Conceptual Preliminaries

First we need to clarify some features of the microaggression concept itself. The term originated in the work of Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce (Reference Pierce and Barbour1970), who focused on cases of racial microaggression against African Americans by whites. Pierce theorized that American whites are socialized to expect deference from African Americans and to react with hostility when it is not forthcoming. Many whites do not display this hostility openly, and may not even be consciously aware of it, but it is unconsciously expressed in minor acts of presumption or insult.

Pierce offered the following example: he, a Harvard professor, frequently found presumptuous white undergraduates telling him how he ought to arrange his lectures or his classroom. As Pierce saw it, ‘The student is on the initiative and sees as his usual prerogative with a black that he must instruct me and order me about and curb my own inclinations and independence.’ (Pierce Reference Pierce and Barbour1970: 277)

Though a student ordering his teacher around is insulting and obnoxious, as an isolated act it is yet not a case of injustice. Pierce's point is that, for African Americans, insulting acts are often not isolated. Pierce reports that he received this treatment from more than one white student. Each case was part of a pattern, a predictable regularity of reminders that he was viewed by many white students as less worthy of respect than his white colleagues.

It is this pattern that changes an isolated insult into a harmful oppressive act, following Marilyn Frye's influential conception of life under oppression: ‘the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systemically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction’ (Frye Reference Frye1983: 4). Pierce wrote as a clinical psychiatrist, not a social justice theorist, but the idea is clear when he says:

So an individual microaggression is not simply an insult. It is one constituent of a pattern of similar insults, linked together by derogation of the victim's race, gender, and so on. This pattern is distributed across both time and social context. It would be one thing to have an enemy, some one person who dislikes you and insults you whenever you meet. It is something different to be routinely insulted by many different people: acquaintances, strangers, even family or friends—especially when those insults are linked to stable traits such as gender, ethnicity, or disability status. What makes microaggression distinctively harmful is victims’ awareness that each instance is not an isolated accident. It will happen again and again and again. Further, these minor insults are linked to vast social harms through their participation in systemic oppression and structural injustice (Young Reference Young2013). Derald Wing Sue, a psychologist who has done more than anyone to bring public attention to microaggression, puts it like this:

An example may help to distinguish microaggression from mere insult. When I was a prospective graduate student, visiting departments to decide where to go for my PhD, I was introduced to a certain very famous philosopher. This philosopher knew I had done my undergraduate degree at Georgetown. Standing amid a circle of prospective students, he offhandedly said, ‘The interesting thing about Washington, DC, is that, unlike the other world capitals, it doesn't have any very good universities.’ He then looked straight at me, evidently curious how I would react. The other prospective students turned nervously to stare.

The famous philosopher insulted me, apparently deliberately. This was obnoxious and strange behavior and perhaps mildly harmful to me at the time. But it was not a microaggression, because it was not part of a pattern of systemic oppression. I have had few other experiences of being insulted on account of my status as a Georgetown graduate. It is not something I expect to happen routinely. There is no history of widespread social derogation directed at Hoyas.

The situation would be different if this famous philosopher had chosen to insult, off-handedly, my gender or ethnic heritage. When an insult is related to a category of social oppression, the target reasonably connects it to a pattern of similar insults, and the effects are typically much stronger than a mere isolated insult. The concentrated harm of microaggression arises from the existence of this background pattern, not from intrinsic features of any one microaggressive act. Sue (Reference Sue2010: chapter 5) sorts these harms into biological stressors (bodily exhaustion) and psychological stressors (aversion to microaggressive situations). He cites evidence suggesting that long-term exposure to these stressors has a measurable negative impact on physical and mental well-being.

I am belaboring this point because it will be crucial to everything else I say in this paper. We need to keep in mind that when we ask how a victim ought to respond to a microaggression, we are not asking how they ought to respond simply to a single isolated incident. We are asking how they ought to respond to an incident which they know to be just one piece in a much larger pattern. We are now in a position to see what is wrong with the first popular view on how to respond to microaggression.

