When you realise the vagueness and self-contradiction are the point, to maximise grievance mongering, you realise why the concept is so problematic. The fact that microaggressions are a self-fulfilling prophecy is precisely the objective.
Why a moratorium on microaggressions policies is needed
"Despite the good intentions and passionate embrace of this idea, there is scant real-world evidence that microaggression is a legitimate psychological concept, that it represents unconscious (or implicit) prejudice, that intervention for it works, or even that alleged victims are seriously damaged by these under-the-radar acts. It is entirely possible that future research will alter some of these verdicts. Until the evidence is in, though, I recommend abandoning the term microaggression, which is potentially misleading. In addition, I call for a moratorium on microaggression training programmes and publicly distributed microaggression lists now widespread in the college and business worlds...
Microaggressions have not been defined with nearly enough clarity and consensus to allow rigorous scientific investigation. No one has shown that they are interpreted negatively by all or even most minority groups. No one has demonstrated that they reflect implicit prejudice or aggression. And no one has shown that microaggressions exert an adverse impact on mental health.
I am hardly the first to raise questions regarding this body of research. Over the past few years in particular, the microaggression concept has been the target of withering attacks from social critics, especially – although not exclusively – on the right side of the political spectrum. These writers have raised legitimate concerns that concepts such as microaggression and trigger warnings (warnings to people regarding distressing material to come) along with so-called protective safe spaces can at times discourage controversial or unpopular speech, and inadvertently perpetuate a victim culture among aggrieved individuals.
My major concern is the rigour of the psychological science itself...
The term microaggression was coined by the psychiatrist Chester Pierce at Harvard University in 1970 to describe seemingly minor but damaging put-downs and indignities experienced by African Americans. Pierce wrote: ‘Every Black must recognise the offensive mechanisms used by the collective White society, usually by means of cumulative proracist microaggressions, which keep him psychologically accepting of the disenfranchised state.’
But it was not until 2007 that the microaggression concept began to filter into the academic mainstream. In an influential article published in American Psychologist, the counselling psychologist Derald Wing Sue at Columbia University defined microaggressions as ‘brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of colour’. Microaggressions can be verbal comments, for instance subtle racial slights; behaviours, such as ignoring minority individuals; or environmental decisions, including naming all buildings on a college campus after white individuals, or even former slave owners. Sue and his team have called microaggressors ‘perpetrators’, but I prefer the somewhat ungainly term ‘deliverers’ to avoid any connotation of intentionality or malevolence.
To Sue and his colleagues, microaggressions are pernicious precisely because they are usually ambiguous. Victims are typically trapped in a catch-22. Because they are uncertain of whether prejudice has actually been expressed, recipients frequently find themselves in a no-win situation. If they say nothing, they risk becoming resentful. Furthermore, they might inadvertently encourage further microaggressions from the same person. In contrast, if they say something, the deliverer might deny having engaged in prejudice and in turn accuse minority-group members of being hypersensitive or paranoid.
Sue and his team differentiated among three subtypes of microaggressions, based on observation. Microassaults, which are the most blatant of the three, are explicit racial derogations ‘characterised primarily by a verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name-calling, avoidant behaviour, or purposeful discriminatory actions’. They might include using racial slurs, drawing a swastika on someone’s door, or referring to an African American as ‘coloured’. In contrast to other microaggressions, microassaults are often intentional.
Microinsults are barbs and put-downs that impart negative or even humiliating messages to victims; they ‘convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person’s racial heritage or identity’. For example, an employer who says: ‘I believe that the most qualified person should get the job, regardless of race’ is delivering a microinsult, as is a teacher who fails to call on a minority student who raises her hand in class.
Finally, microinvalidations ‘exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person of colour’. According to Sue, a microinvalidation could be a white person informing an African American that ‘I don’t see colour’; it might also be an African-American couple receiving poor restaurant service and being told by white friends that they were oversensitive in interpreting this poor service as race-related.
Sue and his research team list a series of microaggressions that they say could be particularly dangerous, divided into categories: for example, the statement that ‘America is a melting pot’ falls under the category of ‘colour-blindness’ and ostensibly communicates the message that minority individuals should conform to majority culture. Saying ‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job’ falls under the category of ‘myth of meritocracy’, and is said to communicate the message that minorities have unfair advantage when applying for employment.
Intriguing as they are, Sue’s conclusions are really just theoretical conjectures based on information gleaned largely from focus groups, and are in no way backed up by rigorous data or experimental techniques. Despite this limitation, the past decade has witnessed the extension of the microaggression concept to other groups who historically have been the targets of prejudice and discrimination, including women; gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals; Asian Americans; Latinos; Muslim Americans and the obese. Virtually all of these extensions presume that the microaggression concept has already been validated and is well-established in African Americans – despite the fact that, by any standard of psychological science, this concept does not pass scientific scrutiny.
Microaggression, like most and perhaps virtually all psychological constructs, such as intelligence, extraversion and schizophrenia, is what philosophers term an open concept, characterised by intrinsically fuzzy boundaries, an indeterminate list of indicators, and an unclear inner nature. Open concepts are not necessarily problematic. To the contrary, they often allow researchers to explore a poorly understood phenomenon in an open-ended way.
