The Ethics of Microaggression

Regina Rini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351762892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Slips of the tongue, unwitting favoritism, and stereotyped assumptions are just some examples of microaggression. Nearly all of us commit microaggressions at some point, even if we don't intend to. Yet over time a pattern of microaggression can cause considerable harm by reminding members of marginalized groups of their precarious position.

The Ethics of Microaggression is a much needed and clearly written exploration of this pervasive yet complex problem. What is microaggression and how do we know when it is occurring? Can we be held responsible for microaggressions and if so, how? How has social media affected the problem? What role can philosophy play in understanding microaggression? Regina Rini explores these highly topical and controversial questions in an engaging and fair-minded way, arguing that an event is a microaggression precisely because it causes a marginalized person to experience an ambiguous encounter with oppression. She illustrates her argument with compelling examples from media, politics, and psychology and explains the significance of essential concepts, such as media representation, reparative renaming, and safe spaces.

The Ethics of Microaggression explains what microaggression is and offers strategies for combating it. Assuming no prior knowledge of the topic or philosophy, it demystifies a controversial and extremely important topic in clear language. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time and for students in philosophy, gender studies, race theory, disability theory, and social and political philosophy.

1 Microaggression basics

There is a lot of confusion around how people use the word ‘microaggression’. Some people use it as a synonym for any sort of insult or rudeness. Other people restrict its use to cases of bigotry: racism, sexism, etc. People disagree about which acts are too big to be ‘micro’, and whether an intentional slur can count. Before we can dig into ethical analysis, we need to get clearer about the concept itself. We will do that over this chapter and the next. This chapter has two goals. First, to look back at the history of the ‘microaggression’ concept, from its coinage in 1970 to contemporary psychology. Second, to address several central questions about microaggression, to head off confusions and challenges before we get to issues of moral responsibility.

Chester Pierce and the ways of aggression

By the age of 40, Chester Pierce was a tenured Harvard Professor of both Medicine and Education. He led a major study of the psychological effects of extreme environments, traveling to Antarctica to observe soldiers enduring six months of night. He had become a leading figure in psychological research – not an easy thing for a Black man in 1960s America.¹ Yet for all his professional success, he noticed a frustrating pattern in the classroom.

Often after class, a white student would approach with some suggestions for Pierce: how he should restructure the discussion, when he should hold extra meetings, even how to arrange the chairs in the room. To Pierce, these interactions had a subtext. The white student, perhaps without fully realizing it, was pushing back against a Black man in authority. These requests were a subtle reminder that, while Pierce might stand at the front of the classroom, it was the white students who expected to be in charge.

Reflecting on these encounters, with the clinical distance of a professional therapist, Pierce wrote:

One could argue that I am hypersensitive, if not paranoid, about what must not be an unusual kind of student-faculty dialogue. This I concede. What I cannot explain, but what I know every black will understand, is that it is not what the student says in this dialogue, it is how he approaches me, how he talks to me, how he seems to regard me. I was patronized. I was told, by my own perceptual distortions perhaps, that although I am a full professor on two faculties at a prestigious university, to him I was no more than a big black nigger. I had to be instructed and directed as to how to render him more pleasure!²

In 1970, Pierce published a paper called ‘Offensive Mechanisms’, describing the psychology underlying encounters like these. That paper gave us the word ‘microaggression’. Pierce needed a term that conveyed how some incidents of racial antagonism might seem small, but once properly understood are shown to play a role in large systems of oppression. It seems like such a small thing for the white student to tell Pierce how to arrange the chairs. But there is much more behind that interaction – in the student’s unconscious mind and in the flawed racial attitudes of the society that shaped such a mind.

Pierce’s inspiration came from a surprising source: football. He had theorized that racial inequality was rooted partly in aggressive actions by whites against Black people. To study aggression, he might have done research on laboratory animals, or perhaps among the era’s campus radicals. But he wanted to learn how a person gets trained to become an effective aggressor. So when the autumn came, he signed up to be an assistant line coach for Harvard’s freshman football team.

Twenty years earlier, Pierce himself had played for Harvard. In 1947, only a few months after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Pierce did the same for southern college football. Until then, northern teams left Black players behind when they went south. But when Harvard came to play the University of Virginia, Pierce’s coach insisted that his senior tackle take the field. Though Virginia relented, and the game itself went well (especially for the home team, who won by 47 points), there were some difficulties in segregated Charlottesville. Pierce was told he could not use the main entrance of the dining hall. So the entire Harvard team insisted on accompanying him through the service door.³

Two decades later, as professor and coach, Pierce learned quite a bit from his season as a trainer of field warriors. Effective offense requires ‘cunning guile and ruthless artfulness’, hiding one’s play behind a screen of distracting motion, all while probing the defense for weakness.⁴ Training aggressors involves repetition of maneuvers, so that on game day they flow like second nature – no need to stop and think. Small changes, like the replacement of a brush block with a reverse body block, could have huge effects on success.

