Here's what racial microaggressions look like in everyday life
When Toronto post-secondary instructor Juanita Stephen stands behind the podium, preparing to lecture on the first day of class each year, she can expect the same type of reaction from a number of her students.
“Sometimes they’ll say things to me, or I can hear them talking amongst themselves,” she said. “They’ll wonder out loud who the professor is, or they’ll meet me and I'll introduce myself and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I thought you were a student.’”
Stephen, who is also a PhD student specializing in women and gender studies, with a focus on Black feminist theories and practices of care, said that as a Black woman, she experiences microaggressions all the time, but this is a recurring example that sticks out in her mind.
Peter Amponsah, an academic administrator at Sheridan College whose work focuses on anti-oppression and anti-Black racism, defines microaggressions as “day-to-day explicit or sometimes ruthless acts directed at racialized bodies that signal to them messages of not being wanted, not fitting in, not being part of the larger structures.”
There are many examples of what this looks like. According to "Racial microaggressions in everyday life," a journal on microaggressions published by the American Psychological Association, it includes the following:
• Assuming a racialized person was born elsewhere (this includes asking questions like “Where are you from?” or telling them they speak English well)
• Attributing a certain level of intelligence to a racialized person, based on their race
• Using statements of colour-blindness like “I don’t see colour” or “We’re all the same”
• Assuming a person is more likely to be involved in criminal activity based on their race (this includes holding a purse closer to your body or crossing the street when a person of a certain race is approaching you)
• Denying one’s own racism using statements like “I have Black friends, so I’m not racist”
• Rejecting that race plays a role in people’s success in life; this includes saying things like “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”
• Acting upon a belief that the cultural norms of white races are superior to others (for example, telling people of certain races they speak too loud)
In Stephen’s case, she said students will often justify their reactions to finding out she is the course instructor by telling her she “looks really young.”
She said that while this response may appear to be innocent, it actually stems from years and years of white supremacy that institutions are still rooted in today.
“The institutions of higher education were not built with Black and Indigenous people intended to be any part of that system,” she said, adding that post-secondary spaces are still assumed to be white spaces.
“So when I’m there, people can’t make the connection, like it’s not possible that I am the professor in the room, because I’m Black. It’s something that doesn’t match up for people.”
Amponsah said that while microaggressions have been embedded in everyday life for a long time, what has changed recently is the language around it, which allows racialized people to quantify their experiences.
Stephen agrees, adding that the issues currently being spotlighted in Canada and around the world regarding police brutality, anti-Black violence and anti-Indigenous violence are nothing new.
“I don’t actually think there’s a lack of awareness; I think it’s a lack of willingness to recognize that racism is endemic to the Canadian national identity,” she said.
“So when people say ‘I didn’t realize that was a problem,’ or ‘I didn’t mean anything by it,’ that’s because white supremacy is so ubiquitous here that people don’t even recognize it as an issue.”
She said that as a society, we often believe that racism shows up in a particular way and that microaggressions are often thought to be insignificant or innocent.
“The micro part of it just means it happens on the micro system level – interpersonally as opposed to systemically,” she added. “So it’s still blatant, it’s still injurious, it’s still racist.”
Amponsah said there should not be an onus on the racialized person to respond to microaggressions or to operate through an individual resiliency model.
“We have to name what microaggressions we are allowing to manifest, which is unfortunately oppressive, supremacist regimes. And the mechanisms that those regimes operate with, those are the inner workings,” he said. “Large institutions need to go through a process of truth-telling and shedding some of this weight.”
Stephen said that in order to truly see change in our institutions, the diversity and inclusion piece is not enough, as it just adds racialized bodies to places that were built upon white supremacist ideologies.
“There needs to be a collective imagining of what that would look like,” she said. "And the answer can’t come from any one particular person.”