Racism isn’t always an overt display of prejudiced behavior or language. Microaggression is a term coined by Chester Middlebrook Pierce and it describes small acts and subtle behavior between people of different races that could potentially be interpreted as racially biased.
Dr. Keith Johnson, a sociologist at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois, is studying microagression.
Keith Johnson is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Oakton Community College. An empirical sociologist, Dr. Johnson earned his PhD from Syracuse University. His primary research interested include occupations and professions, uses and misuses of statistics and methodology, and social problems. He has worked and taught in the United States, Canada and Venezuela.
Keith Johnson – Microaggresion
Recent public attention to an unaddressed social problem, âmicroaggression,â has highlighted an obscure psychological concept: that minority individuals who receive slights or slurs are victims of aggression. A recent New York Times front page article finds the concept is appearing on campuses nationally.
I used a Diversity Survey about personal experiences with eight such awkward interactions. My findings from 400 college students and families have been unexpected and question the concept.
First, almost as many white majority respondents report experiences of cross-racial slights as do minorities. Second, there is little difference in how they are perceived across racial lines. Although minorities report somewhat more âracism,â most donât attribute a bad experience to racism or hate.
The ones most likely to report microaggressions are young people who see them more as racist. More are minorities. It may be that they are more likely to experience racism, but many young whites have a similar response. It is also counterintuitive to have younger people report more life experiences.
Now those who respond aggressively to these perceived slights, are also young people, reporting more bad experiences, seeing them as racist, and being minorities. This supports my hypothesis that microaggression is a two-way street with people who think they are victims acting aggressively themselves.
I conclude that microaggression, as commonly used, is not a scientific concept.  It reifies perceptual bias, through a one-sided view of two-sided interaction.
Comments
2 responses to “Keith Johnson, Oakton Community College – Microaggression”
Can you share your research here? The survey you used? Are you asserting that there is no difference in the experiences of those who might be considered part of a minority group and those who are not?
I’d be interested in your reading this blog: http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2014/06/clarion-inn-at-syracuse-incompetence.html
And tell me what you would call that experience of having the people at the hotel look to his son instead of him again and again, being unprepared for a visitor with a disability and leading the person to an entrance with stairs. Or take the experience of another friend of mine (who happens to have a doctoral degree) who was flying with a colleague and when they landed the employee of the airline looked at her colleague and said, “Do you want to get her or should I?”
Or how about the experience of people who are gay who, if they are not being told they are going to hell, are instead told that “everyone sins” implying that being gay in and of itself is a sin. Or how about this phrase, “I love you in spite of your being gay.”
All of these statements show a bias, not just toward the individual, but toward a group of people with that lived experience.
I recognize that the root cause in some cases is ignorance–as in lack of knowledge–but these repeated experiences are real and the frustration that they cause is cumulative. Perhaps micro-insults would be a better term in the cases above. And I use the term “insults” in a similar way that it is used medically. These repeated insults leave a mark.
I don’t know any nondisabled people who have those experiences. Or any straight people who do.
I’d be interested in how you might explain them.
Thanxx uploader