In March of 2013 Oberlin College canceled classes after a student reported seeing someone on campus wearing Ku Klux Klan regalia. Our initial thoughts were that there was unlikely to be a KKK chapter at Oberlin College, a private liberal arts school with a reputation for progressive activism. Indeed, the apparent Klansman later turned out to be a woman wrapped in a blanket (Dicken 2013). The sighting occurred after racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise offensive messages had been posted on campus during the previous few weeks. These were also not what they seemed, as the culprits were not racists, but two progressive students attempting to get a reaction from the community (Ross 2013).
Reading about this from a distance, we found it puzzling that the Oberlin College community was so ready to believe that virulent racists lurked among them. Then we came across something even more remarkable: the Oberlin Microaggressions website, which invited submissions from those who “hear racist, heterosexist/ homophobic, anti-Semitic, classist, ableist, sexist/ cissexist speech.” The aim of the site was to “demonstrate that these are not simply isolated incidents, but rather part of structural inequalities” (Oberlin Microaggressions 2017). Again some students seemed to think Oberlin, of all places, was a hotbed of bigotry and oppression. But they did not just concern themselves with overt displays of racism, or even with imagined Klan conspiracies. These students wanted to document microaggressions—tiny offenses, possibly unintentional ones—as if to strain out every gnat of bigotry on campus. One of the documented microaggressions was a man asking his sexual partner to wear nothing but a bindi, the red dot that decorates the forehead of Hindu women. “Exoticizing women of color is not flattering,” explained the complainant. Another student objected to someone’s annoyance over hearing the phrase “in solidarity,” saying, “If you’re tired of talking, take action.” One complaint dealt with a professor at the gym telling someone she was glad she and her husband both had blue eyes so her children would have blue eyes, something the poster described as “casual racism.” And a Hispanic student called attention to a white soccer teammate referring to the game with the Spanish word futbol. “Keep my heritage language out of your mouth,” wrote the poster, who vowed to never play soccer with whites again (Anonymous 2013a, b, c, d).
The term microaggression has become popular only recently, and this was the first we had heard of it. As sociologists of morality we were immediately intrigued. We thought of Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth-century French sociologist, who famously asked his readers to imagine what would happen in a “society of saints.” The answer is that there would still be sinners because “faults which appear venial to the layman” would there create scandal (Durkheim 1982:100). And it did seem that people were most concerned about rooting out racism and bigotry in the very places where there was the least of it. These so-called microaggressions, many of which outsiders would see as no more than venial faults, were causing great scandal in our universities. We set out to understand why. This book is the result of that endeavor to contextualize and explain microaggression complaints and related phenomena.
The seventeenth-century biologist Jan Swammerdam once said, “Here I bring you proof of God’s providence in the anatomy of a louse” (quoted in Weber 1958:142). In this spirit we focus in these first two chapters on microaggression complaints. Though they might seem small and insignificant, they have broad implications, revealing much about the patterning of moral conflict and the nature of ongoing moral change in contemporary societies.
Microaggression and Its Discontents
Even as campus activists and many others have embraced the concept of microaggression, much of the broader public has fiercely resisted it. The opposition arises because microaggression complaints violate many longstanding social norms, such as those encouraging people to have thick skin, brush off slights, and charitably interpret the intentions of others. The proponents of the concept, though, believe microaggressions cause severe distress to members of marginalized groups, and that the consequences are too great to be ignored. Each side has radically different moral assumptions, and the debates between them involve a clash of moral cultures.
The Microaggression Program
On one side are the microaggression complainants and others who see value in the concept. These are the supporters of what can be called the “microaggression program,” which refers to “the combination of [microaggression] theory and [its] on-campus applications” (Haidt 2017:176). Harvard education and psychiatry professor Chester Pierce coined the term microaggression in the 1970s, but counseling psychologist and diversity training specialist Derald Wing Sue is probably more responsible for the success of the microaggression program than anyone else. Sue, who has been called the godfather of the concept of microaggression (Schwartz 2016), defines microaggressions as “the brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, and sexual orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” (Sue 2010:5). Sue says that he and an African American colleague were microaggression victims because a white flight attendant asked them to change seats in order to redistribute the weight on a small, mostly empty airplane. While acknowledging that “balancing the weight on the plane seemed reasonable,” he suggests that he and his colleague were singled out because of their race—that the flight attendant should have asked a pair of white passengers to move instead. He describes his reaction after complying with the request: “I could feel my blood pressure rising, heart beating faster, and face flush with anger” (quoted in Sue et al. 2007:275). He describes himself as unable to contain his anger. When he confronted the flight attendant, she denied having any racial motives, and as Sue tells it, “Attempts to explain my perceptions and feelings only generated greater defensiveness from her” (Sue et al. 2007:275). Sue does not claim the flight attendant was lying. In fact Sue and his colleagues say the power of microaggressions “lies in their invisibility to the perpetrator” (Sue et al. 2007:275). “In some respects,” they go on to say, “people of color may find an overt and obvious racist act easier to handle than microaggressions that seem vague or disguised” (Sue et al. 2007:277).
From the overt and obvious, then, to the vague or disguised, microaggressions are wide ranging. Writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay tells of being the target of a racial insult by a classmate in the second grade (“Ew, it’s the smelly Indian girl”) and also of having a teacher who had trouble pronouncing her name on the first day of ninth grade. She considers both the insult and the mistake to be microaggressions, and the accumulation of such experiences, she says, “played a big role in how I have experienced being South Asian in the United States” (Mukhopadhyay 2015). Here are some other actions that have been identified as microaggressions:
- Saying “You are a credit to your race” or “You are so articulate” to an African American (Sue et al. 2008:331).
- Telling an Asian American that he or she speaks English well (Sue et al. 2008:331).
- Suggesting an African American student take “less challenging courses in African American studies” rather than majoring in biology (Runyowa 2015).
- Clutching one’s purse when an African American walks onto an elevator (Nadal et al. 2013:190).
- Staring at lesbians or gays expressing affection in public (Boysen 2012:123).
- Saying “All lives matter” (Phillips 2014).
- Using the phrase “you guys” to address a group of men and women (Saul 201...