The ‘Thicker Skin’ Prescription

Recently, many writers have claimed that the appropriate response to microaggression is, in effect, to grow a thicker skin. In a September 2015 cover story in The Atlantic, campus speech activist Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote the following:

The thicker skin prescription gets microaggression wrong in at least two ways. First, it ignores the systematicity of microaggression. Lukianoff and Haidt make the tritely correct point that students should learn to shrug off isolated insults. But that is not what microaggressions are. Lukianoff and Haidt focus on the ‘small or accidental’ aspects of particular microaggressive acts, omitting the role that any particular microaggression plays in a larger pattern. It is a well-established point from the literature on oppression that a consistent pattern of small, accidental insults adds up to much more than the sum of its parts and that we miss the point when we try to see any one manifestation in isolation.

A second problem with the thicker skin prescription is its overemphasis on the motives of microaggression perpetrators. Lukianoff and Haidt stress this when they insist that victims should ‘give people the benefit of the doubt’. The thought is that most microaggression perpetrators do not intend to cause harm, and therefore it is inappropriate to react with anger or moral censure. I will say much more about this thought later, but for now I want only to stress the misleading oversimplicity of this account of microaggressors’ motives.

When Pierce first coined the term, reflecting concerns of psychiatric theory of the late 1960s, it was essential to the definition of microaggression that perpetrators were enacting unconscious aggression.Footnote ⁴ But contemporary usage of the term does not insist upon this psychiatric claim; for social justice theorists and activists, the key focus is on how victims of microaggression are affected, regardless of the motives of perpetrators. This is consistent with a recent trend in social philosophy away from attention on individual motives and responsibility and toward attention to systemic harms and systemic solutions (see, for instance, Saul [Reference Saul2013] on implicit bias or Zheng [Reference Zheng2016a]) on racial fetishization).

For example, a publication on microaggression by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said that ‘students of color reported feeling uncomfortable just walking into or sitting in the classroom, especially if they were the only person of color, or one of a few’ (Harwood et al. Reference Harwood2015: 7). This is an example of what Sue calls ‘environmental’ microaggressions: ‘demeaning and threatening social, educational, political, or economic cues that are communicated individually, institutionally, or socially to marginalized groups’ (Sue Reference Sue2010: 25). In cases like these, the microaggression does not appear to be caused by any determinate individual, so it is implausible to make claims about motives. (Of course, the absence of people of color from university classrooms does have nonrandom systemic causes, ultimately rooted in individual choices that may be motivated by unconscious racial aggression. The point is only that in this case, unlike in the cases of microaggression Pierce discussed, there is no particular microaggressor proximate to the situation.)

All of this shows how Lukianoff and Haidt are confused about the importance of motives. They appear to think that microaggression victims falsely believe that perpetrators act from hostile motives. Since there (often) are no such motives, a negative emotional response is inappropriate. But contemporary accounts of microaggression do not assume any such motives. Though microaggressions can arise through intentional hostility, they can also happen through the accumulation of unwitting individual contributions to social oppression.

We can now put these two points together to see why the thicker skin prescription is misguided. It claims that victims should treat microaggressions as accidental insults, toughen up, and move on. The implicit argument is something like this:

The problem with this argument is the first premise. As we have seen, microaggressions are not mere accidental insults; they are situated within systemic oppression in a way that makes them unlike mere accidents. This means that we can agree that premise 2 is correct—Lukianoff and Haidt erroneously think we have simply failed to understand it—but set it aside as irrelevant. The question now is whether it is ever appropriate to react with anger or moral censure to patterned actions that contribute to systemic oppression. If so, then the thicker skin prescription is wrong.

Anger and Tactical Quiescence

There is a strong argument to be made that anger is not only an appropriate response to microaggression but is perhaps the appropriate response. If microaggression involves a type of disrespectful harm via oppression, then why should victims not respond just as they do to other forms of disrespect? Many philosophers, influenced by Strawson (Reference Strawson1962), see angry evaluative reactions to mistreatment as a way of upholding moral respect for both the perpetrator (as a responsible agent) and the victim (as deserving of respect.) Jeffrie Murphy, for examples, writes: ‘the primary value defended by the passion of resentment is self-respect … a person who does not resent moral injuries done to him … is almost necessarily a person lacking in self-respect’ (Murphy and Hampton Reference Murphy and Hampton1990: 16).Footnote ⁵

Following this line of thinking, we can frame a second common view about responses to microaggression, which I will call the righteous anger prescription. On this view, anger is always an appropriate response to microaggression, perhaps even a positively recommended response. The righteous anger prescription appears less frequently in print than does the thicker skin prescription, but it has many proponents among activist communities. (One nearby scholarly example is Tschaepe [Reference Tschaepe2016], who builds on the work of Audre Lorde to argue for a positive role for anger in response to microaggression.)

