Derald Wing Sue and the subconscious offence that your words cause

Picture from the I, Too, Am Sydney website which shows students from the University of Sydney holding posters that advertise the insults addressed to them.

Since the days that I could afford to ride in a taxi I have always asked cabbies with surnames I do not recognise: “Where are you from?”

I have a fascination with names and people’s origins, and enjoy discussing with cab drivers their personal stories.

It wasn’t until last November that I learned my curiosity regarding people’s ­origins can now be condemned as an act of micro-aggres­sion.

I was in New York and after a five-minute banter about our ­mutual origins with an Ethiopian taxi driver my fellow passenger — a Boston-based academic — ­informed me that some would construe my questions as acts of micro-aggression.

Until this encounter, the word micro-aggression had not registered on my radar as a concept worth taking seriously. But matters are very different today. Micro-aggression has become one of those fashionable words that is heard more and more throughout the Anglo-American world. It refers to the allegedly subconscious offence that your words cause to individuals and cultural groups.

According to the Orwellian sounding-guidance tool, Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send, circulated by the University of California, Los Angeles, I was indeed guilty as charged. According to this guideline, asking “Where are you from?” or “Where were you born?” conveys the message that “you are not a true American”.

What’s fascinating about the UCLA guidelines is that literally anything that can be said to someone from a different cultural group may be a marker for an act of micro-aggression. So declaring that “America is a land of opportunity” constitutes an act of micro-aggression for it implies that “race or gender does not play a role in life successes”.

There seems to be a veritable industry promoting guidelines, sensitivity seminars and websites on the scourge of micro-­aggression.

At the same time, the number and variety of words and ­expressions castigated as aggres­sive and threatening is constantly expanding.

A few weeks ago, the Inclusive Excellence Centre of the University of Wisconsin declared the latest addition to its vocabulary of censored terms is that of politically correct. Without a hint of irony it stated that it had become a “dismissive term” that some used to suggest “that people are being too sensitive”, and “to police language”. By attempting to censor the usage of this term the directive confirmed that it was the PC practitioners who were, indeed, in the business of policing language.

Since the beginning of the year campaigns designed to tackle micro-aggression have spread way beyond US campuses.

One Australian blogger could not ­contain her outrage at the micro-aggressive comments addressed towards disabled people. “If you’re disabled, you’ve no doubt been described as ‘brave’ or ‘inspirational’ a hundred times, especially if you are blind or deaf or have a physical disability,” she wrote in anger.

From this standpoint, literally any comment addressed to a disabled person can serve as evidence of a slight. Micro-aggression activists perceive themselves as perpetual victims of offence and therefore feel entitled to flaunt their sufferings continually.

The performance of outrage is a central feature of the moral ­crusade against micro-aggression. There is a mushrooming of micro-aggression websites where like-minded victims are encouraged to air their grievances and broadcast their concerns to raise the awareness of those who are blind to the pandemic of micro-aggression ­enveloping the world.

Typically these websites feature individuals holding a poster that directs a message of defiance against the micro-aggressor. So students from the University of Sydney have copied the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign that highlights the unintended slights and insults suffered by put-upon undergraduates. On the I, Too, Am Sydney website, individuals post pictures of themselves holding posters that advertise the insults addressed to them. One poster reads, “You’re not like the other Aboriginals”, followed by the admonishment, “But you are like the other RACISTS!” The collection of selfies on this website come across more as a call for attention than as a comprehensible political statement.

Yet, despite its incoherence, the campaigns against micro-aggression have had remarkable success. One academic was humiliated and disciplined by his administrators at UCLA for his alleged “racial micro-aggression”. Among the numerous micro-sins committed by Val Rust, a professor of education, was to change a student’s capitalisation of the word indigenous to lower case. Since this act apparently showed disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view the university decided to criticise and discipline his behaviour.

