The Conceptual Truncation of Racial Microaggressions
In 1970, Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce introduced the term “microaggression” in his essay “Offensive Mechanisms.” Reflecting on abusive behavior, Pierce writes:
Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly. Even though any single negotiation of offense can be considered of itself to be relatively innocuous, the cumulative effect to the victim and to the victimizer is of an unimaginable magnitude. Hence, the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a microaggression.
Sure, Pierce acknowledges, some abusive actions are glaringly gross and large scale. But most aren’t. Instead, they are the slights and put-downs we receive every day. Moreover, the cumulative effect of these violations takes a toll on victim and victimizer alike, leaving both bowed from the weight of evils and injustice.
In this essay and later work, Pierce developed the concept of a microaggression to account for subtle, quotidian forms of racism. Indeed, Pierce even argues that antiracists “must not look for the gross and obvious [forms of racism]. The subtle, cumulative mini-assault is the substance of today’s racism.”
Psychologist Derald Wing Sue has popularized a version of Pierce’s account of microaggression. For Sue, microaggressions are “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.” Whereas Pierce’s account didn’t explicitly mention group membership, Sue’s does. And Sue’s formulation emphasizes that his and Pierce’s accounts do not limit microaggressions to racial violations. Both authors offer theories that accommodate sex-based slights, for example.
Note, however, that Sue’s pithy definition omits the attention to victims and victimizers that Pierce’s comparatively bloated formulation provides. One finds similar omissions throughout recent presentations of microaggressions.
Consider one prominent example. In How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes the following about microaggressions.
I do not use “microaggression” anymore…I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.
What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse.
Grant Kendi’s swapping of “racial” for “racist” and “abuse” for “aggression.” Grant too Kendi’s emphasis on the traumatic nature of these subtle, everyday forms of racism on racialized minorities. Indeed, all this strikes me as wise or right. But it also strikes me as a conspicuous conceptual truncation of Pierce’s original account (and this apart from acknowledging the reduction that comes with speaking only of racial microaggressions). Kendi only describes the effects of racist microaggressions upon victims; he says nothing about victimizers. This is conceptual truncation.
Some will scoff at my voicing concern about the conceptual truncation of microaggression. For some, my concern bespeaks a failure to care sufficiently for the victims of these forms of racist abuse. I appreciate push back. And I respond by noting that my concerns follow from my commitment to the Church’s historic concern for how sins impact victims and victimizers. Toni Morrison gave race-conscious voice to this tradition in her book Playing in Darkness. Morrison writes:
A good deal of time and intelligence has been invested in the exposure of racism and the horrific results on its objects. There are constant, if erratic, liberalizing efforts to legislate these matters. There are also powerful and persuasive attempts to analyze the origin and fabrication of racism itself, contesting the assumption that it is an inevitable, permanent, and eternal part of all social landscapes. I do not wish to disparage these inquiries. It is precisely because of them that any progress at all has been accomplished in matters of racial discourse. But that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject.
Whereas Pierce’s formulation of microaggressions explicitly accommodated the effects of these racist slights on victims and victimizers, most current employments of the term he introduced do not. And if Morrison is right, it’s not only the therapists that Pierce mentioned that will suffer from this conceptual truncation.
