microaggression
English
Etymology
Etymology tree
English aggression
English microaggression
From micro- + aggression, coined by American psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce in 1970.
Pronunciation
Noun
microaggression (countable and uncountable, plural microaggressions)
- (sociology, chiefly US) Any small-scale verbal or physical interaction between those of different races, cultures, beliefs, or genders that may have no malicious intent, but that can be interpreted as an aggression.
- Near-synonyms: microassault, microinequity, microinsult, microinvalidation, nanoaggression
- 2014 February 18, Graeme Hamilton, “McGill student forced to apologize for racial ‘microaggression’ after emailing joke Obama clip”, in National Post[1], Toronto, Ont.: Postmedia Network Canada Corp., →ISSN, →OCLC, retrieved 19 February 2014:
- At McGill, someone has established a McGill Microaggressions website inviting students and staff to report instances of “sexism, heteropatriarchy, transphobia, classism, racism [and] ableism.”
- 2015 September, Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind”, in James Bennet, editor, The Atlantic[2], Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic Monthly Group, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 4 April 2017:
- Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American.
- 2020 March 3, Hahna Yoon, “How to Respond to Microaggressions”, in The New York Times[3], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 14 November 2020:
- For many of us, microaggressions are so commonplace that it seems impossible to tackle them one at a time. Psychologists often compare them to death by a thousand cuts.
The metaphor is both the subtitle to a paper that Kevin Nadal, professor of psychology at John Jay College, wrote about the impact of microaggressions on L.G.B.T.Q. youth, and the title of another paper on the health implications of black respectability politics by Hedwig Lee, professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, and Margaret Takako Hicken, research assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
- 2021, John H. McWhorter, chapter 6, in Woke Racism, New York: Forum, →ISBN:
- Ask whether microaggressions merit the same response as physical assault and the Elect do not receive this as a challenging query.
Related terms
Translations
everyday interaction interpreted as aggression
|
See also
Further reading
microaggression on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
Categories:
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *mey- (small)
- English terms prefixed with micro- (very small)
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *h₂éd
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *gʰredʰ-
- English terms prefixed with micro-
- English coinages
- English 5-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English uncountable nouns
- English countable nouns
- en:Sociology
- American English
- English terms with quotations
- en:Leftism
- en:Social justice