Unlike the thicker skin prescription, the righteous anger prescription is not confused about what microaggressions are. However, I think that it moves too quickly from the correct observation that microaggressions involve disrespectful harm to the conclusion that anger is the right response. In some cases, anger may not serve the interests of microaggression victims, even if it is otherwise justified.

To see the point, it will help to distinguish two types of reasons we might give for responding with anger to microaggression (or any act of social oppression). These are reasons of desert and tactical reasons. As the name suggests, reasons of desert concern whether a perpetrator deserves to be treated angrily. Tactical reasons concern the effects of anger: will anger accomplish something valuable? In the rest of this section I will argue that there are compelling reasons against anger as a response to microaggression but these are tactical reasons, rather than reasons of desert.

This may be surprising, since the most commonly expressed objections to anger are reasons of desert. Recall Lukianoff and Haidt's claim that microaggression allegations fail to ‘give the benefit of the doubt’. The thought here is that anger is an appropriate response to only agential or blameworthy wrongdoing, and microaggression might (sometimes) not be either of these. Sometimes microaggression happens through ignorance or through ‘slips’ of agency (Amaya Reference Amaya2013); it may not be what a person meant to do. In those cases, anger is normatively inappropriate. There is a reason of desert to hold back from anger at being targeted by a microaggression.

There is some plausibility to this point, but I think it oversimplifies. We do sometimes react angrily to unintentional mistakes. For example, I might be angry if a very close friend completely forgets my birthday, and I might persist in holding her responsible via this anger even if I know she did not intend to forget (Smith Reference Smith2005: 236). Our practices of holding people responsible are not strictly tied to intention, and therefore the ambiguity of intention in microaggression does not automatically make it an inappropriate target of anger.

Further, even if microaggression perpetrators sometimes do not deserve anger, this does not settle the matter of whether anger is morally justified. Sometimes anger may be justified for tactical reasons. Cheshire Calhoun has influentially argued that in ‘abnormal moral contexts’, such as when the harmfulness of a common practice is not widely appreciated, ‘it may be reasonable to reproach moral failings even when individuals are not blameworthy’ (Reference Calhoun1989: 405). She points out that when harmful acts are widely practiced, failing to condemn them risks simply allowing them to continue because silence is easily interpreted as acceptance. So, even if people do not quite realize what they are doing when they microaggress and even if this makes them not blameworthy, this lack of awareness may actually be a positive reason to express angry reproach in order to draw attention to otherwise unacknowledged harm.Footnote ⁶

So there may be tactical reasons to express anger even when it is otherwise undeserved. But there are also tactical reasons against expressing anger toward microaggression perpetrators. These have to do with the social uptake of anger.

In popular critiques, people who challenge microaggression are often portrayed as ‘shrill’, or ‘bitter’, or even ‘hysterical’. As Sue Campbell has argued, terms like these are often employed in socially constructing oppressed people as suffering from ‘diseases of the affections’ (Campbell Reference Campbell1994: 47). Campbell draws a useful distinction between ‘anger’ and thicker evaluative terms like ‘bitter’. Though anger is sometimes a reasonable response to being mistreated, bitterness and similar affective ‘diseases’ are not reasonable.

Campbell claims that ‘the individuation of feeling is collaborative’ (55)— whether a person counts as angry or bitter depends not upon intrinsic features of her emotional state, but instead upon how her emotions are construed by her audience. Whether a person ends up ‘angry’ rather than ‘bitter’ (or ‘shrill’ or ‘hysterical’, I would add) depends on whether her audience extends interpretive uptake to her. Campbell says, ‘We may try to be angry through our actions and simply not succeed. The very same actions may succeed as angry actions in a different interpretive context’ (54).

