From Our "You Keep Using This Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means" Dept.

Samuel R. Delany linked to this post on racial "microaggressions" today.  Despite the disclaimer (echoed by comments under Delany's link) that the "project is NOT about showing how ignorant people can be in order to simply dismiss their ignorance," that's pretty much what it is about.  It doesn't help that, as the word has moved from academia to a wider userbase, people don't know what it is supposed to mean.

The weirdest evidence for that was a comment under Delany's link, by another writer of some repute.  She lives in a poor Central American country, and she listed some things people say to her there that bother her.

The other thing is getting asked how much things I have cost (including my dog and her cocker clip when she's been recently groomed) -- and either I answer or I "forget." This somewhat bothers me, but it's not the micro-aggression that spitting near my feet is (one guy appears to really have it in for Gringos).

I pointed out that spitting near someone's feet is not "micro-aggression," it's aggression full stop.  The writer replied, "Having had rocks thrown at me when I was a child for being too smart for a girl who wasn't a college professor's daughter, I'm okay with one guy in town who doesn't like gringas."  Which is fine -- I'd feel the same in her situation, and I've encountered some hostility as an American when I was in Korea -- but it doesn't change the fact that spitting at someone, let alone throwing rocks at them, is not microaggression.

This is to me the most disturbing distortion of the term I saw at The Microaggression Project tumblr: what many people reported as microaggressions were really overt and explicit expressions of bigotry.  (That's true in the "21 Racial Microaggresions" post too: see number 10, among others.)  I think this inadvertently supports the assumption many bigots make, that if you don't run someone over with your car, it's not bigotry.  And as this linguistic inflation proceeds, I predict that even overt violence against people will eventually be referred to as microaggression.  And then racists will start whining that the idea of being some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth microaggressor never crossed their minds -- being called a microaggressor is one of the worst things you can be called in public life.

Insisting on this is not hairsplitting.  The images in the "21 Racial Microaggressions" post include a fair amount of fine language chopping.  "Being biracial doesn't make me a 'what'," for example.  People love creating distinctions and multiplying categories, but they have trouble keeping them consistent after they've created them.

I noticed too that some of the microaggressions in that post are as likely to come from other people of color as from whites, like "You don't act like a normal black person ya' know?" and "You don't speak Spanish?"  Mina Shum's great Canadian indie film Double Happiness shows these pressures at work on a young Chinese-Canadian woman.  I've encountered plenty of such stereotyping from other gay men in my day. ("I mean, you're supposed to like Barbra Streisand if you're gay, aren't you?")  Delany himself remarked on the post, "The one I've been getting for seventy-one, going on seventy-two years of my life is: 'You're black? So then what were your parents . . .?' The answer, by the bye, is black. Yes, both of them. And so were all four of their parents."  In his memoirs Delany recounts an affair he had with a black African man who refused to believe that he -- Delany -- was really black; I doubt that guy was the only such person of color in Delany's life.

Another commenter on Delany's link made a very good point:

Is there a way we can think about trying to place one another ancestry and culture-wise less as "aggression" and more as just a way to establish certain kinds of relatedness with one another - a topography of sorts? We're not, after all, just all cosmopolitan liberal subjects unmoored from all context. The way we visually present to one another can't just be brushed under a rug. For example, as a Brit from an Italian family I'll have more in common with someone raised in a catholic culture (even though I was raised anti-catholic.) Surely it's how we go about placing each other than whether we do it. Because whether we speak it or not, we actually do it all the time.

I think this person may have missed something, though: while I agree that trying to place people is a way to establish certain kinds of relatedness, the kinds of behavior collected under "microaggresion" go beyond that, often putting people into a double bind.  Children of immigrants or of interracial couples can't help the fact that they don't fit into a normal "topography" of race or culture: expecting them to do so is not just trying to map them but, yes, a form of aggression.

It occurs to me that microaggression is one of the tools normally used to socialize people, majorities as well as minorities.  We may not be beaten or screamed at to get us to conform to gender and other cultural expectations, for example, but a bit of mockery or shaming can be just as effective.  And there's no way to raise children without socializing them, without pressuring them to behave and speak and think in certain ways.

I don't mean to deny the negative effects of microaggression on its targets, but if we're going to combat this kind of behavior we have to be able to name it correctly, and distinguish it from other forms of social control.  When I talked to a teacher friend of mine about these matters, he said that microaggression is supposed to be mentioned in education classes to alert teachers-in-training to their own attitudes and behavior, not to give them a club to bash their students with.  As I said earlier, the material in the "21 Racial Microaggressions" post does exactly what it's not supposed to do.  Judging by this material and people's comments, microaggression is already slipping into confusion and ultimate meaninglessness.

Reality Has No Name

Here's a good example of sloppy, lazy use of language.  I saw an online advertisement today, consisting of the words "All Military Families Deserve Benefits, Regardless of Sexual Orientation."  Families don't have sexual orientations.  Individuals in families have sexual orientations, but they may not have the same ones: one partner may be gay, the other bisexual -- and their children, if any, may be straight.

