On Microaggressions: Cumulative Harm and Individual Responsibility

Abstract

Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm. The cumulative harm of microaggressions presents a unique case for understanding disaggregation models for contributed harms, blame allocation, and individual responsibility within structural oppression. Our standard moral model for addressing cumulative harm is to hold all individual contributors blameworthy for their particular contributions. However, if we aim to hold people responsible for their unconscious microaggressions and address cumulative harm holistically, this model is inadequate. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model, I argue that we, as individual perpetrators of microaggressions, have a responsibility to respond to the cumulative harm to which we have individually contributed.

Microaggression: Conceptual and scientific issues

“…Pérez Huber and Solórzano () leave the details of their model somewhat vague, but it has since been more precisely articulated in philosophical research (McTernan, ; Friedlaender, ; Freeman and Stewart, ). Christina Friedlaender (, p. 9) sheds light on how Structural Accounts can avoid the problems that Lilienfeld raises for Psychological Accounts:

As contextually defined acts, microaggressions are communicative in accordance with their background conditions… [B]y linking microaggressions to structural oppression in this way, there is a stronger case for showing how microaggressions occur in patterned ways and with a certain frequency. If perpetrators argue that their acts are not microaggressions, we can point to a pattern of similar acts that have historically and currently manifested in relation to an objectively existing form of structural oppression.

A similar emphasis appears in Emily McTernan's claim that microaggressions perform a particular functional role in oppressive social structures.…”

“…Pérez Huber and Solórzano (2015) leave the details of their model somewhat vague, but it has since been more precisely articulated in philosophical research (McTernan, 2017;Friedlaender, 2018;Freeman and Stewart, 2018). Christina Friedlaender (2018, p. 9) sheds light on how Structural Accounts can avoid the problems that Lilienfeld raises for Psychological Accounts:…”

Believing on eggshells: epistemic injustice through pragmatic encroachment

“…See, e.g.,Freeman and Stewart (2018), Friedlaender (2018), Perez Gomez (2020), and Rini (2020.21 Interestingly, this point may help explain a wrong in some microaggressions. Although an appropriate analysis of this suggestion is well beyond the scope of this paper, consider that microaggression theorists tend to agree that a central harm of microaggression is that it is attributionally ambiguous-in other words, it is difficult to ascertain whether the microaggression perpetrator intended to communicate the hurtful message that she communicated.See, e.g., Fatima (2017), Friedlaender (2018,Sue et al (2007),Spanierman (2020), andRini (2020). Our account of encroachment injustice suggests that this attributional ambiguity may stem not from self-doubt, but from the raised stakes of believing falsely, which may force an agent, rationally speaking, to remain in a state of inquiry when she would otherwise have had knowledge.…”

Verbal Microaggressions as Hyper‐implicatures*

“…As Rini has argued, this objection misconstrues the nature of microaggressions in at least two ways: it disregards "the systematicity of microaggression" and oversimplifies the harm of microaggression by holding that microaggression perpetrators do not intend to harm.23 McClure and Rini 2020, p. 5. See alsoFriedlaender 2018;Freeman and Stewart 2018;McTernan 2018.…”