The Dubious Science of Microaggressions
unsafescience.substack.com
unsafescience.substack.com
It's really disheartening that people have taken a tool for identifying actual subtle racism and are now using it as a weapon to attempt to tarnish the reputations of others.
Here’s a suggestion: what if that one exaggerated incident that you observed does not reflect on the reality that most people see? What if we try and see if there is a pattern among the population, using tools we have to measure these things, instead of forming our opinions based on the anecdotes that we observe?
The conclusion that I am drawing is not that "accusations of microaggressions are invalid because of my experience", it's "I now know that people will deliberately falsely accuse someone, because I've personally witnessed it." Previously, I was inclined to believe accusations. Now, I withhold judgement. There's nothing quite like first hand experience to show what some people can do.
I think they're saying the incident is exaggerated compared to the norm, i.e. that it's an outlier, not that you're exaggerating in your description.
As for the rest of your comment, I think people have made false claims against each other long before the term "microaggression" came about, and it will likely happen long after the term goes out of common use. Given the near infinite flexibility of language, playing vocabulary whackamole likely will be more of a distraction than anything else.
exaggerate, as far as I can tell after looking at some dictionaries, never means "more than the norm". It is not a comparison, it is an actor distorting something. I do appreciate the attempt at charitable interpretation, but I don't think you can redefine words from their only meanings just to clear someone from making an accusation.
> exaggerate, as far as I can tell after looking at some dictionaries, never means "more than the norm"
Not to nitpick, but it's almost exactly the second definition here[1]: "enlarged or increased beyond the normal : greater than normal"
It’s also the least fulfilling kind of conversation, to reject a solution if you personally observe situations where it doesn’t work. Nothing’s perfect.
How do data collection methods on something like micro-aggressions ensure no low quality "anecdotal data" gets in?
It would be more defensible to claim anecdotes were lower quality evidence than "data" (assuming such a distinction were clear, which I'm not sure it is) than to claim they simply aren't evidence.
Yet if someone claimed a racial incident, would you be so quick to run to the latest peer reviewed study to verify that this group has victim status and the other group has perp status? Or would you say something along the lines of “believe women”, and “lived experiences are real experiences”?
I suppose I could claim generalization in the other direction. Something bad happens to a minority, the offender went out of their way to be aggressive/etc, Every. Single. Time. I can literally say this about any kind of aggression. White-on-white aggression in the burbs, black-on-black in the city, man-on-woman, women-on-man, etc.
Here’s a suggestion- what if that one incident you heard fourth hand through the media isn’t always the reality every sees?
Not an accurate representation of the situation at all. You are going too far in an attempt to make a point, inventing things out of thin air that don’t actually exist.
We know that gender biases and mistreatment of women is a real problem. The rhetoric of “believing women” is meant to counter the specific phenomena whereby the experiences of women are ignored or belittled while that of men aren’t. It isn’t a generic device meant to applied to all situations.
> I suppose I could claim generalization in the other direction. Something bad happens to a minority, the offender went out of their way to be aggressive/etc, Every. Single. Time. I can literally say this about any kind of aggression. White-on-white aggression in the burbs, black-on-black in the city, man-on-woman, women-on-man, etc. > Here’s a suggestion- what if that one incident you heard fourth hand through the media isn’t always the reality every sees?
Here’s a better suggestion: what if we rely less on fourth hand incident reported through the media and instead look at statistical data and studies instead? How about that huh? How about you stop trying so damn hard to both sides the situation, look at the data (not anecdata) on what happens and then use that in your decision making?
I brushed it off because frankly I was too focused on my work to care.
One of my coworkers who merely witnessed it freaked out. There was screaming and eventually that person quit.
It was terrifying.
In retrospect I think it was an attempted coup. The person who was freaking out was the obvious choice to replace the person they were trying to get fired.
Labelling the “science” as “dubious” is basically slighting the people attempting to track these slights at something other than a personal level.
Just because the stories you hear don’t jive with your take on the zeitgeist doesn’t mean the stories are wrong. It could just be that you aren’t the type of person that gets slighted often simply for existing the way you are.
On one hand there’s valid criticism of collection techniques, on the other there’s dismissing the entire proposition that slighting is a thing that happens because you don’t like the way the collection is done.
A better critique would look at ways to improve data collection, but that requires quantifying the myriad ways we slight each other. How to write that all down?
First, no claiming you doubt is not a slight. Claiming you don't believe it at all because there is no evidence is not either.
Second, this piece isn't merely labeling. It explains why microaggressions are not to be believed.
> A better critique would look at ways to improve data collection,
We don't all agree with your "better" and it's certainly not a requirement. Is this some kind of "criticism slight?" ;-)
But because it involves an attempt to measure something that has partisan lean, people of one partisan group feel an instinctual need to refute it, lest they lose points or whatever. So you get this genre of right-leaning libertarian blog post that literally seems to be arguing that racism must not exist because you can't measure it precisely.
And I agree, this is in fact a really hard thing to measure rigorously and there's lots of room for improvement in the field (right up to maybe having picked a needlessly inflamatory name). But if your critique starts from a prior of rejecting the (again, really obvious) hypothesis outright, you're clearly doing worse science, not better.
I think you make a good point that partisan issues like this can lead to knee-jerk reactions.
You point out how this might play out with right-leaning readers, and it seems plausible to me.
Any theories for how a partisan topic like this could affect left-leaning readers?
