15 June 2020
A microaggression is a subtle, often unintentional, action that exhibits a prejudice or discriminates against a marginalized minority. Microaggressions may be minor, almost unnoticeable, slights, and a single or even a few instances may be insignificant. But when they are experienced daily over the course of years, or even a lifetime, the psychic toll on a person can be great.
While microaggressions are sociologically important, in many ways the word is linguistically uninteresting. For instance, its origin is unexceptional, a compound of the combining form micro- + aggression.
But the word does have two distinguishing features. The first is that we can pinpoint exactly who coined it and when, and the second is that it is an excellent example of what linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the recency illusion, the belief that a word or phrase that you have just noticed for the first time is genuinely new, when in fact it has been around for a long time, in this case some fifty years.
To those points, it was coined by Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in F. B. Barbour’s 1970 The Black Seventies:
Hence the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a micro-aggression, as opposed to a gross, dramatic, obvious macro-aggression such as lynching.
Most terms or new usages arise in casual usage, and their very first uses go unrecorded. It’s not until sometime later, sometimes years, that they actually see print. Exceptions to this are often scientific and technical terms, where researchers are often careful to call out new terms that they use. This is one of these latter cases. And indeed, microaggression remained restricted to psychiatric and psychological literature for many years.
It’s not until seventeen years after Pierce coined it that microaggression appears in a mainstream publication, in this case, the Chicago Tribune of 15 September 1987. This usage is also useful in that it gives several practical examples of what constitutes a microaggression. But this example still refers to Pierce and his research, showing that the term had yet to become familiar to a broader audience:
Leon Boyd stepped into a CTA bus on his way to work on the North Side and discovered that he was being transformed into a monster.
At first, Boyd said, the symptoms were subtle.
"I would catch them glancing out of the corner of their eyes, looking at me," Boyd said of nervous passengers.
"They practically crammed themselves into the seat not to touch me. Then they'd adjust their bags and purses or draw their purses tight around their arms."
[...]
A study by Chester Pierce, a professor of education at Harvard University, suggests that episodes similar to those described by Boyd occur routinely. Labeling the phenomenon "microaggression and microinsult," Pierce demonstrated through experiments that black men often are mistreated and stigmatized in public by whites.
By 1992, microaggression could be used without reference to psychiatrists or psychological literature, as in this article from the Philadelphia Tribune on 15 October 1993 about rapper MC Lyte:
Lyte sings: "...doing 80 by funeral mourners—showing little respect—now that's a ruffneck." But notice that Lyte said "showing little respect," not no respect.
Nevertheless, her ruffneck still falls outside the bounds of conventional social respectability. But is it possible that our world of so-called social respectability is itself infested with levels of microaggression, microinsanity and micro-dysfunctionality glossed over and hidden by the societal tendency to highlight the adaptive "brutality" and coarseness of a ruffneck/gangsta b----? And is "brutality" a biological trait? Or is "brutality" a social construct used to label, misinform and consequently render a certain group worthless and hopeless?
The Philadelphia Tribune is an African-American newspaper, which indicates that, as one might expect from its definition, microaggression made inroads into the Black community first, while white America remained largely oblivious to it. And indeed, neither the Corpus of Contemporary American English or the News on the Web Corpus contain examples of the word until 2012, indicating that it was vanishingly rare in mainstream publications and websites until this past decade, some forty years after it was coined.
Sources:
Blake, John. “Miscast ‘Monsters’ of the Streets: Skin Color Makes These Men into Magnets of Fear and Scorn.” Chicago Tribune, 15 September 1987, D1. ProQuest.
Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): One billion words, 1990-2019.
Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 10 billion words from 20 countries, updated every day.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2018, s.v. microaggression, n.
Yancy, George. “Behind the ‘Gangsta.’” Philadelphia Tribune, 15 October 1993, 7A. ProQuest.