Microaggressions: One Challenge We All Have In Common
BIPOC, LGBTQ+, or Women, we all face this challenge. And we've got to name it.
“You’re gay? But you don’t act like a girl.”
“You speak so well.”
“I wish I had an ass like a black girl.”
“No but where are you from? Okay but where are your parents from?”
“I act blacker than you.”
“How can you not speak Spanish?! You’re Mexican! You mean you’re not Mexican? What are you?”
The quotes above are microaggressions. Assuming Latinx people can’t speak, fetishizing a black girl’s butt, telling a black guy you’re blacker than him because you listen to more hip hop, or being told upon revealing you’re queer that you act surprisingly “straight” for a queer guy. These are little things that we all hear at least once a day that dehumanize and, importantly, compound to chip away at our self-worth and self-esteem.
What’s so frustrating about microaggressions is that people--it is widely theorized--don’t know they’re engaging in the behavior, and it’s theoretically “not a big deal”, so it is incredibly hard to bring up. You’d almost have to start by educating them on what a microaggression is, and no one has time for all that. And sometimes we just feel safer and saner not bringing it up.
For this article I want take the spotlight off black and queer people and put it on people who also deal with a lot of microaggressions but are spoken of less in the media: Latinx and Asian Pacific Islander. Let’s start with Latinx.
In a Psychology Benefits study, 98% of participants reported experiencing a microaggression within six months prior to the study. It also showed that Latinas experienced more school and work discrimination than Latinos. Latinx women also reported being highly exoticized, which of course the men did not face. Exoticization of women is an intersectional layer. A Latinx man will be disparaged in many of the same ways as a Latinx woman, but for women there is also a sexual (read: power) element added into the microaggressions they face.
Another intersectional layer is the immigrant experience, and indeed Latinx people born outside of the U.S. reported more microaggressions than Latinx people born in America, according to the study. They were “treated as inferior” far more often. Often, an accent and language barrier makes Americans quick to write someone off. As someone who had four grandparents that were the children of immigrants, that hurts. Imagine Italian people hadn’t been grandfathered into whiteness. I imagine it often, because I think of my great grandparents with their thick accents and contrast that with the way they found their place in America--something that’s not widely available to Latinx people and immigrants at the moment.
In a study of Asian-American microaggressions, they found commonplace microaggressions that had the capacity to be pretty damaging: “Some examples of racial microaggressions include (a) teachers who ignore students of color, (b) taxi drivers who fail to pick up passengers of color, or (c) airport security personnel screening passengers of color with greater frequency and care.”
I need an anecdotal interlude. I have seen teachers treat students of color with extreme prejudice my whole life. While my bad white friends could walk out of class and spend entire 90-minute blocks just walking around campus, while they could be loud and rude and disruptive, while we could doodle and chat through geometry, my BIPOC friends did not have this luxury. They were immediately spotted and harassed if they were the ones walking around campus during class. And I’m not sure I had a single teacher who did not favor their white students. Teachers also withhold extra help from Asian students because they believe they don’t need it or deserve it, that they already have a leg up.
In second grade, a lot of white kids cried like banshees over everything. Because they were seven. But the only kid my teacher ever dragged out by her braids was a kind but emotional black girl who--I’m just going to editorialize--probably, at age seven, did not deserve to be dragged across the carpet and ground for crying, as kids do. She did this weekly. As I got older, I saw the frightening parallel to the lynchings of the early 1900s south. I never forgot that girl.
And, wanna talk about real educational and institutional discrimination? I didn’t even see a student of color at UC Santa Barbara. They did not want them, they did not admit them. But the pressing reason students of color had no presence at my university was because of all that educational racism they faced from age seven on. It stunts success. We all need mentorship, but in America we don’t all get it.
This quote from an Asian-American student hurt: Lauren Siesky said, “When I was little, I didn’t even realize that some of the stereotypical comments and remarks about Asians were racist because no one really cared.” Another intersectional moment appears here: I had no idea all the homophobic nonsense I heard in my education was, in fact, homophobic nonsense. You age. You learn. You rage.
Student Reet Sangroula takes us back to the immigrant intersection: “I experienced racism at a young age coming to America with foreign parents who weren’t really fluent in the [English] language.” This overlaps in our venn diagram with the Latinx immigrant experience, and underscores the negative assumptions Americans have about people with accents who haven’t mastered English. It is interesting (and--say it with me now--intersectional) that both Latinx and Asian immigrants experience this parallel discrimination.
Making it more interesting is that Asian Americans suffer from the “Model Minority Myth”, equating them with general and academic perfection, while Latinx people deal with another myth, which could only be called the “Dumb Immigrant” myth. While Asians are believed widely to be suited for academic success and desk or tech jobs and Latinx people are believed most suited for manual labor, as immigrants they are both discriminated against in at least one major, similar way. In this way they are dehumanized and made fun of for their accents and imperfect English, and written off as inferior. This is what microaggressions do. They are meant to dehumanize, inferiorize, and justify racism. So when an immigrant is made fun of for their accent, it has real implications because that immigrant could very well react by going out and interacting less, making it even harder for them to adjust to their new country.
It is true, in this social justice activist’s opinion, that Asian Americans are often treated like their racial struggle doesn’t really matter, that they’re successful so why fight for their racial equality? We’ve got to look at them in conjunction with every other group: like black and Latinx people, they are discriminated against at school (in the reverse: teachers hamper their success to even the footing with their precious white students); like all of us marginalized groups, they face dehumanization, often through microaggressions; and like women, they are expected to be perfect.
Microaggressions can be big or small, but either way hurt people. From institutional discrimination to simply rude conversation, microaggressions take away a marginalized person’s power, and not just in that split second. These take away more and more power, leaving you with less self-efficacy and self-trust, the more and more you hear them. Sometimes they disempower you, sometimes they disadvantage you. And they are always--always--up to you to deal with how you see fit. Call it out or don’t. Avoid that person or don’t. Just know you can choose how to deal with it. In that, you still have power.