Numerous academics have indicated to me that they practise self-censorship because they fear humiliating retribution for ­comments that others interpret as evidence of micro-aggression.

Accusations of micro-aggression are not confined to university campuses. Recently, US television interviewer Melissa Harris-Perry scolded one of her guests for describing Paul Ryan, the recently elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a hard worker. She claimed that calling Ryan a hard worker ­demeaned slaves and working mothers “in the context of relative privilege”.

Typically, individuals who are placed under pressure to correct their language and acknowledge their micro-aggression backtrack and implicitly accept the moral authority of their accusers.

So what does it mean?

The term micro-aggressions is associated with the publications of counselling psychologist Derald Wing Sue. Sue defines micro-­aggression as “the brief and ­commonplace daily verbal, behavioural and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative ­racial, gender and sexual orientation and religious slights and ­insults to the target person or group”.

What’s important about this definition is that these indignities need not be the outcome of intentional behaviour. Indeed, Sue ­argues that “perpetrators of micro-aggressions are often unaware” of the indignities they inflict on others.

The focus on the unconscious or unwitting dimension of micro-aggression is crucially important.

People accused of this mis­demeanour are not indicted for what they have done or for what they have said, and not even for what they think they think, but for their unconscious thoughts.

According to Sue, “micro-­aggressions are often unconsciously delivered in the form of subtle snubs or dismissive looks, gestures, and tones’’. But how does one prove an act of micro-aggression? After all, if these are acts ­buried deep in the psyche and are delivered unconsciously, how can their existence be verified?

As far as Sue and his collaborators are concerned there is no need for a complex psycho-analysis of the subconscience of the accused perpetrator of micro-aggression. Why? Because, as “nearly all interracial encounters are prone to the manifestation of racial micro-­aggression”, there is little to prove. The same holds for encounters involving women, gay, lesbian, ­bisexual and transgender individuals, and disability groups.

In all these cases the presumption of guilt precedes the words or gestures of the unconscious aggressor. This is a secular theory of original sin from which no white, heterosexual man can possibly escape. According to Sue, even “well-intentioned whites” suffer from “unconscious racial biases”.

The crusade against micro-­aggression plays a central role in the elaboration of Western identity politics.

The performance of outrage featured on micro-aggression websites plays an important role in transforming the “micro” banal insults and misunderstanding of everyday life faced by an individual into a major injustice facing groups of victims.

The featuring of numerous placards drawing attention to insults suffered communicate the message that these are not simply individual issues but constitute a larger pattern of injustice confronting an entire victimised group.

The language of outrage displayed by the holders of placards is inversely proportional to the scale of the slight suffered. A poorly phrased compliment can incite the angriest reaction from an outraged placard holder.

The advocacy of the cause of victims of micro-aggression resonates with a wider mood of distrust that surrounds the conduct of human relationships. In recent decades, society has felt uncomfortable with leaving the interpretation and management of personal interactions to the people concerned. The proliferation of rules and codes of conduct covering bullying, harassment and conflict mean that interpersonal tensions and misunderstandings are often managed by professionals rather than resolved by the parties affected by it. Now a whole new dimension — unconscious behaviour and its unintended ­consequences has been brought to the attention of rule-makers and lawyers.

Human communication has always been a complicated business. The reading of body language and the interpretation of words and gestures have always been subject to miscommunication. In an enlightened environment, it has been recognised that it is difficult, if not impossible, to hold people responsible for the unintended consequences of their action and words. If people are held to account not for what they did or said but for their unconscious thoughts, the idea of moral ­responsibility becomes emptied of meaning.

What is truly tragic about the myth of micro-aggression is that it makes genuine dialogue impossible. The micro-policing of human relations is the inexorable consequence of the project of criminalising unconscious thought and behaviour.

The policing of statements and words expresses a disturbing ­attitude of intolerance.

The statement “watch your words”, which is so casually ­communicated by the crusade against micro-aggression, in fact represents a call for closing down discussion.