origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted
conversation about a Latino’s ability to speak English without an accent.
This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of
blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect
the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour — microaggressions — used
to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can
play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.
black person” describes feeling alienated from conversations about
racism on campus. A digital photo project run by a Fordham University student
about “racial microaggressions” features minority students holding up signs with
comments like “You’re really pretty ... for a dark-skin girl.” The “St. Olaf
Microaggressions” blog includes a letter asking David R. Anderson, the college’s
president, to address “all of the incidents and microaggressions that go
unreported on a daily basis.”
What is less clear is how much is truly aggressive and how much is pretty
micro — whether the issues raised are a useful way of bringing to light often
elusive slights in a world where overt prejudice is seldom tolerated, or a new
form of divisive hypersensitivity, in which casual remarks are blown out of
proportion.
The word itself is not new — it was first used by Dr. Chester M. Pierce, a
professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard University, in the 1970s. Until
recently it was considered academic talk for race theorists and sociologists.
The recent surge in popularity for the term can be attributed, in part, to an
academic article Derald W. Sue, a psychology professor at Columbia University,
published in 2007 in which he broke down microaggressions into microassaults,
microinsults and microinvalidations. Dr. Sue, who has literally written the book
on the subject, called “Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and
Sexual Orientation,” attributed the increased use of the term to the rapidly
changing demographics in which minorities are expected to outnumber whites in
the United States by 2042. “As more and more of us are around, we talk to each
other and we know we’re not crazy,” Dr. Sue said. Once, he said, minorities kept
silent about perceived slights. “I feel like people of color are less inclined to do
that now,” he said.
Some say challenges to affirmative action in recent years have worked to stir
racial tensions and resentments on college campuses. At least in part as a result
of a blog started by two Columbia University students four years ago called The
Microaggressions Project, the word made the leap from the academic world to
the free-for-all on the web. Vivian Lu, the co-creator of the site, said she has
received more than 15,000 submissions since she began the project.
To date, the site has had 2.5 million page views from 40 countries. Ms. Lu
attributed the growing popularity of the term to its value in helping to give
people a way to name something that may not be so obvious. “It gives people the
vocabulary to talk about these everyday incidents that are quite difficult to put
your finger on,” she said.
To Serena Rabie, 22, a paralegal who graduated from the University of
Michigan in 2013, “This is racism 2.0.” She added: “It comes with undertones, it
comes with preconceived notions. You hire the Asian computer programmer
because you think he’s going to be a good programmer because he’s Asian.”
Drawing attention to microaggressions, whether they are intentional or not, is
part of eliminating such stereotypes, Ms. Rabie said.
On the other hand, John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia
University, said many of his students casually use the word when they talk about
race, but he cautioned against lumping all types of off-key language together.
Assuming a black student was accepted to an elite university purely because of
affirmative action? “That’s abuse,” Dr. McWhorter said. “That’s a slur.” Being
offended when a white person claims to be colorblind — a claim often derided by
minorities who say it willfully ignores the reality of race? Not so fast.
“I think that’s taking it too far,” he said. Whites do not have the same
freedom to talk about race that nonwhites do, Dr. McWhorter said. If it is socially
unacceptable for whites to consider blacks as “different in any way” then it is
unfair to force whites to acknowledge racial differences, he said.
Even when young people do not use the term overtly, examples of perceived
microaggressions abound.
When students at Harvard performed a play this month based on a
multimedia project, “I, Too, Am Harvard,” that grew out of interviews with
minority students, an entire segment highlighted microaggressions.
In one scene, students recite phrases they have been told, presumably by
nonblack students, including “You only got in because you’re black” and “The
government feels bad for you.” In another scene, a black student dressed in a
tuxedo and a red bow tie describes being at a formal university function and
being confused for a waiter.
Tsega Tamene, 20, a history and science major, and a producer for the play,
said microaggressions were an everyday part of student life. “It’s almost scary the
way that this disguised racism can affect you, hindering your success and the
very psyche of going to class,” she said.
Outside of college campuses, microaggressions have been picked apart in
popular Web videos including a two-part video poking fun at things white girls
say to black girls (“It’s almost like you’re not black”) and another video called
“What Kind of Asian Are You?” (“Where are you from? Your English is perfect”).
But the trend has its critics. A skeptical article in the conservative National
Review carried the arch headline “You Could Be a Racist and Not Even Know It.”
Harry Stein, a contributing editor to City Journal, said in an email that while
most people feel unjustly treated at times, “most such supposed insults are slight
or inadvertent, and even most of those that aren’t might be readily shrugged off.”
Mr. Stein took issue with the term “microaggressions,” saying that its use
“suggests a more serious problem: the impulse to exaggerate the meaning of
such encounters in the interest of perpetually seeing oneself as a victim.”
The comments on recent articles about microaggressions have been a mix of
empathetic and critical. One commenter on a BuzzFeed article on the “I, Too, Am
Harvard” project wrote: “Make up your mind, do you want to be seen the same as
everyone because you’re a human being, or do you want to be seen as a ‘colored’
girl, since not being seen as a ‘colored’ person is obviously offensive?” Another
wrote, “I don’t get bent out of shape if a white person asks me are you, like,
Hindu or something? I just correct them.”
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and author, said the public
airing of racial microaggressions should not be limited to minorities, but should
be open to whites as well. “That’s the only way that you can produce a
multicultural, ethnically diverse environment,” he said.
“We’re talking about people in close contact who are experiencing the
painful intersections of intimacy,” he said. “The next part of that is
communication, and this is a new form of communication.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 22, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Everyday Slights Tied to Race Add Up to Big Campus Topic.