And, most importantly, the cumulative operations of a good offense are often so subtle as to be invisible to nearly everyone. One day, Pierce stood with the head coach while they watched two players practice a blocking maneuver. At the end of the play, the head coach turned to yell at a third player, who had been out of sight the whole time. The coach told the player what he’d done wrong, showed him a more effective positioning, and ran the play again. This time it worked. Pierce was amazed: how did the head coach know what the third player was doing wrong while he was paying attention to the other two? The coach explained that he didn’t need to watch; he could tell what the player had done from where and how the player was standing at the end. This mechanism was invisible to Pierce, and to the player himself, but to an expert like the coach its operations were plain.

Pierce returned to his research with these insights about aggression: done well, it is subtle, acquired through repetition and small adjustments, and plays out in ways that are invisible even to its enactors. Effective aggression isn’t a loud display, like animals rattling cages. It is sneakily methodical, setting opponents off guard without their being able to see exactly what has been done to them.

These lessons, Pierce decided, were “applicable to both the football warrior-in-training and the schoolboy bigot-in-training”. If racism is a team sport, the white team had worked out an especially good training program. “Just as the skillful coach teaches his charge certain rules about the offense, the society is unrelenting in teaching its white youth how to maximize the advantages of being on the offense toward blacks”.⁵

This thought allowed Pierce to explain how white people, like his advice-dispensing student, could be acting out gestures of white supremacy while sincerely believing themselves innocent of racism. He started from the familiar psychological concept of a ‘defense mechanism’: people subconsciously act out forms of evasion or separation that keep them from honestly confronting unwanted information about themselves. Couldn’t there also be ‘offensive mechanisms’ – similarly below conscious awareness, and similarly aimed at preserving some aspect of the person’s self-perception, but enacted against other people? Subtle put-downs, quick dismissals, presumptuous advice-giving: all ways that whites can unthinkingly push the sense of their superiority, trained into them by a racist society, onto the Black people they encounter.

This last point is key. As Pierce came to see it, racism often accomplishes its aims with the distant influence of a veteran coach, his players running their aggressive maneuvers with the effortlessness that comes from intense practice:

[T]he culture makes offensive mechanisms automatic and perhaps almost obligatory on the part of whites. These mechanisms may be seen as conscious, unconscious, or pre-conscious. But to the black, the salient feature is that offensive mechanisms seem automatic. They are ever able to define for whites the way of inter-personal activities with blacks.⁶

The automaticity of prejudice, Pierce thought, explains why whites and Blacks had such different experiences of racial reality. If white superiority is automatic, unthinking, then of course whites will often fail to see their own complicity in bringing it about. But the targets of racism, endlessly jostled by minutely aggressive pushes and pulls, cannot fail to see what it all adds up to. Small things accumulate, Pierce decided, and understanding something as vast as racism could require careful attention to the smallest personal interactions. Hence, the new term:

Most offensive actions are not gross or 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 in justice 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 micro-aggression, as opposed to a gross, dramatic, obvious macro-aggression such as lynching. The study of micro-aggression by whites and blacks is the essential ingredient to the understanding of in what manner the process of interactions must be changed before any program of action can succeed.⁷

Microaggression gets a little bigger

Chester Pierce died in 2016, after decades of influential work in psychiatric theory. He continued to develop the idea of microaggression across several later publications.⁸ But it took the work of several other theorists, building on Pierce’s initial insights, to develop ‘microaggression’ into a concept with an impact beyond academic psychiatry.

One of the most important was Mary Rowe, an expert in organizational psychology who has spent decades guiding universities and corporations on achieving fairness for their people. Rowe’s work began at MIT in the 1970s, where she gathered hundreds of stories of women encountering sexist barriers to career advancement. Her 1970s articles acknowledge Pierce’s influence but develop her own concept: ‘micro-inequity’. A micro-inequity is a “destructive, but practically speaking non-actionable, aspect of the environment”.⁹

The word ‘non-actionable’ is a clue to Rowe’s interest in the legal aspects of human resource management. You cannot (typically) bring a lawsuit about micro-inequities, because they are too small or diffuse to be documented to the satisfaction of legal standards of evidence. Yet something can be harmful even if the harm isn’t easily demonstrated to judges and juries. For example, Rowe found that young female academics were often accidentally left off lists of those invited to dinner with influential visiting speakers. Rowe did not have to assume such ‘accidents’ were less-than-accidental. Even if they were genuine mistakes, the point remains: their systematic impact made it harder for women to advance in professional academia.

Rowe seems to take micro-inequity as a more general concept than microaggression; she says microaggressions are a type of micro-inequity, characterized by their insulting or hostile character. But many of the basic ideas are the same. We can hear again Pierce’s worry about sneaky offense when Rowe writes: “It is hard to deal with micro-inequities because each one by itself, appears trivial. Because the victim finds it hard to be sure what happened. Because we are all so us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Microaggression basics
• 2 All in the eye of the beholder?
• 3 Collective harm and individual blame
• 4 Agency problems: Ignorance and lack of control
• 5 Proleptic blame
• 6 How to do better
• 7 Uptake failure and dismissal
• 8 Skillful blame and social media chaos
• Conclusion: Justice for an imperfect world
• References
• List of examples and thought experiments
• Index