Campbell points out that there are often (implicit) political motives behind audience ascriptions of bitterness rather than anger. When a woman or person of color tries to express anger at social oppression, people who benefit from privilege have an (possibly unconscious) incentive to interpret the expression as irrational bitterness rather than as reasonable anger because attributing reasonableness would mean acknowledging the existence of pervasive oppression. If a person attempts anger but is constructed as bitter instead, her complaint can be ignored, and everyone else can go on without the trouble of confronting injustice.

These points are very important for a tactical response to microaggression. Of course, it is terrible that people trying to register oppressive harm end up construed in dismissive ways; as Sylvia Burrow writes, ‘oppressed persons should not have to defend their emotions if they fail to express them as a result of another's oppressive political agenda’ (Burrow Reference Burrow2005: 30). But to the extent that we are concerned to make response to microaggression socially efficacious, expressing anger may not always be the best practice. If it is a predictable fact that victims of microaggression will often be unfairly construed as bitter, then attempting anger may be a tactical error. It may be best to make an emotionless, patient declaration—or, in some cases, simply to let the offense pass. Sometimes—such as when insulted by a gangster or neglected by a well-lawyered landlord—silence is the only tactically feasible response to mistreatment.

To pull this all together: though sometimes reasons of desert count against directing anger at microaggression perpetrators, in abnormal moral contexts angry reproach may nevertheless be the most effective response to systemic injustice. Hence, the thicker skin prescription cannot be right. Yet, tactical reasons do not univocally pull in favor of anger. This suggests that the righteous anger prescription is misguided, at least if construed as always recommending anger. Instead, anger is one possible tactic, but it must be adaptable to particular circumstances.

To be clear: I am not assuming that we always have control over our anger. Nor do I think that it makes sense to fault a microaggression victim who becomes angry when quiescence would be more efficacious tactically. I am only trying to sketch a type of regulative ideal: how should victims react if they could calibrate their spontaneous responses to ensure maximal efficacy? Real world practice, of course, cannot reasonably be expected to mirror regulative ideals, but they at least offer us a guide.

What have we accomplished so far? We have examined the thicker skin prescription and the righteous anger prescription. I have argued that neither is a convincing cover-all recommendation for responding to microaggression. What can we say instead? It is tempting to try to construct some third cover-all prescription that gets everything right. But I think we should resist this impulse. Microaggression is such a complex phenomenon that I doubt that any generalized prescription is adequate. Appropriate responses will be highly adaptive and situation-specific, more a matter of practical wisdom than of formal imperative.

What I will do instead, in the remainder of this paper, is catalog the factors that go into determining the best response to a particular microaggression. What are the effects of responding in such-and-such a way? We can sort these into three types: effects on the microaggression victim, effects on the microaggression perpetrator, and effects on third parties.

Effects on the Victim

Some criticism of microaggression discourse assumes that victims gain benefits from challenging microaggression; sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning claim that: ‘victimhood is a kind of moral status based on suffering and neediness, something that makes one sympathetic and deserving of help and concern’ (Campbell and Manning Reference Campbell and Manning2016: 155). But this is a facile thought. In fact, some of the strongest reasons against challenging microaggression are prudential. The victim takes personal risk in speaking up: risk of not being believed (and so judged thin-skinned or foolish), risk of economic or even physical retaliation. Sue and colleagues detail some of these risks:

But there are also risks in not challenging microaggression. Sue and colleagues call this the ‘Catch-22 of microaggression’:

I think we should start by accepting this catch-22 as a moral excusing condition for victims of microaggression. Even when there are moral reasons to speak up (such as educating the perpetrator, see below), a victim's ambiguous prudential situation is a legitimate excuse for remaining silent.

Importantly, different people will face different risks if they choose to challenge a perpetrator. Some victims occupy a social position that is relatively economically advantaged or powerful. For example, US Senator Tammy Duckworth was the target of a racial microaggression during her 2016 electoral campaign. Her opponent, Mark Kirk, made a mocking comment about her East Asian heritage. Duckworth had enough social capital to openly challenge Kirk without serious personal costs—she won the election—and it is good that she did this.

