Microaggressions

Brief History of Microaggressions

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made racial macroaggressions—racial segregation in public spaces [Page 530]such as bathrooms, schools, and hospitals—illegal by deeming explicit and intentional racial discrimination against U.S. law. However, nonwhite groups such as Asian, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian; Black, African American, Caribbean, and African; Indigenous, First Nations, and Native American; Latino, Latina, Latinx, and Latine; and mixed-race people of color continue to experience implicit and unintentional racism that is often undetected and invisible as well as legal. As a result, the term microaggression surfaced in the 1970s to capture the experiences of nonwhite people and prove that racism was not extinguished from U.S. culture but rather that racism had taken on a more clandestine form. In a groundbreaking article about racial microaggressions, a team of researchers of color expanded the concept of microaggressions into an umbrella term (Sue et al., 2007).

One of the most important characteristics of the framework of microaggressions is that micro does not refer to something that is small; rather, the prefix refers to the invisibility of an insulting message or action. The perpetrator is usually unaware of their complicity in perpetuating harmful stereotypes, but the underlying message is usually painfully clear to the marginalized person who has been affected by the microaggression. Similarly, the prefix macro in macroaggression does not refer to something that is big but describes messages or actions that are visible to almost everyone in society since the messages and actions are public and, in most cases, legal. The framework of microaggressions comprises three different categories: microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations.

Microaggression Categories

Microassaults are intentional, and the perpetrator is usually very aware that what they have said or done is offensive; however, the perpetrator generally believes that their offensive behavior will cause a minimally harmful impact—an incorrect assumption in most cases. Microinsults are unintentional, and the perpetrator is usually unaware of the harmful underlying messages contained in what they have said or done. Microinvalidations typically occur in response to being called out on a microassault or microinsult, but microinvalidations can also occur independently.

It is useful to have three categories of microaggressions, since some microaggressions are explicit (e.g., microassaults) and some are implicit (e.g., microinsults and microinvalidations). Given that perpetrators are usually unaware of their implicit biases and how they perpetuate harmful stereotypes, perpetrators frequently become defensive when called out on their offensive language and therefore cite that they did not intend to cause harm. This type of defensive response prioritizes intention over impact, which further negates, insults, and invalidates the marginalized person’s experience. Therefore, it is critically important to prioritize understanding the impact over intent after committing a microaggression.

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