Many
of us have received email forwards with jokes or funny pictures that sometimes
we delete and sometimes we pass along to our friends. Last year (2015) it was this type of email
forward that resulted in the firing of some police officials in Ferguson,
Missouri while also uncovering some of the deep racial issues within the police
force in the city of Ferguson. There was
a photo of Ronald Reagan feeding a monkey with the caption: “Rare photo of
Ronald Reagan babysitting Barack Obama in early 1962” (Wesley & Kindy,
2015). Coworkers many times may share
email jokes like this that may contain severe or subtle discriminating features
with either intentional, or unintentional discriminating motives. These types of everyday subtle verbal or
nonverbal exchanges with the intent to degrade or belittle an individual
because of his/her race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or ethnicity
is referred to as microaggression (Sue, 2010).
Microaggressions are occurring all
around us everywhere we look. They are a
part of who we are. We are who we are
because we are a product of the environment that created and nurtured us. No one is immune from the psychological
effects of the culture we live in. Sue (p.
24, 2010) explains: “… all citizens are exposed to a social conditional process
that imbues within them prejudices, stereotypes, and beliefs that lie outside
their level of awareness”. She goes on
to explain that we may support equality but in our unconscious there are
implicit bias that harbor inequality.
The reason why microaggression are occurring all around us every day is
because although some intentionally discriminate, many do it without realizing
it. Microaggression can play a large
toll on the psychological well-being of an individual.
There are three forms of
microaggressions described by Sue (2010) in her reference of (Sue, Capodilupo,
et al., 2007; Sue & Capodilupo, 2008).
These are microassaults (deliberate conscious behaviors communicated to
belittle a minority), microinsults (interpersonal communications displaying
stereotypes and demean a minority) and microinvalidation (verbal and
environment cues that exclude the feelings and societal importance of certain
groups of people. Microaggressions are
very powerful and felt every day by minorities and they maintain their power
because many offenders do not realize the impact that their actions and
behaviors are having on the minorities that they interact with.
One may not realize the large
outbreak of microaggresions that plague the world on a daily basis until they
take time to analyze their surroundings.
It doesn’t take long to begin to notice these subtle offences. Interested in this topic, I spent a few days
looking for microagressions during my daily activities. As I begin to monitor
my surroundings I saw various microagressions occurring. I observed a behavior change in students when
a female instructor began to instruct. There
was a comment a parent made about my daughter being a fast runner for a
girl. I overheard a comment stereotyping
the behaviors of a homosexual student in my class. Then there were many examples in the media, there
was the first one I mentioned about the photo with Ronald Reagan. There was a New York Police detective
reprimanded for belittling an immigrant taxi driver, then a NCAA basketball
player spoke racial words against an opponent during a post-game press
conference.
Many behaviors are based off of what
society believes the role of a particular person may be. For example, our society believes that men
must be better athletes then women and that they could not compete in the same
sports. When a parent commented to me
during a coed soccer game that my daughter was a fast runner for being a girl.
I returned the comment that many of the other players are pretty slow runners
for being boys. We both had committed a
microaggression. This parent, insinuating that girls should not be faster
runners than boys and stating that a
girl who can run faster than a boy is to be considered abnormal and a boy who
cannot run as fast as my daughter is weaker than the average boy. Society has defined the roles of a man and
women. Even though our society is
evolving and the line that divides these roles has been shifting, the traditional
roles established throughout cultural history are still within our minds and
control our implicit behaviors. I
observed these implicit roles in the behaviors between the interactions with
male teachers vs female teachers. There
are notable verbal and nonverbal changes in both male and female students when a
class is being taught by a male versus a female. Both sexes do not realize their implicit
behavior but it is noticeable when observed that a female and male student will
feel more intimation from a male teach than they would from a female teacher.
Another observation of a blatant
conscious microaggression, or microassault (Sue, 2010), was committed by a New
York City police detective named Patrick Cherry toward a taxi driver in New
York. In this viral video he ridicules
the driver for his accent and asks him if he knows what planet he’s on. He states on a video clip: “How long have you
been in this country” (Sanjay Seth, YouTube, 2015)? His behavior demonstrates his belief that
this taxi driver, because of his nationality is a “Second-Class Citizen”, he is
seemed to be of less worth, and Detective Cherry feels inferior and has the
perception that this taxi drive deserves this treatment because of who he is
(Sue, 2010). I am certain that if the
driver in this vehicle was a white, well dressed male with a New York accent,
Detective Cherry would have treated him in a very different manner.
There are many individuals full of
hate that consciously commit microaggression, but the bigger problem are those
that do it implicitly. Maybe through
gaining an understanding of implicit microaggressions, one can make a change in
their life and become a part of the solution rather than a part of the
problem. To gain this understanding we
must analyze the culture and environment that has helped create us to be who we
are. We must also understand how culture
has ingrained implicit behaviors within us and how these implicit bias can
manipulate our behavior.
Once
we have gained this understanding we must make an effort to avoid committing a
microaggression. This is the hard part
since we have implicit bias that affect our behavior. Gladwell (2005) explains how previous
experiences, observations, beliefs and behaviors create biases that are in our
subconscious and we sometimes do not realize that they are effecting our
behaviors and attitudes. He continues to
describe a tool that measures these biases found in areas such as gender,
sexual orientation and race. This tool
is called the Implicitly Association Test IAT which can be found at www.implicit.harvard.edu.
It tests our preference for things such as black over white, gay over straight,
guns over no guns etc. It is amazing how our implicit bias will affect our
decision even when we try to avoid it.
Even after several takes of this IAT the results will come out the same.
An increase of cultural awareness and
self-awareness of our behaviors and action can assist in decreasing the amount
of microaggressions that one may cause toward those they associate with.
References:
Gladwell, M.
(2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. New York: Little,
Brown and CO.
Project Implicit.
(n.d.). Retrieved February 22, 2015, from
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1.
Sanjay, S (2015, March 30). Police Abuse
of Uber Driver in New York City – March 30th, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGSrGmHsT8s&spfreload=10.
Sue, D. (2010). Microaggressions in
everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
Wesley, L., & Kindy, K. (2015, April
3). These are the racially charged e-mails that got 3 Ferguson police and court
officials fired. Retrieved April 5, 2015, from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/04/03/these-are-the-racist-e-mails-that-got-3-ferguson-police-and-court-officials-fired/.
