I was actually a little worried when I started reading this post. The three examples in the first paragraph seem so grossly overstated. Those aren’t microagressions, they’re merely characterisations of someone’s perception of the political landscape. Maybe they’re wrong (I think they are), but they doesn’t seem aggressive to me. Perhaps part of the problem is perceiving any disagreement as aggression.

“There is ambiguity as to what counts as a microaggression, and there is some concern among critics that academic debate over some issues—such as affirmative action—might be “chilled” because people fear making statements that could be seen as racist microaggressions.” It would be a bad thing if this silenced debate, but I think the concern over microaggressions could be useful for people to realize the implicit biases and perhaps even the racist assumptions they might have about issues like affirmative action. For example, Louis Pojman’s article “The Case against Affirmative Action” is rife with racist assumptions that, perhaps if he was more aware of this problem, would have forced him to rethink how he presented his argument. It’s important to note that this article still gets reprinted in ethics textbooks today. Here’s a link: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/business_computer_ethics/the%20case%20against%20affirmative%20action.htm/the-case-against-affirmative-action-sacramento-state

Before any asks there are at least two really bad examples of these racist assumptions in the piece that I can remember:

He thinks it’s normal to just assume minorities and women in positions of prestige like physicians are unqualified for those positions:

“Furthermore, even if it is of some help to people with low self-esteem to gain encouragement from seeing others of their particular kind in successful positions, it is doubtful whether this need is a sufficient reason to justify preferential hiring or reverse discrimination. What good is a role model who is inferior to other professors or physicians or business personnel? The best way to create role models is not to promote people because of race or gender but because they are the best qualified for the job. It is the violation of this fact that is largely responsible for the widespread whisper in the medical field (at least in New York) “Never go to a Black physician under 40” (referring to the fact that AA has affected the medical system during the past twenty years). Fight the feeling how I will, I cannot help wondering on seeing a Black or woman in a position or honor, “Is she in this position because she merits it or because of Affirmative Action?” Where Affirmative Action is the policy, the “figment of pigment” creates a stigma of undeservedness, whether or not it is deserved.”

This is the pernicious myth that affirmative action puts unqualified people in such positions, completely ignoring that there is a long history of white males doing favors for other white males by putting unqualified friends in positions of authority (who was it that ran FEMA during huricane Katrina? http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1103003,00.html Also, this is obviously racist and sexist since it assumes that blacks and women cannot succeed at these positions without resorting to any data analysis.

Pojman also takes anecdotes as examples of prevalent phenomena, again without any data to support this assumption. There are three different examples about academic employment:

“I knew a brilliant philosopher, with outstanding publications in first level journals, who was having difficulty getting a tenure-track position. For the first time in my life I offered to make a phone call on his behalf to a university to which he had applied. When I got the Chair of the Search Committee, he offered that the committee was under instructions from the Administration to hire a woman or a Black. They had one of each on their short-list, so they weren’t even considering the applications of White males. At my urging he retrieved my friend’s file, and said, “This fellow looks far superior to the two candidates we’re interviewing, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” Cases like this come to my attention regularly.”

How regularly? Can this be meaningfully quantified? Is this discipline specific? Who knows, just take his word for it that it happens enough to think affirmative action is cheating whites of jobs they deserve.

“A few years ago Jesse Jackson joined protesters at Harvard Law School in demanding that the Law School faculty hire black women. Jackson dismissed Dean of the Law School, Robert C. Clark’s standard of choosing the best qualified person for the job as “Cultural anemia.” “We cannot just define who is qualified in the most narrow vertical academic terms,” he said. “Most people in the world are yellow, brown, black, poor, non-Christian and don’t speak English, and they can’t wait for some white males with archaic rules to appraise them.”19 It might be noted that if Jackson is correct about the depth of cultural decadence at Harvard, blacks might be well advised to form and support their own more vital law schools and leave places like Harvard to their archaism.”

I’m pretty sure this lead to the hiring of now renowned founder of Critical Race Theory Derek Bell, so obviously there were qualified black candidates that didn’t get a shot before the call for preferential hiring.

