Microaggressions are a symptom of a much larger problem in our thought process. First of all, the only thing small about microaggressions is the amount of thought the person who says them gives to what they are saying. A “small” comment about how someone is a “credit to their race,” for example, has a big impact. It means that that person is an exception to the rule of a whole group of people being lesser. That is a big responsibility — and a big lie.
And what does it mean when a person says something like that? It means that they are full of hate, right? That, too, may be a misconception.
Right now, we think of racism as a problem with individual people. Ignorance and/or hate creates racist ideas, which makes racist policies. Where does that hate and those ideas come from, though? Everything that we know has been taught to us. It is part of our socialization: our induction into society.
Something that is not socialized, however, is the desire to keep power among those who have it. Thus, on Otelia Cromwell Day, November 7, 2019, associate professor of education and child study Shannon Audley and psychology professor Nnamdi Pole presented an alternate route to racism. The desire to keep power leads to racist policies. In order to justify those racist policies, racist ideas are propagated.
Their theory is far from the only alternative view of racism, but it does spotlight a fundamental truth about racism: “Racist” is a current state, not a permanent condition.
There is something unsettling about that. If racism is an illness in individual people, then those people can be cast out. The contagion, so to say, can be contained. The far more complex reality, though, is this: If racism is an illness, it is already airborne. The United States was built on racism: the belief that the people of color who lived on the continent were not as worthy of life as white settlers, the notion that black lives can be bought and sold to maintain the system of economics that put white people on top, and many more.
In such a toxic environment, then, it is not a matter of if a microaggression will be committed. It is a matter of when. And when that microaggression is committed, the intentions of the person who said it do not matter. It does not matter that it was a “compliment.” If the person feels minimized, that is not small.
The process to heal is not small either. First, the person who committed the microaggression must be made aware of their error. The person might get defensive, but even that is not necessarily an act of hatred. Especially if a person has never been confronted about their behavior before, facing a fundamental flaw in not only one’s own thinking but realizing that their whole world is susceptible is frightening. Next, the person who committed the microaggression must adjust their behavior, so the wound is not re-opened. Then, that person must try to repair the relationship.
Pole, who is black, emphasized that while it is no one’s responsibility to remain in a relationship that has hurt them, forgiveness can be a powerful tool in the healing process, if the person has put in the work to change their behavior.
Change is work, but it is work worth doing in order to heal a world that seems to be defined by division.