By contrast, a young African American man who is microaggressed by a white police officer has overwhelming prudential reason to allow the harm to go unchallenged, at least in the moment (though, of course, we should not blame him if he does react with anger).

This point shows the misguidedness of a certain popular critique of microaggression theory. It is sometimes claimed that the people most likely to employ the language of microaggression are economically privileged college students, rather than the most vulnerable members of marginalized communities (Campbell and Manning Reference Campbell and Manning2016: 160). Critics seem to think this is a sign that talk about microaggression is an affectation of the well-to-do. But if I am right, then it is no surprise that open discussion of microaggression is most common in privileged academic environments; it is privileged people who have the safety to draw attention to microaggression, and they do so in solidarity with those who lack that safety.

But there is another reason why even the most privileged victim may choose to stay silent. This is the risk of not being believed. As Sue and colleagues note, victims who report microaggression are frequently told that they have misperceived their situation. In that article Sue himself recounts a personal experience of being subject to a racial microaggression aboard an airplane. But in a professionally published response, another psychologist suggests that Sue's description of the case ‘may speak more about Sue's personal need to feel special or privileged than about any prejudice on the part of the flight attendant’ (Thomas Reference Thomas2008: 274).

If Sue, a senior faculty member at Columbia University, cannot dispassionately report microaggression without facing colleagues’ doubts about his judgment, what hope do less well-positioned victims have of being believed? Victims of microaggression are intimately aware of this risk. Recall the example from Chester Pierce, the originator of the microaggression concept, with which we began. Pierce reported being bossed around by his white undergraduate students. In recounting the example, he wrote:

Notice two things about what Pierce says: he ‘concedes’ that he can be seen as paranoid. But also he ‘knows’ that ‘every black’ person will recognize what he has seen. There is a revealing tension in these two points; Pierce allows that even he, a Harvard psychiatrist, will not be trusted to perceive correctly a social situation; yet, there is an entire community that knows he is right. The message, of course, is that it is white people who will think him paranoid and people of color, those who have greater access to the reality of oppression, who will not. But it is the white people who are mostly in power. (For closely related points, see Miranda Fricker's [Reference Fricker2007] concept of ‘hermeneutic injustice’ and Kristie Dotson's [Reference Dotson2011] concept of ‘testimonial smothering’. For discussion of the continuing threat racial microaggression poses to self-conception, see Fatima [Reference Fatima, Kirsti Cole and Holly Hassel2017].)

Many microaggression victims have far fewer professional and analytic resources than Pierce or Sue and will understandably avoid putting themselves forward to be regarded as paranoid. What they reasonably fear is that they will be targeted for oppressive gaslighting. Gaslighting is ‘a form of emotional manipulation in which the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone the sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds—paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy’ (Abramson Reference Abramson2014: 2). That is what Pierce means when he concedes he will be seen as paranoid. It is also what Kenneth Thomas does when he suggests that Sue has confabulated microaggression aboard the airplane.

Gaslighting is bad not only because it leads to others not listening. It can also sap one's own self-trust, leading gradually to a diminished ability to make agential choices and to be treated as doing so by others (Govier Reference Govier1993; Benson Reference Benson, Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar2000). Ordinary victims of microaggression anticipate this effect and are understandably deterred from challenging or reporting microaggression. (Jordan Peale's recent film Get Out is, in part, an examination of the pressure that people of color feel to excuse or explain away microaggression in order to avoid being thought paranoid.)

Again, the risk of gaslighting shows that victims of microaggression have prudential reason to avoid challenging perpetrators, but also that those in the most secure positions ought to do so as an act of solidarity with the most vulnerable. Learning that other people have been through the same experience is one of the strongest defenses against doubting your own perception.

To summarize: there are important prudential reasons to stay quiet in the face of microaggression, especially for the least socially empowered victims. Not surprisingly, since we are talking about systemic oppression, it turns out to be quite difficult to say much about the interests of individual victims of microaggression without also discussing the need for solidarity among members of marginalized groups.