“At several universities, the administration has forced departments to hire members of minorities even when far superior candidates were available. Shortly after obtaining my Ph D in the late 70’s I was mistakenly identified as a black philosopher (I had a civil rights record and was once a black studies major) and was flown to a major university, only to be rejected for a more qualified candidate when it discovered that I was white.”

Again, vague assertion of a prevalent phenomena without any statistical backing. Three separate anecdotes that somehow speak to a prevalent phenomena without any recourse to unemployment figures, faculty makeup, or anything that might be recognizable as research.

And, my last example of implicit bias:

“By giving people what they deserve as individuals, rather than as members of groups we show respect for their inherent worth. If you and I take a test, and you get 95% of the answers correct and I only get 50% correct, it would be unfair to you to give both of us the same grade, say an A, and even more unfair to give me a higher grade A+ than your B+. Although I have heard cases where teachers have been instructed to “race norm” in grading (giving Blacks and Hispanics higher grades for the same numerical scores), most proponents of Affirmative Action stop short of advocating such a practice. But, I would ask them, what’s really the difference between taking the overall average of a White and a Black and “race norming” it? If teachers shouldn’t do it, why should administrators?”

How often does this happen? Who knows because Pojman is just basing this claim off of rumors. I tell my students that if they find such logic convincing then I should be suspicious of any assignments white males turn in since the majority of students I caught plagiarizing were indeed white males. Obviously, if I were to hear other stories about the same phenomena I would have to leap to the conclusion that white males just aren’t cut out for academic work.

To be fair, Pojman does indeed have a footnote referring to statistical support for his claim, but just one footnote. The bigger problem is that this article gets used a lot when professors teach the Affirmative Action debate since it is frequently published in ethics textbooks. Some probably miss the implicitly racist assumptions that blacks are unqualified for the upper middle class positions they hold, that blacks unfairly get preferences in academic job interviews over whites (that’s why they’re a whopping 1% of all philosophy faculty positions in the US), and that blacks get preferential treatment in grading. There’s a willingness to believe injustice in favor of minorities (black mischief) especially if the harmed party is whites and one can ignore injustice that favors whites. Forcing someone to be a bit more critical about the unsaid assumptions of their position would help the debate and force that person to be a more critical thinker, something I would expect out of a philosopher.

It’s been rare that I see accusations of microaggression appear in the wild (IRL as well as virtual), but when I have they typically follow this formula:
Speaker: I like that car but I’d like it better if it wasn’t black
Listener: Your use of ‘Black’ in negative terms is a microaggression and I am offended.
Speaker: I apologize for the misunderstanding but I am not using the word black to denote skin colour but rather the colour of that vehicle. I am clarifying to you that my intention was not to offend.
Listener: Check your privilege racist white male, etc.. shitlord. Hey Everyone! We got’s us a racist over here! I demand satisfaction! Everyone! Everyone! Oh, and if you question this in any manner or you’re a racist too!

Although I’m sure that’s not how the ‘tool’ of microaggression was intended to be used, it seems to be applied more and more in such a manner. A Hammer used to smash faces instead of build houses if you will. Could a control be added to the base concept of microaggressions so as to ensure it is used to curb aggression as opposed to increasing it?

On a side note, it doesn’t seem to be applied universally across all humans either. That is, would a statement such as ‘Pffft! Everyone knows white people can’t dance!’ be considered a microaggression? (That might be a bad example, but I think it describes the concept. If you can think of a better example, please do contribute.) Also, keep in mind I am a seeker of wisdom and therefore do not know all, so have a bit of patience and assume a lack of willful ignorance on my part. Thanks. 🙂

I find sine nombre’s read of Pojman’s article uncharitable in the extreme.

Sin nombre says Pojman “assumes blacks and women cannot succeed at [professional positions] positions without resorting to any data analysis.”
Data analysis isn’t necessary because Pojman is considering the ramifications of a hypothetical policy which says: “preferentially hire women and minorities despite the fact that they are less qualified than other candidates.” He calls this “strong affirmative action” and defines it explicitly in contrast to “weak affirmative action” which he does not oppose. If an institution endorse strong affirmative action then there are good reasons to think that the women and minorities it hires will in fact be less qualified than others. Pojman is clearly not assuming that women and minorities *are* less qualified–let alone that they are *essentially so* in some kind of racist, misogynist sense. At any rate, Pojman shows us that that hypothetical policy shouldn’t be adopted because it won’t meet its aim–it won’t actually increase equality. You might think he’s wrong; but it’s not racist.