As scientific knowledge progresses and information accrues, the concept can become less ‘open’. For example, in the days of the 19th-century Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel and even much later, the gene was initially a ‘wide open’ concept, understood only as a hypothesised unit of transmission of heritable traits. With the discovery of the structure of DNA, the concept became considerably more closed. At the same time, there is the risk of an open concept being so imprecisely defined and porous in its boundaries that it is not at all apparent where it begins or ends. When this is the case, concepts become ripe for abuse by advocates with different, even opposing, political agendas.
In the case of the microaggression concept, it is dubious whether its definition is sufficiently clear or consensual to permit adequate scientific progress. For example, it is not evident which kinds of actions constitute a verbal, behavioural or environmental indignity, nor what severity of indignity is necessary for an action to constitute a microaggression.
All this vagueness and ambiguity can lead to outright contradictions in what is or is not a slight. For example, both ignoring and attending to minority students in classrooms have been deemed to be microaggressions by some authors: one researcher called out ‘teachers ignoring the raised hands of Asian-American students in classrooms’ as a microaggression. Another regarded complimenting the student with a remark such as ‘That was a most articulate, intelligent, and insightful analysis’ as a microaggression. In still other cases, they have regarded both praising and criticising minority individuals as microaggressions. In one striking example, researchers solicited reports of supervisor microaggressions from 10 African-American graduate students in clinical and counselling psychology programmes. The authors identified both withholding criticism from supervisees and providing them with tough criticism as microaggressions.
Compounding this problem, microaggressions necessarily lie in the eye of the beholder. It is doubtful whether an action that is largely or exclusively subjective can legitimately be deemed ‘aggressive’. After all, referring to an action as aggressive implies at least some degree of consensus regarding its nature and intent. Take the statement: ‘I realise that you didn’t have the same educational opportunities as most whites, so I can understand why the first year of college has been challenging for you.’ If one person interprets the comment as patronising and hostile while another sees it as supportive, should it be classified as a microaggression?
The ‘eye of the beholder’ assumption generates other logical quandaries. In particular, it is unclear whether any verbal or nonverbal action that a certain proportion of minority individuals perceives as upsetting or offensive would constitute a microaggression. Would a discussion of race differences in personality, intelligence or mental illness in an undergraduate psychology course count? Or a dinner table conversation regarding the societal pros and cons of affirmative action? What about news coverage of higher crime rates among certain minority populations than among majority populations? It is likely that some or all of these admittedly uncomfortable topics would elicit pronounced negative emotional reactions among at least some minority group members.
The boundaries of the microaggression concept appears so indistinct as to invite misuse or abuse. For example, according to Sue’s team, ‘the fact that psychological research has continued to inadequately address race and ethnicity … is in itself a microaggression’. Although few would dispute that the field of psychology should accord greater emphasis to certain scientific questions bearing on prejudice and discrimination, the rationale for conceptualising this insufficient attention as a microaggression appears flimsy.
One major scholar in the field even regarded the statement ‘I don’t usually do this, but I can waive your fees if you can’t afford to pay for counselling’ as a microaggression. The University of California system informs faculty members that referring to the United States as a ‘land of opportunity’ constitutes a microaggression, presumably because many minority individuals are not afforded the same opportunities for success as majority individuals. At least one research team has even classified saying ‘God bless you’ following another person’s sneeze as a microaggression, presumably because it could offend nonreligious individuals. According to some expansive definitions of microaggressions, this article itself could presumably constitute a microaggression, as it challenges the subjective experience of certain minority-group individuals.
Given the fluid boundaries of the concept, in hindsight even statements that might appear to be explicitly anti-prejudiced have been interpreted as microaggressions. Sue’s team, for instance, analysed what the Arizona senator and then-presidential candidate John McCain said in response to an elderly white woman during a 2008 campaign stop in Minnesota. The woman said: ‘I can’t trust Obama … He’s an Arab,’ and McCain immediately grabbed the microphone to correct her. ‘No ma’am,’ McCain retorted, ‘he’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with … He’s not [an Arab]!’
While acknowledging that McCain’s defence of Obama was ‘well-intentioned’, the researchers dubbed it a ‘major microaggression’. According to Sue, McCain’s assertion that Obama is ‘a decent family man’ implicitly communicated the message that most Arab or Muslim males are not decent family men, as well as the message that were Obama in fact a Muslim (which he is not), it would have implied that he was somehow dangerous or at least unworthy of admiration.
Although these post-hoc interpretations of McCain’s comments are interesting and might be defensible, they are concerning. In particular, they raise the possibility that a vast number of statements can be retrospectively labelled microaggressions. For example, had McCain responded: ‘No ma’am, he’s not an Arab – but what would be wrong if he were?’ – which is the response that Sue said McCain should have given – some advocates could have contended that McCain was subtly intending to insinuate that Obama might indeed be a Muslim. Furthermore, Sue’s interpretation overlooks the possibility that McCain was merely responding to the affective gist of the woman’s comment – namely, that Obama is a bad and untrustworthy person – rather than to its literal content. In doing so, he effectively communicated his central point – namely, that although he disagreed with Obama on many things, he did not believe that Obama was trying to conceal or lie about his ancestry, or that Obama was a bad person.
Conversation demands precision, but in the realm of microaggression, ambiguity reigns. Indeed, the recipient of a microaggression always harbours the nagging question of whether it really happened. Sue himself says that many racial microaggressions are so subtle that neither target nor perpetrator might entirely understand what is going on. The deep ambiguity of the phenomenon means that these statements can give us more insight into the respondents’ personality traits, attitudes and learning history than anything else. Furthermore, without evidence that external observers can agree on the presence or absence of microaggressions, how can we know whether a given microaggression occurred or was merely imagined?
The idea of microaggression stands at loggerheads with swaths of social and cognitive science. As José Duarte, then a psychology graduate student at Arizona State University, and his research team observed in a widely discussed article, much of contemporary social psychology are characterised by embedded values – typically of a politically progressive slant. The problem arises when researchers are unaware of the extent to which their sociopolitical perspectives infiltrate their assumptions regarding scientific phenomena. ‘Values become embedded when value statements or ideological claims are wrongly treated as objective truth, and observed deviation from that truth is treated as error,’ write Duarte and colleagues. Widely accepted studies show that all of us, researchers included, are oblivious to many of our biases, and that the best means of combatting such biases is to collaborate with, or at least seek the input of, colleagues who hold differing and ideally offsetting biases.
The microaggression field, like much of psychology, lacks diversity of thought, and it shows. For instance, statements such as ‘everyone can get ahead if they work hard’ or ‘I believe that the most qualified person should get the job’ are seen as microaggressions, but they might also be endorsed by those with highly individualistic worldviews, no prejudice involved...
A compelling argument could be advanced that many putative microaggressions, especially microinvalidations, lend themselves to a myriad of potential interpretations, some of them largely malignant, others largely benign.
Moreover, many of the implicit messages posited by Sue and colleagues appear to reflect the distortion of mind that cognitive-behavioural therapists term mind-reading. In this scenario, individuals assume – without attempts at verification – that others are reacting negatively to them. Cognitive-behavioural therapists typically regard mind-reading as a subtype of the broader tendency of individuals to jump to premature conclusions...
Even the word ‘microaggression’ can lead us astray. It implies that statements are aggressive in nature. Yet, confusingly, microaggression advocates posit that such behaviours are typically unintentional. As a result, the root word ‘aggression’ in ‘microaggression’ is conceptually confusing and misleading. Essentially, all contemporary definitions of aggression in the social-psychological and personality literatures propose or at least strongly imply that the actions comprising this construct are intentional. From this perspective, the concept of an unintentional microaggression is an oxymoron.
Does it matter? Research suggests that it might, because the perception of intent is a critical correlate of, and perhaps contributor to, aggression. Specifically, social-cognitive research on hostile attribution of intent suggests that if individuals perceive aggressive intent, they are more likely to respond aggressively in turn. Hence, labelling ambiguous statements or actions as ‘aggressive’ might inadvertently foster aggression in recipients. And labelling certain statements or acts as ‘microaggressions’ could fuel anger and even overt aggression in recipients: this possibility should be examined in the lab...
One study includes such items as: ‘A White person failed to apologise after stepping on my foot or bumping into me’ and ‘At a restaurant, I noticed that I was ignored, overlooked, or not given the same service as Whites.’ Being passed over by a taxi driver for a white person has been listed as a microaggression. In a study of microaggressions experienced by African-American faculty members in counselling and psychology programmes, the researchers identified a student calling a professor by his or her first name as a microaggression.
Yet it is likely that virtually all individuals who have lived in a major city, regardless of their race, have at least once been passed over by a taxi driver for a white person, and that virtually all faculty members, regardless of their race, have at least once had a student address them by their first name. Without at least some information concerning the frequency of the events, it’s difficult to exclude the possibility that many microaggressions merely reflect everyday occurrences in the lives of both majority and minority individuals...
How do we know that offence taken at these comments derives from widespread social upset rather than the individual pain of the personalities who share the assumptions of microaggression researchers?
All this requires a hard and careful look. Numerous studies have revealed robust correlations between microaggressions and adverse mental-health outcomes, such as psychological distress, anxiety and depression, among minorities. Researchers have argued that the cumulative effects of microaggressions shorten life expectancy and even foster suicidal ideation, but where is the solid proof?...
Microaggressions should be the start of an open dialogue, not the end.
Telling someone: ‘What you just said is a microaggression. You offended
me and you have to stop’ is unlikely to be conducive to a productive
two-way conversation. In contrast, it could be a fruitful entry point
into a difficult but mutually enlightening discussion to say: ‘You
probably didn’t mean this, but what you said bothered me. Maybe we’re
both misunderstanding each other. I realise that we’re coming from
different places. Let’s talk.’"