Effects on Third Parties: Educative and Aversive Correction

I turn now to the effects of responding to microaggression on third parties: anyone other than the microaggression perpetrator or victim. Third parties are, among others, witnesses to the particular act of microaggression and other members of oppressed groups who might be the victims of similar future microaggressions. All can be affected by how a victim responds to a particular microaggression, so all have a stake.

The first thing to appreciate about third-party effects is their relation to the distinction between microaggression and mere insult. In ordinary cases of insult, third parties do not have much at stake. When the rude professor insulted my alma mater, it did not matter very much to bystanders how I replied. They were uncomfortable, and perhaps it would have been nice of me to make a friendly quip to dispel the awkwardness. Similarly, perhaps other Georgetown alumni might have been offended if the story circulated, so perhaps they had a bit of a stake in wanting the rude professor not simply to get away with it. But these do not seem like very weighty moral interests. Everyone has to deal with a bit of awkwardness or disagreeable opinion at times.

But as I have been stressing, microaggression is not mere insult. Because each particular microaggression is part of a pattern of similar insulting actions that target an entire category of socially marginalized people, third parties have a far greater stake in the response to microaggression than do bystanders to a mere insult. How we respond to microaggression—whether we allow it to pass unchallenged or insist upon marking it as an infraction—makes a difference to whether we continue to tolerate a pattern of oppressive harm.

There are two distinct social benefits to challenging a microaggression. The first benefit is corrective. Challenging a microaggression can reduce the chances that it will be committed again by the same perpetrator or by a witness. We have already seen this idea in Calhoun's suggestion that abnormal moral contexts can make it reasonable to reproach an unwitting oppressor; the confrontation is what allows for the possibility of change.

Sometimes microaggression perpetrators are simply ignorant; they do not realize that what they have done is offensive or that it is part of a wider pattern of oppression.Footnote ⁷ For example, consider the question ‘where are you really from?’. Asian-Americans frequently report receiving this question from non-Asians, apparently as a coded inquiry about ethnicity. Here is a representative dialogue between A, a New York City resident of European heritage, and B, a New York City resident of East Asian heritage:

This is a classic instance of microaggression. The question ‘where are you from?’ is not, by itself, harmful or insulting at all. It can be a perfectly reasonable question to ask a new acquaintance, especially if it is meant literally (as an inquiry about where the individual grew up). And sometimes it is even reasonable to ask others about their family background. The problem is that this question, asked in this way, tends to attach specifically to members of certain ethnic groups and not to others. Sue and colleagues (Reference Sue2007) call this type of microaggression the ‘alien in one's own land’ type. They suggest that it sends an implicit message: people of Asian heritage are not really Americans in the way that people of European heritage are. If ‘Los Angeles’ is a sufficient answer when asking a European American about their origin, but not sufficient when asking an Asian American, the insulting implication is that Asian Americans just don't belong.

This is a useful example because many people who perpetrate this microaggression are simply ignorant of what they are doing. They may not even be aware that they have a disposition to accept different ‘where are you from?’ answers from European Americans and Asian Americans. When this is called to their attention and they are given the opportunity to see the question from the other side, they may realize that they are being unintentionally insulting—and that may be enough to keep them from doing it again. In that happy chain of events, challenging microaggression leads to fewer recurrences and diminishes (by a little) the amount of oppressive harm experienced by potential future victims.

Of course, not every microaggressor acts in pure ignorance, and not all those who do will learn from a challenge. For example, people of color who work in professional occupations find that they are sometimes mistaken for waiters or attendants at fancy events. A white person who has made this mistake and been challenged on it might respond in a variety of ways. Here is one: ‘Well, look, it's just a fact that most of the people of color working around here are waiters. So my (unconscious, implicit) inference was statistically reasonable. I didn't mean anything by it.’

A microaggressor who reacts in this way probably hasn't learned much, since they seem to regard their behavior as justified or at least mitigated. But they still might become less likely to perpetrate the same microaggression in similar circumstances, simply because of social pressure. Being challenged for engaging in offensive behavior, especially behavior related to social marginalization, is usually an unpleasant experience. This can have an aversive effect on the likelihood of the behavior being repeated, whether or not the perpetrator comes to understand better why it is a bad thing to do.

