April 18, Priscilla Lui, SMU psychology professor, for a piece (updated from an earlier version) acknowledging the existence of micro-aggressive behavior and hate incidents that have links to systemic racism, and to which she offered suggestions to help alleviate this behavior. Published in Inside Sources: https://bit.ly/3mYif9g
Many people have heard “microaggression,” but how many understand what it really means or looks like?
- Wrongfully assuming that an African American student must have been admitted to a prestigious university because of an athletic scholarship, rather than academic merits.
- Asking a Latina business executive to bring coffee or help clean up an office, as if she was a custodial staffer.
- Insisting an Asian American person is a foreign immigrant, and then concluding the Asian American is “oversensitive” when they react negatively after that assumption.
Such examples of microaggression are more than cultural and racial naïveté. They often are racism in disguise, weekly impacting 80 percent of Asian Americans, and likely other people of color, according to psychological research. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Asian American people, in particular, have experienced increasing frequency and severity of everyday slights and attacks.
Continue reading “Microaggression, Isolated Hate, and Systemic Racism”