April 2014
Until this week, most Canadians knew nothing of microaggressions,
unless they got in a fight about whose turn it was to use the lunch-room
microwave. McGill student politician Brian Farnan helped change that with an
apology sent to the university’s 22,000 undergraduates for sharing a video that
had been doctored to portray U.S. President Barack Obama kicking down a door.
Responding to a formal complaint from a student, Mr. Farnan said he regretted
the “microaggression” of perpetuating a stereotypical depiction of black people
as violent. A backlash to the backlash followed, with one student calling the
whole affair ‘‘ridiculous.’’ The Post‘s
Graeme Hamilton has a look at how we got here:
Columbia University psychology professor Derald Wing Sue is considered the
leading expert in this emerging field. A 2007 American Psychologist paper on
which he was the lead author defined microaggressions as “brief and commonplace
daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or
unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights
and insults to the target person or group.” More recently the study of
microaggressions has expanded to include gender, sexual orientation and
disability.
If the offending words or actions are
unintentional, how can you be sure that you have been microaggressed? Couldn’t
it just be a mis-understanding?
Dr.
Sue, who is Asian-American, explores this question when relating an incident
that occurred to him on a mostly empty flight between New York and Boston. He
and an African-American colleague had been told to sit wherever they liked but
were then asked to move to the back of the plane for proper weight distribution.
A group of three white men who had boarded after them were allowed to stay in
their seats in the front.
“In
light of our everyday racial experiences, we both came to the same
conclusion: The flight attendant had treated us like second-class citizens
because of our race,” he wrote. After fuming for a while, he challenged the
flight attendant, who was white, and she replied indignantly, saying “I don’t
see colour! I only asked you to move to balance the plane.” Dr. Sue wrestled
with who was right but concluded he had experienced a microaggression. The
paper’s authors noted that psychological research “tends to confirm the
existence of unconscious racial biases in well-intentioned Whites” and concluded
that the disempowered are best placed to identify microaggression.
The
sanction issued by the Students’ Society of McGill University against Mr. Farnan,
who is white, appeared to follow the same logic. “The fact that a complaint did
come forward does prove that someone was harmed and did feel harm,” Joey Shea,
the SSMU executive member responsible for equity, said.
The
term was first coined by American psychiatrist Chester Pierce in the 1970s, but
it has recently become more popular among academics who argue that racism and
other types of discrimination have evolved from overt bigotry to more disguised
forms.
Students on many U.S. campuses have embraced the theory. Universities have
adopted policies for avoiding microaggression in the lecture hall, and web sites
have sprung up to catalogue incidents of microaggression.
Vivian Lu, a PhD student at Stanford University, is the co-founder of the
pioneering Microaggressions Project, a blog that publishes submissions from
microaggression victims. “I think college campuses are a space where everyone’s
the same age, everyone’s trying to understand each other, we all come from
different backgrounds,” Ms. Lu said. “Microaggression is a way to show that even
in these kind of ideal places where there’s a language of, ‘Anyone can come,’
‘We’re all equal,’ this kind of thing, our everyday interactions show we all
carry these ideologies with us.”
No.
Dr. Sue and his colleagues identify three subclasses: microassaults,
microinsults and microinvalidation. A microassault is an over act of racism,
such as using a racial epithet or displaying a swastika. Microinsults are
“subtle snubs,” such as asking a minority employee how he got his job or
avoiding eye contact with a black employee during a conversation.
Microinvalidation refers to comments that negate the thoughts or feelings
particular to a person of colour, such as telling a Latino couple who received
poor restaurant service not to be oversensitive.
Dr.
Sue and his co-authors offered dozens of examples, from asking someone of Asian
origin, “Where are you from?” (the assumption is that the person is a foreigner)
to a white woman clutching her purse when a black man passes. Microaggressions
can also exist in the environment, the authors say, for example a university
with buildings that are all named after rich, white, heterosexual men or an
overabundance of liquor stores in communities of colour.
Kevin Nadal, an associate professor of psychology at the City University of New
York, wrote this month on psychologybenefits.org about the toll microaggressions
– such as the expression “That’s so gay!” – take on LGBT people. “Many studies
have found that the more that people experience microaggressions, the more
likely they are to report symptoms of depression, psychological distress, and
even physical health issues,” he wrote.
Ms.
Shea of the SSMU acknowledged that it could be qualified a micro microaggression.
But the experts seem to agree that aggression is in the eye (or the ear) of the
recipient. “The worst thing that we can do is to deny that someone is hurt or
offended by something we said or did; in fact, invalidating their experience
could be considered a microaggression itself,” Mr. Nadal wrote.
National Post, with files from Sarah Boesveld, February 21, 2014.
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