It... confirms our priors and gives us a label to call out subtle-but-still-obvious bad behavior in a way that gets results because it can be easily understood?
I mean, it's true that it might not be rigorously defined. But that's what it means to the woke hippies. And it doesn't sound so awful to me.
What I'm getting at is maybe we need to teach people how to grow thicker skin? To become immune to microagressions?
Some of these microagressions are not so micro - such as real estate agents being documented discriminating against black people ~50% of the time (assuming we can generalize from NY)
What do you think most people on the receiving end of it do? Do you think they get into fights everytime this happens to them?
People already do have thick skins. Most people just accept this as part of being who they are. However we have studies showing that even just being on the receiving end of this can have major issues on one’s health. So the goal here is to identify these issues and try to prevent them from happening.
Isn't the argument of the post that some of those studies/findings can be questioned?
Do you mean "thicker skin" as in teaching people to be more tolerant of casual bigotry, or teaching people to be more open to learning that there's a cultural subtext to the words they aren't aware of? Because I've seen a whole bunch of people get unreasonably upset, dare I say offended, that they unintentionally offended somebody.
Should patients grow a thicker skin to deal with dirty-handed surgeons (perhaps they should stop being so sensitive to broken bones or cancer so they don’t need surgery in the first place?), or should surgeons take on the practise of washing their hands, wearing hair nets and masks and autoclaving their tools?
Or that a person isn't particularly observant of human behaviour or not arguing in good faith, which is the only possible reason anyone could open a blog questioning the notion someone might receive "substandard service compared with customers of other races" by suggesting it might have something to do with long queues and prices at airport restaurants...
If someone cuts you off in traffic, you can road rage and curse and be angry, or you can shrug your shoulders and go on with your day.
The mistake is putting the responsibility for your own emotional state onto other people.
The mistake here is expecting everyone else to do your driving for you, and claiming they are being too sensitive when they pull you up on your poor habits.
"You're responsible for my anger" is something abusers tell their victims.
I'm very familiar with being on the receiving end of these sort of things and it's VERY odd to see people take the opposite tack of the one I've taken.
I'm not at all speaking for anyone else, but for me, overwhelmingly, the best "strategy" (kind of weird to say it, it feels more like a survival mechanism) has been to understand that the "aggressor" is the problem in the equation, and I have control over how I react.
So for me, even the framing of "microaggression" gives too much power. I'd prefer something like "A-hole flares" or "Jerk flags."
Though generally one shouldn't speak for large groups, I will perhaps be so bold to say that black folks my age and older are very used to doing this and it's valuable, and it's something younger people should learn.
Calling it a jerk flag is a great way to take over the transaction.
What makes insults insulting is that they draw focus to a real or perceived difference in or loss of status. That's an external perception that you may have some influence over by your response, but to a large degree it's outside of your control in the moment.
Full on racially motivated abuse is obvious and easy to understand. When someone tells me to go back to my own country and so on everyone around me can easily condemn that behavior.
Microaggressions are much more subtle. When someone is dismissive or rude to you it's very hard to tell whether they were doing that because of your race, gender, or because they are just an unkind person. For each individual action, it's basically impossible to say whether it was racially motivated or not. But after repeating this situation again and again you noticed that on average people are treating you a little bit differently.
I don't think it's worth complaining or trying to correct microaggressions. But I do think it's a useful term to describe what happens and to share experiences with others.
And since no one gets to experience life as anyone else, it's very hard to gauge whether you are having more negative experiences than other people. Maybe it's all in my head. Maybe this is normal, everyone is treated this way, I just need to grow a thicker skin, stop overreacting. Maybe I'm imagining it. Maybe I deserve to be treated this way.
The fact that it's such a subtle, barely perceptible pattern makes it worse. Hard enough to convince yourself it's happening sometimes, definitely not worth the effort of trying to get other people to see when they've decided not to.
My understanding of microaggression is more like calling some food "ethinic" food. At least in NYC/SF/LA it kind of seems like all food should be called "ethinic" or no food should be called "ethinic". If someone says "hey, let's go have some ethnic food" what they're perceived as saying is "let's go have some food from outsiders". And it makes perfect sense on some level but at some point, when there's enough people of different backgrounds all living in one place with 2nd and 3rd generations it's time to stop referring to them as outsiders in subtle ways .
It's like this joke
(Of course, we may differ on what makes science good science. For me, the ability to repeat an experimental result is essential to good science. Profiting from the results of your research generally seems to lead to bad science)
Therefore... what? What conclusions are we supposed to draw from that? That sociology has lived up to the standards of positivism? That it hasn't? That we should therefore find sociology to be trustworthy? That we shouldn't?
What point are you trying to make? Asking honestly, because I can't tell.
But from my (admittedly very outside) perspective, sociology and psychology don't look anything like positivism. They look like... I don't know what to call what they look like, but positivism ain't it.
Maybe actual positivism could help them. On the other hand, if they think that's what they've been doing for the last century, then telling them to do it isn't going to get them to real positivism...
Note well: I think positivism is a philosophy that failed because it was mistaken. I am not a supporter or a fan. But I think that sociology has really failed to come anywhere near what positivism would call for.
But I try to know my audience a bit and sometimes simplify certain things on HN to avoid arguments and conversational detours. Discussing things like postmodernism tends to get sidetracked and that's inherently necessary context, so...
Modern sociology is fairly quantitative and data-driven though. I think a lot of people would be surprised.
You can’t make perfume from shit. People don’t change.