Ideally, microaggression perpetrators would become educated about the harm of their actions and would voluntarily aim to stop. We can call this ideal type educative correction. But there is also aversive correction, as we have just seen, where microaggressors stop simply because being challenged is unpleasant. There are important reasons to prefer educative correction over aversive correction, but education is not always possible—and aversion is sometimes enough to secure the third-party benefit of reducing the occurrence of harmful microaggression.

Effects on the Perpetrator: Deserved and Undeserved Costs

But what about the people who commit—and get called out for—microaggressions? What about effects on the perpetrator? On a cartoon picture of microaggression, perpetrators are people who merely behave with less than perfect political correctness. It is unfair to get angry and ‘jump all over’ them for an innocent mistake. After all, it hurts to be accused of participating in a pattern of systemic social oppression.

There is something right about this view, but a lot is wrong. The part that is right is this: it is costly to be called to account for perpetrating a microaggression. There is psychological pain, in some cases damage to reputation. We should not simply ignore these costs—and they should have a moderating effect on appropriate responses to microaggression. We should not impose exorbitant personal costs on individual microaggression perpetrators. We should not ‘make an example’ of a microaggression perpetrator through public humiliation.

We can find examples of this in journalist Jon Ronson's recent book So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Reference Ronson2015). A woman named Justine Sacco was briefly infamous in 2013 after posting an ill-advised joke to Twitter. Moments before boarding an overnight flight, Sacco wrote: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just Kidding. I'm white!’ She later claimed that the tweet was meant to be an ironic parody of white ignorance. Whatever her intent, the alleged joke was not well-executed and certainly in poor taste. But the Internet reaction was out of proportion. Thousands of people around the world began tweeting abuse at her. Internet denizens delighted at the thought of Sacco, incommunicado on a long flight with no idea of the retribution that faced her; the hashtag #hasjustinelandedyet exploded (and is used to this day as a marker of virally ill-advised social media humor). Sacco was soon fired from her job and found her professional and personal reputation ruined. Any Internet search on her name returned thousands of results about her villainy.

I hope we can all agree that Sacco did not deserve this response to her poorly considered tweet. Perhaps she did deserve to be called out for it—for someone to explain to her, perhaps even angrily, the harm of making light of racial disparities in health. But she did not deserve to have her life ruined.

Yet, it would be a mistake to generalize far from cases like this one. It is very rare that challenging a microaggressor will have effects anything like what happened to Sacco. Typically, the costs are short-lived and no worse than a heated misunderstanding with a stranger. These are costs, but we need to be realistic about their extent.

Some theorists will insist that many microaggression perpetrators do not deserve to pay any costs because (sometimes) microaggressions are committed unintentionally. The thought is that we can only deserve to pay costs for harms that we have inflicted knowingly and voluntarily. I take this to be a big part of the motive for urging a quiescent response to microaggression. Recall Lukianoff and Haidt's question about student microaggression victims: ‘Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?’ (Lukianoff and Haidt Reference Lukianoff and Haidt2015).

But this is a mistake. We do sometimes think people deserve to pay costs for harms they inflict unintentionally (for discussion, see Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998, Young Reference Young2013, and Zheng Reference Zheng, Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul2016b). For example, I once parked at a highway rest area in the mountains. When I opened the car door, a strong wind ripped it from my hand and slammed it into the mirror of the car next to me. The mirror shattered. I left a note and eventually paid to have the mirror replaced. I deserved to pay this cost even though I did not intentionally break the mirror. That is simply a feature of social life; we can reasonably be expected to bear costs our accidents inflict upon others.

The same is true, I think, about social oppression. Even if some microaggression perpetrators do not act intentionally, they can still be reasonably expected to bear some costs for the harms they impose. It is important to realize that someone will have to bear the costs of microaggression. If we insist that victims must always be quiescent so as to spare the feelings of perpetrators, then we pool all of the costs onto victims. Microaggressions remain unaddressed, and harmful patterns continue. That this is the status quo does not mean it is the right answer; if we claim that quiescence is the correct response to microaggression, we must provide a justification for assigning all the costs to victims and none to perpetrators.