Similar objections hold for the rest of the post. Sine nombre doesn’t find the anecdata compelling. Does s/he really think that university HR departments, or search committees are going to go on record saying, “why, yes, we are illegally discriminating against white candidates, males especially”? It’s one thing to say that you don’t find the anecdotal evidence compelling; I don’t find it compelling either. It’s quite another to say that reliance on anecdotal data is racist.

As a matter of fact, there is empirical evidence that the phenomena Pojman reports for hiring in philosophy does happen in legal academia. See, Merritt and Reskin, “Sex, Race, and Credentials: The Truth about Affirmative Action in Law Faculty Hiring,” Columbia Law Review, vol 97, no 2, (1997): 199-311. Merritt and Reskin find that white women and men of color (but not women of color!) enjoy a modest advantage at location of placement over white men with similar qualifications. (So white women and black men get better jobs than they would have otherwise, but they are not necessarily more likely to get a job at all.)

I haven’t followed these debates and I’m not competent to scrutinize the methodology of Merritt and Reskin, nor do I know if the inference that philosophy might be like law in the relevant respects is a good one. But neither do I know any actual empirical evidence this isn’t the case. (Apparently neither does sine nombre, else I assume s/he would have cited it.)

another anonymous,

To be honest, I struggle with this question about charity: does calling out racist assumptions or out-right racist claims conflict with the principle of charity? I want to say no, but I think it is disingenuous to deny that people might not have implicitly racist biases when they are so willing to believe that injustice benefits blacks in the US despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. Before people start thinking I am calling Pojman a racist, I am not. I am saying he is working with some implicitly racist assumptions. In case you don’t see the difference, please watch this very helpful video on the distinction between calling a person a racist and calling his views or words implicitly racist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc

So, since I struggle with this issue I clearly fall on the side of calling out the implicit biases that sound racist than I do by saying well, maybe they didn’t mean it that way. Another Anonymous writes: “Data analysis isn’t necessary because Pojman is considering the ramifications of a hypothetical policy.” Pojman is warning his readers of a phenomena that he both believes to be wide-spread and morally wrong. His reasons for it being wide-spread are just anecdotes and I do not find them convincing. His reasons for them being morally wrong is because clearly unqualified candidates are getting jobs over qualified candidates. I think this is less obviously false and perhaps true in some cases, but the reason one might likely find it true in most cases is because we might likely think minorities in women to be unqualified. But why? There are a lot of reasons we might think this: white men are usually doctors and professors, women and minorities tend to test worse, I’ve heard of a case or two where someone just up and handed a woman a job as a doctor. Think about it for a moment: what makes a person qualified? Presumably education, training, commitment, experience, etc. Why can’t women and minorities have all these qualities. Let’s say that on average women and minorities do poorly in school, on tests, etc. Well, those are averages so surely some are doing well and others aren’t. Why should we assume the ones in those positions are the ones doing poorly any more than they might be the ones who succeeded? Nevertheless, Pojman himself states: Fight the feeling how I will, I cannot help wondering on seeing a Black or woman in a position or honor, “Is she in this position because she merits it or because of Affirmative Action?” Of course you could say that his belief that this policy (if it exists) is morally wrong because it is wrong to give unqualified candidates such positions in abstracto, but it’s important to remember that this is not an article about an abstract phenomenon but a concrete one with real people, a real history, and a really unclear assumption about what qualified might mean and who might be actually qualified. Given those factors and the assumptions against blacks, it is hard for me to see how this claim isn’t racist.

Another anonymous writes: “Pojman is clearly not assuming that women and minorities *are* less qualified–let alone that they are *essentially so* in some kind of racist, misogynist sense.” I take it that the force of this claim is the essentialism is important for racism. Sure, I buy that and maybe Pojman doesn’t think blacks and women are essentially unqualified, but all the black doctors under 40 are likely to be unqualified. That sounds suspiciously like Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers, but some, I assume, are good people. So Mexicans aren’t essentially criminal, just too many of them and all the ones coming to the US. We still call that claim racist, don’t we? And quite frankly, the racist part of this particular claim is that he doubts blacks and women can be qualified enough to earn their position unlike whites, who he just takes for granted have always earned their positions. So it’s a lot more complicated than some simple essentialism.

