Mainstreaming Microaggressions

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

Mainstreaming Microaggressions (Part 5). In the summer of 2020, a resident of Oakland, California, reported that nooses were hanging from trees in an Oakland park. Understandably, the public was alarmed and city officials removed them. The next day at a press conference, things got more complicated.

“And I want to be clear that regardless of the intentions of whoever put those nooses in our public trees, in our sacred public space here in Oakland, intentions don't matter. We have got to stop terrorizing our black and brown citizens. And as white people, we have to become knowledgeable and educated about the impacts of our actions, whether they are well-intentioned or not.”

That's Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf insisting that it didn't matter that, according to residents who had come forward, those looped ropes had been used for games and exercises for weeks. It didn't matter that the man who'd put them up for games and exercises was himself black. Mayor Schaaf said they were nooses and continued to call them nooses and symbols of hatred throughout the press conference because, she said, “it's not the intention that matters, it's the impact.”

Now, most Americans hearing this probably thought, "What is wrong with this person? Why can't she just say that the ropes were taken down because they scared people who mistook them for nooses? What's going on?" What's going on is what happens when thousands of college administrators get hold of a badly-argued essay and then pass its ideas along to hundreds of thousands of college students in first-year orientation sessions in dormitories and diversity training programs.

That essay is called “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” and was published in 2007. It was written by an ed school professor, Derald Wing Sue and six ed school co-authors—all affiliated with teachers college. Since 2010, especially among administrators, it's become a kind of Bible whose golden rule says it's not the intentions that matter, it's the impact.

The stated aim of the essay is to alert white people to the unintentional harm they may be doing to people of color in their daily interactions. That's a worthy goal. Decent people, whatever their color, want to know how they might be hurting other people without meaning to. But the essay is in fact a recipe for racial misunderstanding and division.

The first problem is that it puts under a single banner microaggression behaviors that are obviously racist on the one hand and on the other behaviors or statements that Professor Sue just disapproves of. It's obviously racist, to take one of Sue's examples, to refuse to get on an elevator because a black person is on it.

It's not clear why that's a microaggression. There's nothing micro about it. That's just racist. But is that really comparable to someone who says, quote, "There is only one race, the human race."? According to Professor Sue, it is comparable because the impact of that statement on a person of color, quote, "Denies the individual as a racial-cultural being." Well, maybe. But the speaker might just be emphasizing our common humanity. In fact, it's just this idea of what we share as human beings, that the bigoted person who refused to get on that elevator desperately needs to hear.

Another example of a microaggression is the statement, "Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough." Now, Sue and others claim that the impact of this statement on a person of color,—the message that it sends—is this quote: "People of color are lazy or incompetent and need to work harder." Again, it's possible that's the meaning in a worst-case scenario. But if you're trying to encourage someone who's had a setback, it might help to say, "Keep at it. I know it's not easy, but you can succeed if you keep working."And if there's just a little bit of trust between two people, the color of the person who says that and the color of the person who hears it just won't matter.

But trust is what Professor Sue is undermining. Throughout the essay, he calls people who have committed what he himself says are accidental insults, "perpetrators", and he refers to the people of color who may have been accidentally offended, "targets.” Does he really not know the meaning of those words? And then, to make sure that people of color feel like targets, he takes the worst possible interpretation of a statement and declares that to be the impact—the meaning—for people of color.

How does he know that's the impact on 150 million Americans? He doesn't. But by putting the worst possible spin on things that people say and calling that "the impact,” he helps create the impact because that's what people will hear. Do that enough, and it becomes second nature to claim that the intentions of the speaker don't matter. Have enough people doing that and in a decade's time, you'll have the mayor of a major American city claim that exercise loops put up by a black man weren't just mistaken for nooses and symbols of racial hatred, they were nooses and symbols of racial hatred.

But that's just one mayor in one press conference in one city. This kind of irrational racially-divisive thinking and speaking have been corrupting most of the colleges and universities in the nation for more than a decade, and it's helped to grow an entire industry of people who are inflaming racial tensions under the guise of healing them.

In the next video, I'll talk about a well-known incident at Yale which exemplifies that problem.

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)