#i will huntt you down

[ilovebeatingmywife]

Doyou like my new lockscreen

no i dont 😕

[academicchaos]

Microaggression, Three Ways

(originally written as a speech)

How many of you have heard the saying, “I don’t see skin color.” or “America is a melting pot?” Pretty common sayings, yeah? Well, they’re also pretty common microaggressions.

University of Illinois Professors Harwood, Huntt, Mendenhall, and Lewis credit Black psychiatrist Chester Pierce for the term microaggressions. In 1978, in an effort to describe post-civil rights era race relations,  Dr. Pierce coined the term racial microaggressions, to mean “subtle, shocking, often ‘automatic’ and frequently non-verbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’ of Blacks by perpetrators.”

Over the years, microaggressions have been studied not only in terms of race, but also gender, sexuality, and disability. Minority and marginalized populations encounter microaggressions in almost every public sphere of life, from residence halls and classrooms, to workplaces and restaurants. But with so many people and so many spaces, how does one know when a microaggression has been committed?

The following three categories, microassaults, microinsults and microinvalidations will help to more easily identify the ways in which microaggressions function.

Let’s start with microassaults; this form of microaggression is the most comparable to good old fashioned discrimination. Like an assault, the attack is consciously meant to harm or oppress the target. But unlike the casually tossed racial slurs of the 50s and signs reading “Whites Only”, microassaults function when three conditions, as denoted by Professors Shelton and Delgado-Romero from the University of Georgia, are present.

The first condition is that there must be the assurance of anonymity, that the perpetrator’s identity won’t be linked to the act.

Second, the agitator has to feel safe, that they share the company of others who feel similarly prejudiced.

And third, the aggressor must have control over the situation, the ability to hide offensive beliefs. When control is lost, the blatant prejudice tends to slip out.

One day in Philly,  as I was walking down the sidewalk, day off from work, minding my own business, a cop car nearly hit me turning out of a lot. I scowled in his direction but didn’t say anything. The cop, who was Black, took it upon himself to lean out of his window to say to me “Lazy nigga, get a  job.” and then continued to trail me as I walked home.

In this experienced microassault, the offender’s goal was to intimidate and actively harm me in terms of threatening my safety and potentially my freedom. 

As a cop with the ability to drive away at any time, he had an assurance of  

1. anonymity and the hierarchical positioning to call me a liar if I were to report his actions.

2. safety due to the uniform linking him to others who may share many of his sentiments and 

3. control over the situation in that his Blackness would allow him a denial of racism. 

Because of these three conditions being enacted, this Philadelphia cop was able to perpetrate an intentional microassault against me.

Now, while a microassault is always intentional and conscious, that’s not necessarily the case with the next two categories of microaggressions.

Let’s take microinsults, which tend to be unconscious, unintentional, and the most difficult to grasp. They function by being “insensitive, rude, or inconsiderate of a person’s identity.”

For example, asking an Asian-American person, “Where are you from?” implies that they were not born in America. Telling a Mexican-American that they speak “English so well” also implies that their nationality, and perhaps citizenship, should be in question.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told that I am “articulate” or “well-spoken”. Seems like a compliment, right? What’s actually happened is that in telling me, a young Black male, that I am articulate, you’ve implied that I have somehow surprised you and appear to be an exception to the offensive assumption that the rest of my race is inarticulate.

Often, targets of microinsults who speak up or report such treatment, are dismissed as being overly sensitive. This very dismissal brings us to the third major category of microaggressions -- microinvalidations. Microinvalidations are subtle, often unintentional  “behaviors that minimize the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiences of targets” and considered by academics, including our aforementioned professors from the University of Georgia, to be the most dangerous of microaggressions. Why? Because microinvalidations allow for the erasure of culturally differing experiences.

Do you remember the first two examples from the beginning of this talk, “I don’t see color” and “The US is one big melting pot?” These are microinvalidations that erase and ignore the experiences of people of different cultures. When someone from a majority demographic says that they don’t “see skin color”, the minority culture is being told that their reality of getting tenure as a Black professor being exponentially more difficult, is incorrect or not actually related to the state of race relations in our country. Being told that the US is a melting pot erases the cultural differences that many people have worked hard to hold onto, from differences in religion to eating habits. The assumption that we are all culturally homogenous, culturally the same, invalidates experiences and erases the struggles and histories of generations, those very things which establish cultural identity.

Microaggressions are attacks on an individual’s cultural identity. It is a broad term that encompasses behaviors, verbal and non-verbal, intentional and unconscious, that tell a marginalized population that they are less than, deviant, intellectually flawed and ultimately unwelcome.

As I’ve said, being able to identify microaggressive incidents, the mishap made by the perpetrator, and their effect on the individual, can be a difficult task made more manageable by categorizing microaggressions in one of three ways --

as microassaults, (somebody yells faggot out their window as I drive by)

microinsults, (Oh, I just assumed I’d be working with a guy).

or microinvalidations, (assumptions of straightness.)

At this point, you may ask, well now that I can better identify microaggressions and understand more about how they function, what do I do with this information? That, my colleagues, is entirely up to you.

TKEW //  originally written 09.20.2016 // edited 08.14.2017