Another Anonymous writes: Sine [sic] nombre doesn’t find the anecdata compelling. Does s/he really think that university HR departments, or search committees are going to go on record saying, “why, yes, we are illegally discriminating against white candidates, males especially”? It’s one thing to say that you don’t find the anecdotal evidence compelling; I don’t find it compelling either. It’s quite another to say that reliance on anecdotal data is racist.

I didn’t say reliance on anecdotal evidence is racist, I said the willingness to belief anecdotal evidence that shows black mischief or injustice that favors blacks over whites is racist. Those are actually part of the base mythologies of white resentment in the US. Think about the “white hands” ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIyewCdXMzk So no, using anecdotal evidence is just bad reasoning, but using particular anecdotal evidence that is steeped in racist traditions is actually racist, even if the author might not recognize it as so. I’m wiling to believe that Pojman never considered whether his assumptions were racist. That doesn’t make them any less racist, that makes them important biases and assumptions to explore and I take it that’s the point of the microaggression concern.

Another Anonymous writes: As a matter of fact, there is empirical evidence that the phenomena Pojman reports for hiring in philosophy does happen in legal academia. See, Merritt and Reskin, “Sex, Race, and Credentials: The Truth about Affirmative Action in Law Faculty Hiring,” Columbia Law Review, vol 97, no 2, (1997): 199-311. Merritt and Reskin find that white women and men of color (but not women of color!) enjoy a modest advantage at location of placement over white men with similar qualifications. (So white women and black men get better jobs than they would have otherwise, but they are not necessarily more likely to get a job at all.)

Important word here is modest and that’s telling since Pojman portrays it as a prevalent phenomenon. Also, this could be because qualified black and women candidates are finally given a fairer shot at a faculty position than before. Maybe they actually earned it?

Lastly, Another Anonymous writes: I haven’t followed these debates and I’m not competent to scrutinize the methodology of Merritt and Reskin, nor do I know if the inference that philosophy might be like law in the relevant respects is a good one. But neither do I know any actual empirical evidence this isn’t the case. (Apparently neither does sine [sic] nombre, else I assume s/he would have cited it.)

Am I misunderstanding this or is this person expecting me to prove a not? If I am misunderstanding you, can you explain to me what sort of empirical data you want me to provide. I am happy to provide the empirical data that shows that there are worrisomely few black and Latino professors of philosophy, or that blacks and Latinos have much higher rates of unemployment (surprising given that they are given all these jobs being denied to qualified whites), or that blacks and Latinos and others are passed over for interviews because of their name.

Arthur Greeves, can you provide examples?

Arthur Greeves,
Could you clarify a few things:
1. How does Person 2’s aggressively telling Person 1 “not to act that way” constitute a microaggression? Perhaps I don’t know what you mean by “aggressively tell.” If a boy and a girl are in the back seat and the boy pulls the girl’s hair and she screams “stop it!” is this a microaggression?
2. Related to 1: how is telling someone to “not to act that way” offensive? I don’t understand this point.
3. I think the point about microaggressions I got from the post is not so much that they are offensive but that they contribute to more concrete harms like psychological stress. In which case, can it be so simple as telling someone how they feel when person 1 says something that constitutes a microaggression?
4. Is your problem with microaggressions or with people who use them or both?
5. Do you have real life examples of this tu quoque problem?
6. I can see how you might conclude that “This is the powerful trying to condescendingly manipulate people into never saying things that will shake up the status quo” but the odd thing here is that, if I understand microaggressions right (and maybe I don’t), they are instituted to protect the least powerful. That generally isn’t what the powerful do. Further, I’m inclined to think that the point of microaggressions is to shake up institutions of power by not just questioning powerful myths but calling them out as fundamentally hostile to diversity. So I guess I would like to hear more on why you think that microaggressions are a tool of the powerful to maintain status quo.

