatory notion, which carries with it the racially charged subtext that when people of color sound intelligent, they are actually sounding white. Not to forget, of course, the ancillary implication that individuals who do not speak or behave in accordance with traditional white conceptions of “intelligent” speech and action… must, in fact, be ignorant. Kind of ironic, yeah?

    Excuse my language and bashing, but this is still a really fucked up country in a helluva lot of ways. It’s easy (but still unacceptable) for members of the majority culture — who are largely unaffected by the prejudice and discrimination that are part of the daily realities of persons of color — to miss “smaller” incidents. Microaggressions don’t register to whites as easily in a society where we have a loony tunes gooper spouting nonsense about Jesus and Santa’s legendary whiteness… on a “mainstream” national “news” network. Ignorance that stark and flagrant casts a shadow over the everyday occurrences that are, in the long run, probably more harmful. I mean, at least Megyn Kelly’s drivel has a kind of tragicomedy quality to it. …Kinda. The solution for all that? A lot of us need to pay more attention, for one thing.

    Thanks for the diary, Denise. Informative and poignant as always.  

Comments are closed.