#microinvalidations

You and yourHollowHyper-defensiveEmotionally brittle selfA curmudgeon in cashmereBeing just as spleneticOn the way homeI imagined you dyingScreaming and aloneI wished for you to self-exterminate---Ugh! Damn it! I will feel like the villain laterFor all my intrusive and deliberate thoughtsTry as I might, I'm still too sensitiveToo thin-skinned for this jobIf only I were too sexyI'd let perceived…

Correct.

Recently, I have found myself both emotionally and physically drained by the diversity work that I am attempting to do in my department, as well as my current assignment teaching the history of Black women's thought in America. In attempting to trace the source of my exhaustion, I initially assumed that it was the amount of work that I was doing as opposed to the kind of work that I was doing. Any graduate student will tell you, grading over seventy paragraph responses a week while writing a dissertation is supremely difficult; doing so in an environment hostile to your experience and its articulation is even harder.

Thus, it was my assumption that the amount of work (including my conference schedule) coupled with the environment where I am doing the work has resulted in this increased level of exhaustion that I feel. When I consider, philosophically, this conclusion, I think I am in error: it is not the amount of work, or the kind of work, but the response to the work that may be the source of my ongoing exhaustion. This leads me to microaggressions: the little kinds of invalidations and verbal cues directed at minority individuals that kill us slowly over time.

Microaggressions have recently come to the fore in discussions about the hostility of academia to minorities and those who do not align with the "default" which is assumed to be straight white males. Further research has indicated the prevalence of sexed, classed, or gendered microaggressions within spaces dominated by marginalized bodies, indicating that the concept is not limited to cases of a minority body moving within a space dominated by the majority, but minority bodies moving within minority spaces. In so far as they are used within this context, most of the work done on microaggressions is focused on the way dominant group marginalizes or invalidates the subordinate group in ways that are not so readily apparent.

An obvious example would be the appointment of a woman or a person of color to a committee for the sake of their embodiment and not for their particular skill in the field, or the worn compliment offered to students of color that they "speak so well," or the assumption that Asian and Asian-American students will be intrinsically better at math. Expressed through everyday language and off-hand comments, microaggressions have been argued to have demonstrable effects on the well-being of those they are directed against. Even when the microaggression presents a positive image of the minority subject, it is always in reference to a negative image of the subject's group against which the subject stands out.

Derald Wing Sue indicates four forms of microaggression: microassault, microinsult, microinvalidation, and microrape. It is the third that I want to focus on: Microinvalidation. Microinvalidation examples have often been presented in the form of colorblind racism, arguing against the perception of an oppressive reality by appealing to emotional sensitivity, or other actions that minimize the import and impact of the lived experience of the marginalized subject. Wing Sue and those building on his work often articulate these microinvalidations as unconscious activities perpetrated by well intentioned and well meaning individuals. However, my experience, while it shows some parallels with the microinvalidation as commonly presented, is something that has not been addressed.

For example, we can consider the responses of my students to the assertion of institutionalized oppression or privilege as a form of microaggression, though not one directed specifically at me. By, say, arguing that everyone has the same opportunities as a result of being born in America; or, black women should seek to work more closely with white women in order to solve the problem of sexism; or, my student's persistent denial of the connection of the history of oppression being articulated with their present circumstances, my students engage in the invalidation of large parts of the history that goes into my cultivation. However, what is unique about this is that the microinvalidation emerges from people who assume themselves to be progressive or not possessing sexist or racist opinions. Further, and most importantly, several of the microinvalidations emerge from people who share social positionality with me: these microinvalidations are not coming from those who would be socially superior to me.

If we consider that I have to grade upwards of seventy paragraph responses a week, and if maybe a third of them are articulations of microinvalidations, I am responsible for grading almost twenty microinvalidations a week, some of them coming from people within my same social position, and this does not begin to consider the kinds of microinvalidations that emerge from our in-class discussions, student essays, and presentations. If we were to bring in the observations that Wing Sue and others have taken up with regards to the way in which teachers of color are traditionally subject to microaggressions, it becomes apparent that there I have assumed a massive emotional and intellectual burden over and above the traditional stressors of graduate student life.

Putting this aside, let's turn to the "work" of diversity that I'm doing in my department. Simply put, if my department does not make attempts at increasing diversity at all of its levels, undergraduate, graduate, and faculty, it may not survive through the close of the decade. Faculty aside, mobilizing the graduate students has proven to be difficult, largely due to my colleagues' ability to recognize without recognizing the problems of diversity in their midst. In so far as they say "well, we recognize that there is a problem, but there's nothing we can do," or make attempts to downplay their complicitness in perpetuating structures of oppression, the continue to invalidate the very problem that they recognize as being in need of solution. In doing so, they allow for the invalidation of the experiences of the marginalized members of the graduate student community.

When we consider the faculty of my department, the way in which they deflect the question of marginalization with the shield of "pluralism" and "lack of funding," they render insignificant the larger systemic issues that they are complicit in perpetuating. This has not gone unnoticed by the graduate students themselves: in responding to a presentation of the problems of our department in philosophical terms, my faculty continued to lay the blame for the lack of diversity at the hands of "us versus them" thinking, the predominance of analytic philosophy, and even went so far as to claim that the marginalization experienced by minority members of our department was equivalent to the marginalization they experienced at the hands of their advisors for choosing contentious subjects.

Allow me to repeat, my own faculty compared the experience of being a minority body in the field of philosophy to being marginalized for studying a minor scholar in the field for philosophy.  In attempting to articulate solidarity (in a fucked up way), my faculty have managed to marginalize the entire experience of being a minority in philosophy.

While my experience of microaggressions is unique, I argue that the bodies engaging in microinvalidations and how they are engaging in them is significant. On the one hand, we have individuals subject to similar forms of oppression engaging in the process of invalidating that very experience in order to present an image of a progressive reality; on the other hand, we have a community that recognizes and seeks to solve a problem of oppression, invalidating the experience of that oppression through their search for a solution. What I can conclude from both of these experiences is the way in which we articulate diversity, for example, can actually invalidate the experiences that diversity rhetoric is supposed to ameliorate. In so far as I am engaging in working towards making my department, and the field, more diverse by offering classes and working with my colleagues, I (and I assume others like me) have to endure the weight of microaggressions, which place an additional burden on an already difficult task.

"A microassault is an explicit verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name-calling, avoidant behavior, or purposeful discriminatory actions.

A microinsult is characterized by communications that convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person's racial heritage or identity. Microinsults represent subtle snubs, frequently unknown to the perpetrator, but clearly convey a hidden insulting message to the recipient of color.

Microinvalidations are characterized by communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a minority person."

(Definition source: Unmasking subtle heterosexism: Microaggressions and microvalidations in everyday life)

Microinsults and microinvalidations are often unconcious.

Microinsults and microinvalidations are often unconcious.

Microinsults and microinvalidations are often unconcious.

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