theatlantic | The study that might have put to rest much of the recent agitation about microaggressions has unfortunately never been published. Microaggressions, for those who are not up on the recent twists and turns of American public discourse, are the subtle prejudices found even in the most liberal parts of our polity. They are revealed when a lecturer cites mainly male sources and no gay ones, when we use terms such as “mankind,” or when we discuss what Michelle Obama wore when she visited pandas in China, something we would not note about a man. In short, they are the current obsession of political correctness squads.
The study that I believe could have helped a great deal was conducted
by a research assistant of mine at Columbia University who disappeared
before she completed her Ph.D. Carolyn (I am withholding her last name
in order to acknowledge her without embarrassing her) asked members of
80 groups in New York City what they felt about other such groups. She
avoided broad strokes and asked not about divisions between black and
white, but what African Americans felt about Africans from Nigeria and
blacks from the West Indies. She asked Hispanics about Dominicans,
Haitians, Mexicans, and Cubans, and so on.
What Carolyn found was that there was little love lost between any
two groups. Members of all the 80 groups she studied attached all kind
of unflattering labels to members of other groups, even if they were of
the same race or ethnic group. When she interviewed members of
subgroups, they were unsparing about each other. German Jews felt that
Jews of Polish origin were very uncouth (and surely would not want their
daughter to marry one or to share a synagogue with them). The Polish
Jews, in turn, felt that those of German background were stuck up and
“assimilated,” and hence one was best off crossing to the other side of
the street if they neared. Iraqis from Basra considered those from
Baghdad to be too modern, and those from Baghdad considered their
brothers and sisters from Basra as provincial—and so on and so on. Today
they would all be called at least microaggressive.
None of this is surprising to sociologists, who have long held that
one major way community cohesion is promoted is by defining it against
out-groups—and that there is a strong psychological tendency to
attribute positive adjectives to an in-group and negatives on to the
outsiders. In short, it’s part—not a pretty part—of human nature, or at
least social nature. Choose any group and you will find its members
griping about all the others.
I hence urge those who are troubled by the ways others talk about
them to use Carolyn’s findings as a baseline. That is, not to ignore
slurs and insults, and most certainly not racial, ethnic, or any other
kind of prejudices, but merely to “deduct” from them what seems to be
standard noise, the normal sounds of human rambling. We may wish for a
world in which people say only kind things about each other, but until
we get there, we should not take umbrage at every negative note or
adjective that is employed. For now, that is something most of us
do—yes, I suspect even those who rail against microaggression.