Instead of defining the view that that we live in a meritocracy as a micro-aggression why don’t we instead demonstrate, through argument, that we don’t live in one, or undertake militant action on the assumption that we don’t. The condescension towards students involved in the assumption that they can’t handle hearing about, and responding to, the view that we live in a meritocracy (or the view that the most qualified get a job, etc.) is massive. We should be aiming at instilling in our students intellectual virtues such that they can take part in open agonistic dialogue, to confidently assert their point of view, yet have the strength and forbearance to hear other views and adjust their view accordingly if convinced by them. The discourse around micro-aggressions does not accept this as the proper aim of education as it wishes to put predetermined boundaries on dialogue. For on that view one ought not even proffer the view that we live in a meritocracy as this view is defined in advance as aggressive and hurtful. One’s view about meritocracy should not be determined in dialogue but rather BEFORE dialogue. I am unclear how this is not a threat to an open discourse space. Of course, harassment, bullying, threats, racist taunts, etc. are not acceptable in the university space. But those are different things than being confronted with a view that one disagrees with and might even be hurtful to one.

One of sin nombre’s comments (#6) struck me as odd and troubling: “some professors of color have had their positions imperiled or out-right lost because they’re [sic] speech was perceived racist against whites or even antisemitic.” I’m perturbed by the suggestion that the charge of antisemitism is as ridiculous, if not more so (“*even* antisemitic”), as that of racism against whites (which according to some fairly reasonable definitions of racism is a contradiction in terms). Comments that are generally insulting to white people are not a serious threat to anyone; suggestions that a large group of Jews should be killed are a little disturbing to people who remember that a very large group of Jews was killed not so long ago. I’m concerned that there’s a tendency on the extreme Left (and I’m pretty far left myself) to regard Jews as an especially privileged group of white people, more white than white. We were not always white; racially restrictive housing covenants were applied to “Hebrews,” too.

I know you were talking about the case of Steven Salaita. I also know that it is possible to be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic. I’m not sure Salaita succeeded in keeping that line clear when he tweeted that he hoped all the West Bank settlers would “disappear” in the same way as the three boys who were kidnapped. I don’t know what I think should have happened with his job offer, but I don’t think it was unreasonable for people to be shocked or offended by what he said.

Anon Jewish grad,
Now I’m confused. I thought I wasn’t clear that I was talking about professors of color challenging power structures, but if you already knew who Salaita is and the context of my claim why the charge of me being dismissive of anti-semitism. Salaita’s tweet was: “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing” and I’ll buy that it was a reference to the three boys who were kidnapped, but I don’t understand how we get from there to anti-semitism. I’m not trying to be difficult, but I do think we should recognize that his sentiment is common to other anti-colonial sentiments people have: hoping for their colonial oppressors to go away or just die, etc. I hope for more peaceful solutions in this matter, but I’m having a hard time seeing how this is anti-semitic and not anti-Israeli expansion, which is an illegal expansion that continues today. Could you clarify. Interestingly, in searching for this tweet (I thought he got in trouble for the Netanyahu tweets about a necklace of Palestinian children’s teeth), I found this from mondoweiss: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/reading-salaita-illinois-1#tweet3

About that tweet specifically, the author writes: Moreover, if Salaita had actually wished for the West Bank settlers to be kidnapped, would Nelson find it any worse than a wish for settlers to “drop dead” or “go jump off a cliff”?

sin nombre,

“why the charge of me being dismissive of anti-semitism”: because you were lumping Salaita in with cases of people of color making snarky or socially critical comments about dominant white culture, and thus putting his remarks into the class of criticisms of a group whose dominance puts them beyond the possibility of being legitimately threatened by a subordinate group — which is not true of Jews everywhere. Wishing all the West Bank settlers would pack up and leave (which I do, too) could not possibly be mistaken for advocating violence against a group of Jews; wishing they would “go missing,” with implicit reference to people whose fate was already reasonably clear, could be read that way. (I don’t know about the hypothetical “jump off a cliff” case, but the obvious use of a hyperbolic figure of speech does strike me as less menacing than an allusion to an actual instance of violence.) I somehow missed the “necklace of Palestinian children’s teeth” tweet, but that also looks pretty horrible.