What the ad meant, of course, was that same-sex couples should have the same privileges in terms of benefits that mixed-sex couples do.  Which, I suppose, would mean that they'd have to be married:  unmarried heterosexual couples don't get such benefits.

A related example: yesterday a colleague, moderating a GLB panel for an education class, explained to the audience that as teachers they may have students with "same-sex parents."  What she said was that a child may have a parent of the same sex; in my case, that would have been my father.  Not all children do have same-sex parents living with them.  But that's not what my colleague meant.  She meant that some children have two parents of the same sex.  That's not necessarily the same thing as having gay or bisexual parents.  A straight male friend of mine isn't married to the mother of his son; soon after the boy was born she married another man and had a child with him.  Since the boy regarded both men as his fathers, he had three parents, two of whom were the same sex.  (True, they weren't both his biological father, but the same is usually true in lesbian couples with children: only one is the biological mother, but both are moms.)  As I've noticed before, "same-sex" -- which refers to the bodies of the people who are interacting, not to their sexual orientation or other essence -- is gradually taking on the meaning of "gay" or "lesbian," as when someone writes about "same-sex acts."  (Similarly, I've seen references to LGBT individuals, but no individual can be gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered.)

We were speaking to a class for future teachers in the School of Education, and the instructor had sent the participants some advance questions and other material.  The most interesting to me was information about "microaggression," a term I hadn't heard before though it has been around since 1970.  I wish I'd saved the definition the instructor sent us, but Wikipedia's is close to it:

Microagression usually involves demeaning implications and other subtle insults against minorities, and may be perpetrated against those due to gender, sexual orientation, and ability status. According to Pierce, “the chief vehicle for proracist behaviors are microaggressions. These are subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are ‘put-downs’ of blacks by offenders”.  Microaggressions may also play a role in unfairness in the legal system as they can influence the decisions of juries.

My immediate reaction to this concept was positive, since it's certainly true that most racist and other bigoted behavior takes forms other than overt violence and verbal abuse.  But even people who throw around racist epithets will deny that they're racist; the real problem is getting them to recognize that such behavior and attitudes are racist (or sexist, etc.).  Invoking a word like "microaggression" is not going to help.  It can be useful for people who are discussing the varieties of bigoted behavior, but it should have no place in dealing with people whose behavior you're trying to change.  A professional who doesn't have a non-jargon translation handy in those situations needs to go back to school.

But I had reservations almost immediately.  Since most white Americans, anyway, seem to have trouble grasping that you can be racist even if you've never lynched anybody or never owned a slave,
I gather from Chester M. Pierce's words as quoted by Wikpedia that microaggressions are by definition nonverbal.  (I'm not sure whether the "often" in "often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges" is meant to modify only "automatic," or "nonverbal" also.  Another definition, also quoted by Wikipedia, includes verbal behavior.)  From the discussion in class when we spoke there, I could tell that the students were already blurring the meaning of "microaggression" to include all kinds of behavior, verbal and nonverbal, that didn't fit the definition of the term.

After the class, I looked for more information about microaggression on the Web, and found this tumblr-like blog, The Microaggression Project, discussed by the bloggers in an interview with Ms. magazine.  I noticed quickly that many of the submissions weren't about microaggressions at all, but about overt expressions of bigotry -- call them "macroaggressions."  I also noticed in the Wikipedia article that some researchers have begun multiplying varieties, "microinsult" and "microrape" for example.  There are also "microaffirmations" and "microinequities."  I don't think that these variations add anything useful to the concept, especially since so much behavior intended to reinforce power and status occurs without overt violence.  The concept of institutional or structural racism, for example, dealt with subtle as well as overt forms of subjugation and privilege.  Power isn't always exercised by violence; it's more effective if it works subtly, even subliminally.

Words like "microaggression" are easy to define, but apparently many people, even academics and trained professionals, have trouble learning and applying those definitions.  They also inflate their meaning to the point where the terms lose precision, and sometimes any meaning at all.  In the same way that "deconstruct" came to mean simply "analyze," rendering it redundant, "microaggression" seems to be headed toward meaning "racism," "sexism," or any other form of bigotry.  In which case, why use it at all?  I suspect that part of the appeal of these words is their Latinate abstractness, which has prestige for many people: using them makes the user feel powerful.  Which isn't entirely a bad thing -- it was, after all, one of the reasons Raymond Williams wrote Keywords: to give working-class people and people without university backgrounds the knowledge they needed to use such words:

I deliberately included some terms in it because I felt that people did not know their more interesting and complex social history, and so were often unsure about employing them, or recoiling from one of their meanings which had been heavily put to use by ruling-class papers or publicists. I wanted to give them confidence in their ability to use these terms [Politics and Letters (Verso 1979), p. 179].

But Williams wrote Keywords primarily for university students, and it's clear they need it just as much.  It may be for lack of such a resource that graduate students and professors keep messing up terms like "social construction," "essentialism," and other technical terms in their own fields.  It's not enough simply to wave these terms around, they must be used correctly.