Carl Sagan famously asked, what is the difference between an invisible, incorporeal dragon that spits heatless fire, and no dragon at all? We might well ask the same of an “aggression” so small that it can’t be detected. If a slight is so tiny as to be literally “micro”, is it even real, or more likely imagined?
Such are the questions we might ask of so-called “micro-aggressions” — if we were allowed.
Advocate Monnica Williams recently declared, “Data from academic institutions and the general public highly suggests that microaggressions are common.” Such a claim is common. But a closer look at the evidence on which such claims are made paints a different picture.
Are people sometimes treated poorly? Of course. Are they sometimes “BIPOC” (or whatever ludicrous descriptor is dictated by the Thought Police this week)? Inevitably. Does that mean that having to wait too long to be charged too much for “for a small, desiccated hamburger at an airport” is a victim of a “racist microaggression”?
According to some academics, yes: if you’re non-white.
What makes some sort of bad treatment a microaggression versus just another form of people treating each other badly sometimes? Racism (or some other form of bigotry). The treatment needs to be motivated by, express, and reinforce racism. Long waits for bad burgers could be a microaggression—if, say, the burger joint made POC wait longer to order. But if everyone has a long wait for bad overpriced burgers, there is no racism involved, so no microaggression.
But how can one tell whether any particular insult or mean-spirited act or statement is a microaggression or just a person acting badly that has nothing to do with race (or any other identity)?
With the sort of obviously fallacious circular logic that so often defines the “social sciences” these days, it doesn’t matter. “Microaggressions are racist, but deniable as not racist.” As the old cartoon gangster Rocky would say, “I don’t know how yas done it, but I know yas done it!”
Academic activists simply assert that something is a “microaggression” and then, having asserted their own premise as a conclusion, airily sail on to assert further that “microaggressions” are responsible for every ill — real or imagined — that supposedly besets whichever designated victim group.
The root assumption — that the existence and ill-effects of so-called “microaggressions” are real — is never questioned. Despite that assumption being questionable, at best.
A study by Kanter et al. […] provides “important empirical support for something that diversity researchers knew all along—microaggressive acts are rooted in racist beliefs…” This was a small-scale study, including only 33 Black and 118 white students, all from a single university. These numbers are so small and so unrepresentative of any population that the entire study should be viewed as little more than question-raising, regardless of other limitations, of which there are many.
More notably, the criteria for “microaggressions” are even more vague and rubbery than the criteria used to “prove” such obviously ludicrous arguments as “one in four American women on college campuses is raped”.
For example. consider the item “someone avoided walking near me on the street because of my race.” This requires mindreading. Ever since Bem’s ESP article helped trigger psychology’s replication crisis, mindreading has been widely recognized as impossible.
It gets worse. The actually reported experience of even such ridiculously faked “microaggressions” are vanishingly small.
Respondents were provided with supposed examples of microaggressions and were then asked how frequently they had experienced such discrimination in the prior six months. For a vast majority of the items, most respondents reported that they either had not experienced the supposed microaggression in the past six months at all or, if they had, did so one to three times. In light of this result, it’s difficult to characterize microaggressions as constituting a major social ailment.
Unsafe Science
Yet, all this obviously confected nonsense is passed off as “science”.
And they wonder why so few of us trust the “experts”, any more.