In the context of the rest of his Twitter activity, it seems clear that Salaita is not actually an antisemite, but he should have been more careful about pushing certain buttons with the descendants of European Jews — which fits right in with the general discussion of microaggressions. Anti-colonial sentiments are completely understandable, but educated westerners should also recognize that Israel is unusual as colonial powers go. Absolutely, they are in power on the ground, and the Israeli government has been unjust and oppressive for a long time. But lumping in the existence of the state of Israel with “settler colonialism” worldwide is historically misleading. Unlike the English and the French who colonized parts of Africa and North America, the existence of Jews was precarious when they colonized Palestine, and they are still a hated minority group in many parts of the world. That does not excuse the way the Israeli government has treated the Palestinian population, but it does complicate the standard “they should just get out” response to colonialism (and I mean people living in Israel proper, not in West Bank settlements) — there’s no England or France to go back to. And it adds a different color to threats or advocacy of violence against the colonial occupier: it’s not just “fight the Man,” it’s also “let’s destroy a last remnant of a group that was already mostly destroyed.” Maybe it’s not intended that way, but it reads that way to people who remember different parts of the relevant history.

A different helpful metaphor? https://twitter.com/kissane/status/618832767925809156

Arthur Greeves,

There’s actually a lot of scholarship on the connection between racism and psychological health. I think it is unfair to blame that on one’s self perception as a victim when often people are real victims of racism and psychological abuse. I’m not really qualified to assess this scholarship, but I think dismissing it out of hand like you seem to be doing in your remark to Avi shows a lack of understanding on your part.

I’m not saying the best interpretation of Salaita’s tweet was that it was antisemitic, but that is a possible and not completely insane interpretation. The same issue has been raised with regard to perceived microaggressions: the speaker may not intend them as racist or sexist, and that may not even be the best interpretation, but they can be taken that way, not always unreasonably — and the speaker should be able to anticipate that. The leftist approach to this issue tends to be to give more credit to the interpretation of a member of a historically oppressed group, but Jews don’t count, apparently — I guess because we’re doing OK in the U.S., we generally look white, and we even have our own country now, we’re just paranoid. Of course it matters that the West Bank settlers are Jews, in the same way that it matters that colonial settlers in India were English. Obviously Salaita wanted them gone (perhaps even dead) qua colonial settlers, not qua Jews, but it’s a little difficult to abstract away from the fact that they are also Jews, given that they wouldn’t be considered representative of the colonial power in question if they weren’t. This is why the remark might understandably touch a nerve among Jews everywhere, considering — as I pointed out at length above — the unusual status of Jews vis-a-vis other nationalities that have had colonial settlements. “Context matters” cuts both ways.

I’m not always sure what people mean when they say they’re anti-Zionist. If they mean they’re against illegal expansion of Israeli settlements into Palestinian territory, that’s great, so am I. If they mean they oppose the violent actions of the Israeli government, great, so do I. But if they mean they don’t believe there should be a Jewish state, I think I would need some explanation. For example, people who think there shouldn’t be a Jewish state but supported the Scottish independence referendum or an independent Kurdistan should consider why it’s important for some nationalities but not others to have a state in which they are a self-determining majority. I think the ethnic nation-state is a shitty model, but it is the prevailing model in most of the world, so it’s understandable that Jews in the lead-up to and the wake of the Holocaust felt compelled to seek one out (if only there had actually been a habitable but uninhabited tract of land to establish one…). For the same reason, it’s also not totally unreasonable for Israeli Jews to be worried about becoming the demographic minority in every state where they live, which is what made them so vulnerable in Europe. That is why (in this non-ideal world of nation-states) I support a two-state solution, so that both the Palestinians and the Jews have a state in which they are the self-determining majority.

I agree that charges of antisemitism are thrown at anti-Zionists too freely. But I also think that a great deal of anti-Zionism — at least, as I have seen it expressed, often by my own friends — can be justly accused of historical forgetfulness, which, if it were a question of, say, forgetting the legacy of slavery by calling America a meritocracy, people on the left would not hesitate to call racism. Holocaust denial is definitely antisemitism (and look at some polls — it’s disturbingly common around the world); convenient Holocaust forgetfulness is… something short of that. Perhaps a microaggression? And maybe you can chalk up my initial reaction to your phrasing — “racist against whites or even antisemitic,” as if those two accusations were equivalent — to a perceived microaggression. Apparently I misread your intent. Nonetheless, I am accustomed enough to seeing people dismiss all perceptions of antisemitism as paranoid that I have a bit of a hair trigger about it.

