For the record, I believe we have a problem on campuses with a persistent, low level, broadly shared, largely unconscious set of prejudices that places an unfair burden on minorities (and, often, women). I also think we have the wrong word for it. The word popping up everywhere — surely it will be a candidate for 2016’s Word of the Year — is microaggressions.
To get to what I think doesn’t work, here, I want to begin with the origin of the word itself. The Greek prefix micro stands in opposition to macro, meaning very small as opposed to very large. But although microeconomics and macroeconomics are often presented as a pair, more often we pay attention to things made small and fail to inflect the large aspect. Thus we say microscope but rarely macroscope, microbrewery but never macrobrewery; we speak of microbiology and biology, not macrobiology. The idea seems to be that the initial notion is of large scale and needs the prefix only to set, say, the small, independent brewery apart from the standard big, commercial enterprise. It’s the same thing, only littler. Ditto microbus, microcassette, microclimate, microfilm, micromanage, and so on.
We have some understanding of what aggression is. Whether consciously intended or not, it is overt, provocative, hostile behavior that precedes an attack or implicitly threatens an attack. ISIS is aggressive in its pursuit of a caliphate; teenage bystanders have trouble intervening in cases of sexual aggression. Following our model, a microaggression should be an aggression on a small scale: a minor hostility, a small threat, a slight provocation.
But microaggression theory yields a different meaning. Coined in 1970 by the Harvard professor Charles M. Pierce, the term signals
… offenses done to blacks by whites in this sort of gratuitous neverending way. … Almost all black-white racial interactions are characterized by white put-downs, done in automatic, preconscious, or unconscious fashion.
People can be unconscious aggressors because of personality traits or unresolved anger. But as social scientists have further described microaggression (and extended it to mainstream behaviors toward groups other than African-Americans), they have stressed the aversive nature of such interactions — the tendency to minimize the effects of longstanding discrimination, to position the dominant culture as “normal,” to express surprise when a member of a minority group deviates from the stereotype.
These are unhealthy tendencies, and those calling attention to their presence on our campuses are waging a difficult and valuable struggle. But I do not believe most of these behaviors are aggressions, micro or otherwise. In fact, many recent statements protesting such tendencies take pains to point out how unaggressive they are. “People who engage in microaggressions are ordinary folks who experience themselves as good, moral, decent individuals,” says the Columbia professor and commentator Derald Wing Sue, who gives as an example a woman’s backing away from entering an elevator carrying a lone black man. Now, that’s hurtful behavior occasioned by the woman’s race- and sex-based assumptions about her personal safety. But is it an aggression for her to back away? I’d rather call it not a micro-anything but what it is: stereotyping, or soft bigotry, or provincial thinking.
What does this matter (aside from the general idea that words matter)? People who commit aggressive acts are aggressors, at least in the moment of the act. By general agreement, people who commit so-called microaggressions may be behaving like jerks, or they may be mouthing some piece of received opinion (“You speak such good English”) that they’ve failed to reconsider. By finding some other way to describe certain intolerable behaviors, we can save the charge of microaggression for behaviors that do fit the model of aggression-in-small-ways, like blackface fraternity parties or characterization of a woman’s speaking up in a meeting as shrill. We may even find people more willing to listen to a characterization of their actions as stereotyping or hurtful or counterproductive when we’re not accusing them of an aggression (micro or otherwise) that they logically disown.
I’ve offered a few alternative terms. Who’s ready to propose others? Or does microaggression really describe what one might call a macrocommon set of behaviors? Pull out your lexicons and let us know.