Pierce referred to racism as a ‘lethal disease’, a kind of epidemic mental illness whose primary victims are not the carriers themselves (Reference Pierce and Barbour1970: 266–67). Through microaggression, those infected with the disease of racism do not usually mean to harm others, but their illness nevertheless does. The cure is slow and costly. In microaggression, perhaps no one deserves to pay costs—neither the carriers nor those harmed by their illness. But someone must pay them. When the disease is social oppression, it seems reasonable to try to distribute costs away from those already disadvantaged.

Benefits to the Perpetrator

Perhaps surprisingly, challenging microaggression also provides benefits to perpetrators, not only costs.

One of these benefits is epistemic. As I noted earlier, regarding educative correction, sometimes microaggression perpetrators simply do not know that what they have done is part of a pattern of oppression. Being challenged on a particular microaggression provides them with an opportunity to learn about social reality, especially about their own role in its perpetuation.

Laurence Thomas (Reference Thomas and Willet1998) has written about the phenomenon of ‘moral deference’, which occurs when a person accepts the testimony of a member of a marginalized group regarding the moral significance of their oppression. Thomas says, ‘Moral deference is owed to persons of good will when they speak in an informed way regarding experiences specific to their diminished social category’ (373). He argues that some forms of oppression lead to experiences that are simply inaccessible to people who are not oppressed. Following Nagel's (Reference Nagel1974) famous point about the ineffability of unfamiliar sensory forms, Thomas claims that some effects of oppression simply cannot be fully explained in public language. Those who are not targets of oppression simply need to take victims’ word for it.

If Thomas is right, then challenges to microaggression can be opportunities for epistemic growth. We do not always have the chance to receive testimony from victims of specific oppressions. If a moment of offense can be turned into an occasion for testimony, deference, and reflection, then perpetrators achieve an epistemic gain.Footnote ⁸

Relatedly, microaggression perpetrators might achieve a moral gain after being challenged. If they learn to avoid causing certain forms of oppressive harm, then they improve the quality of their own moral behavior. There is some dispute over whether being morally good is a part of an individual's own well-being (see Bloomfield Reference Bloomfield2014 for an argument that it is). At minimum, we can say this: many of us do not want to contribute to oppression, but we unwittingly do so anyway. Being forced to confront this lack of unity between our intentions and our behavior is troubling (Rini Reference Rini2017)—but becoming aware of it is the first step toward moral self-improvement.

Finally, challenging microaggression provides an opportunity for interpersonal gain between perpetrator and victim. Calling a person out for causing harm, perhaps angrily, draws attention to the rupture in social relations caused by the harm itself. But so long as the victim keeps open the possibility of forgiveness, there can be a process of ‘moral repair’ leaving the relationship stronger than it was before (Walker Reference Walker2006).

Social justice activism has begun to focus on reactions to microaggression that avoid unnecessary antagonism and seek to restore relationships of equality and trust. In an influential essay, Asam Ahmad (Reference Ahmad2015) builds on a distinction between ‘call out’ culture and ‘call in’ culture (see also Trần Reference Trần2013). Calling out involves the righteous denunciation of a microaggressor. Though this can sometimes have its uses, Ahmad points out that it often devolves into the destructive spectacle of ‘a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are’ (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2015). This has the harmful effect of severing relationships that might have recovered from microaggressive breach; Ahmad says ‘most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community’. Instead, Ahmad argues, activists should learn to ‘call in’ offenders by taking them aside privately and explaining the harm without performative condemnation. The goal is effective anti-oppression education that allows the person who caused harm to restore relations with other people of good will.

In summary: we should not ignore the fact that challenging microaggression imposes costs on perpetrators, and sometimes these costs are undeserved. But assigning undeserved costs is an inevitable part of nonideal theory, and it is better to relocate these costs away from victims of ongoing oppression. Further, challenging microaggression can provide perpetrators with epistemic and moral benefits, and it can be done in ways that aim to preserve community and mutual respect. The effects of a challenge upon the perpetrator give us reason to be careful in how we challenge microaggression, but they do not overwhelmingly count against doing so.