I’m working off the examples in the original post. I see no way that a psychologically healthy person could possibly experience psychological harm from those examples. None whatsoever. There is nothing inherently racist in those expressions.

I am not, to be clear, defending expressions like “Well, coming from a woman, what should you expect?” or “Some cultures are inherently more lazy than others, and you can see that in the demographics.” Those expressions are hurtful in ways that have no possible pedagogical purpose. If a woman or a minority dealt with that environment, they would be worn down and psychologically strained. This sort of thing happens with women in philosophy sometimes — they have to deal with all sort of subtle slights that men don’t, and that is wrong, and it takes its toll.

My objection is that the line being appealed to by the *examples in this post* is way too overprotective. If we apply it equally to other plausibly disadvantaged groups (e.g. Mormons, creationists, hardcore libertarians) we are constantly issuing out unintentional microaggressions.

It strikes me that philosophers are often drawn to formal characterizations of respect. Such characterizations fit nicely with a wide-ranging space of inquiry, and allow for a certain humility about how far the truth might turn out to be from wherever we (now) (personally) find ourselves. But anyone who is attracted to a formal characterization of respect will instantly see how much substantive content is being packed into the idea of a ‘microaggression’ as picked out in these applications (here, the treatment of the ‘melting pot’ line seems especially politically laden).

I suspect that people who are more enthusiastic about microaggressions would have a chance at making more progress if they addressed this concern head-on, e.g. by arguing that the constraints they’re bringing in are not just based in truth (which is kind of off topic) but also no more substantive than other constraints we already accept, or by arguing that the idea of a discourse structured by formal notions of respect is a myth, or…

My comparative religion courses would probably be microaggressive towards most of the Bible Belt students who took them, because I wouldn’t let them rebut all of the other world religions with “…but The Bible says…”

Also, I’m deeply bothered by the microaggression in the title of the film White Men Can’t Jump.

The issue of micro-aggressions can be lumped together with gay marriage, the confederate flag, religious freedom, polygamy, in that what is being debated are the social boundaries in which we interact. Where do we draw the lines? No one is going to be truly traumatized by someone else saying, “America is a melting pot.” The dynamic, instead, is a debate over who asserts the authority to shut down the speech of others, and how/why. The objection is what is going on is not about dialogue, but assertions of control.

I’m a white man married to a black woman. My kids are black. However, we lived in South Korea for ten years, and I have to say to the person who said a “reasonable” definitions of racism not including racism against white has probably not spent any significant time in any non-majority white country. Racism is using “race” in a given societal power paradigm to subjugate and restrict anyone outside of whatever privileged societal class. In the United States, that is white, but not in Korea, Japan, China, etc. (Twenty-five years as an American living outside the U.S. in distinctly non-“masters-of-the-universe jobs” I could go on from personal testimony about observed racism on at least four continents.)

My wife is a coloured South African. Most of the people reading this will have to refer to Wikipedia to understand what “coloured” means in South African context. She came of age when apartheid fell. In America, however, she’s black. All distinction lost. Where exactly does she fit into the scheme of things?

Most people reading my response here are going to be white, educated, and have achieved a certain amount of cachet in academic circles, whatever background. Sorry, but guilt in the privilege of the accident of birth is palpable sometimes on this blog.

Yes, white guilt. Is that a micro-aggression?

I went to elementary school in Dhaka, Bangladesh, middle school on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona, all four years of high school in Lima, Peru. I went to war in Iraq. I deal every single day with veterans and their families from World War II on forward, and I give everyone proper respect.

Yes, I am the white son of a Johns Hopkins professor, but it’s been a hell of a ride.

If you de-couple intent from statement, you can twist the accusation to be about anything. Then it becomes about control, not truth. That’s the problem with the concept of “micro-aggression.” I can reasonably assert I have experienced, or witnessed or directly know people who have seen the very worst of humanity. I’ll let others argue semantics.

My children were born in South Korea, but they will NEVER be considered Korean in any way, shape or form. And perhaps that is the point of the “melting pot.” My wife, who is working on her American citizenship is not trying to “forget” where she came from. It’s not denying whatever heritage for anyone, it’s acknowledging what we are or have become: American. Why is nationalism a pejorative compared to racial, ethnic, gender, sexual or religious identity? Why is everything BUT national identity supposedly more fundamental?

A few people have asserted claims to the effect that whether or not something is a microaggression is determined entirely by the hearer. The contrast was once identified (implicitly, at least) as between objective standards (intent of speaker) and subjective (experience of listener). Not sure why the intent of the speaker is any more objective? But that’s not my main point. I think the point of identifying something as a microaggression is supposed to be that it meets an objective standard. Something like “does the statement cause harm/perpetuate imbalanced power relations”.

In practice, whether or not a statement meets the objective standard is often determined by the putative target/victim, who typically occupies a less privileged position in a social hierarchy. Given some deference to the experience of such people, their claiming that something is a microaggression may often count as sufficient evidence that it is. Maybe that’s a bad thing, maybe not (depends on how you feel about standpoint epistemology or something?) but it’s not built into the notion of microaggressions. The framework aspires to an objective definition, but the epistemic standard for determining whether they meet it or not tends to presuppose more epistemic authority for the marginalized. Even so, if I say “it’s raining outside” or “my dog eats dog food” and someone occupying a less privileged position in a social hierarchy accuses me of committing a microaggression, most people will probably not buy it because it’s hard to see how that could plausibly meet an objective standard of causing harm or perpetuating injustice (at least, absent an argument). On the other hand, if I say “Well, coming from a woman, what should you expect?” and no one around is offended, it’s still a microaggression. It meets the objective standard no matter how anyone feels about it.

Whether Justanotherprof’s examples are of non-microaggressions identified as microaggressions, or genuine but extremely subtle microaggressions, I won’t comment on. But if the former, it’s because they fail to meet the objective standard of genuinely causing harm, and if the latter it’s because they meet it. Questions of how we assign epistemic authority, thorny as they are, are distinct from whether or not “microaggression” picks out a genuine agent of harm that ought to be addressed.

Here’s an interesting article on CHE: http://m.chronicle.com/article/Campus-Diversity-Efforts/231233/

The general theme is that diversity efforts need to focus more on class in addition to race, heritage, ethnicity, etc. This seems to me a legitimate viewpoint, although I am not sure that I agree with it. Still, if seemingly innocuous sayings like “America is a melting pot” count as “micro-aggressions”, then it seems to me that general theme of this article counts as one too. Here, I’ll fill in an entry for a micro-aggressions chart to illustrate, borrowing heavily from that which was released by University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point:

Theme: Color Blindness – statements that indicates that a white person does not want to acknowledge race
Micro-aggression: “What we should really talk about is class”
Message: Deying the individual’s racial/ethnic experience, denying the reality of racial oppression.

Is this an uncharitable interpretation of the above CHE article? Surely. But it’s just as uncharitable as some of the outrageous interpretations of innocuous phrases now declared verboten by certain administrations. No doubt someone out there feels micro-aggressed by the above CHE article, but this just shows that the concept of a micro-aggression is objectionably over-broad. Obviously, if the viewpoint expressed in this article or if it’s publication counts as a micro-aggression, then that is problematic.

In the article in the OP, most of the statements that are used as examples of microaggression just so happen to be the kinds of things that conservatives think. Why might that be troubling? Conservatives and conservative ideas are marginalized at most universities. A recent study found that a majority of psychologists admitted that they would explicit discriminate against a conservative in hiring. Political psychology in general finds that our implicit bias against people with different political beliefs is stronger than our implicit bias against people of other races–we’re more partyist than we are racist. (And high information voters, like college professors, tend to be even more partyist than average.)

So, there’s something unseemly and ironic about this. Let’s make sure we pass rules aggressing against marginalized conservative beliefs in order to make sure conservatives don’t upset other people.

(Note: I am not a conservative, so I don’t take this personally. But it sure does look like the attempt to regulate “micro aggressions” is for the most part a power-play with the goal of further excluding conservatives from campuses. Now we don’t even have to debate them. We can just call them aggressors. Hooray for us liberals.)