Look How Fast “Microaggressions” Became Dogma
Look How Fast “Microaggressions” Became Dogma
The Mainstreaming of an Obscure Academic Term
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Now for quick word on today’s essay …
In recent years, I have become convinced that the rise of “microaggression training” is one of the most destructive features of the modern cultural landscape.
Those of you who have seen The Coddling movie witnessed the powerful way framed the issue. As a college student, she was taught to seek out microaggressions during every waking moment. It made her miserable.
She eventually realized that her pain was coming from how she was interpreting the world. She came to a crucial insight: Instead of other people harming her, she was harming herself.
She said it was like stabbing herself with tiny knives.
Here’s how she put it in the movie:
Back then, when I was steeped in woke ideology, I was full of fear, full of anxiety. Now that I'm out of that and I'm thinking for myself, I'm much happier, I'm at peace.
If I had continued in the woke mindset today, I probably would be an alcoholic. I also most likely would have become homeless because I couldn't function and I can't stress how serious that was. You would have like 1000 daggers in you by the end of the day. It just feels like tiny knives stuck in you.
So how did all of this happen so quickly?
How did terms like “microaggressions” get mainstreamed so quickly?
In today’s essay, I examine how the term spread throughout academia. Next week, in part 2, I’ll examine its rapid rise throughout pop culture.
All the best,
Ted
Teen Vogue publishes an explainer called “What Decolonization Is, and What It Means to Me,” People magazine tackles intersectionality, and over at Netflix former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick muses about microaggressions.
Decolonization. Intersectionality. Microaggressions.
A short while ago, such terms were mostly confined to the jargon-heavy halls of academia, but today celebrities and entertainment publications invoke them and know that their audiences will probably understand their meaning.
Today’s teenagers speak like sociology TAs—it’s a most unlikely development.
Academia produces more than 1 million peer reviewed articles each year, most of which are ignored by nearly everyone on earth. Average readership varies by discipline and other factors, so calculating an overall average is tricky.
But the academics Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchher took a stab at it: “We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people.”
Ten!
The authors note that “impacts of most peer-reviewed publications even within the scientific community are minuscule.”
Such publications are an even harder sell to the general public because academic publishing seems designed to be ignored by outsiders.
Thirty bucks to read one article!
And even if you do hand over your credit card number, you quickly confront another obstacle—inscrutable jargon and some of the most punishing prose humanity has ever produced.
You’re probably not eager to add this title to your reading list: “Disrupting and Displacing Methodologies in STEM Education: from Engineering to Tinkering with Theory for Eco-Social Justice.”
Yet against all odds, certain academic terms penetrate pop culture, not just deeply, but quickly.
Google’s Ngram Viewer is a search engine that produces visual depictions of the frequency of a term's use over time.
Below I’ve included Ngram results from 1990 to 2018 for the following terms: decolonize, intersectional, implicit bias, and microaggression.
The slopes steepen around 2012 or 2014, and then shoot upward.
Consider the term “microaggression.”
Although it was coined by a Harvard professor in the 1970s, it lay dormant until 2007. That year it was popularized by an article by Derald Wing Sue, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College.
The concept became so popular that in January 2017 Perspectives on Psychological Science published a literature review by psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld titled “Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.”
Lilienfeld observes that what he calls the “microaggression research program (MRP)” has “spread to numerous college campuses and businesses.”
[I]t is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application. I conclude with 18 suggestions for advancing the scientific status of the MRP, recommend abandonment of the term “microaggression,” and call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.
Jonathan Haidt responded later that same year.
Haidt praised Lilienfeld’s contribution and pointed out how microaggression training contradicts ancient wisdom, from the Buddists to the stoics to Jesus:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? … You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Matthew 7:3–5)
Haidt asserted that the microaggression program “may be the least wise idea one can find on a college campus today” since it trains students “to react with pain and anger to ever-smaller specks that they learn to see” in the eyes of everyone they encounter.
Haidt called for a swift response: