Eugene Goodheart has invited responses to his new First piece (posted below) which takes in student protests against microaggressions and the more macro analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.[1] I’m skeptical of Goodheart’s attempt to hook-up the world-view of those students with Coates’s World. (More on that anon.) But his critique of the protesters has pushed me to think through the theory of microaggression.
I didn’t zero in last fall on the protests that provoked Goodheart. Perhaps because I’m wary of focusing too much on interracial relations in elite bubbles. I get more than a whiff of where things are at from the bottom up since my mixed race son goes to a private middle school linked with an Ivy institution. I’m alive to his progress there and how other African-American scholarship kids like him figure in his school’s Manhattan shadow-play of diversity. My sense is discourse on microaggression, which has trickled down to administrators of my son’s school, tends to lead “clients” (experts on microaggresion are often consultants who get paid) on a superficial “journey toward cultural competency”—a trip that skips over deep structures of disparity such as the wealth gap between black and white families. It’s no shock officials of my son’s school would be taken with the notion of microaggression. Dead lectures and/or performance pieces about bullying have been a staple of my kid’s school days, though nobody’s intent on teaching him “the wealthiest 100 households in America own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States.” Nor does the anti-bully brigade at his school cop to the fact their institution won’t end up enhancing life-chances of most scholarship students of color who lack the cultural capital to compete with echt Upper West Siders for spots in good city high schools.
Afro-American Ivy Leaguers are better off than most black kids in my kid’s middle school who seem likely to get a few (uneasy) years in a privileged surround before being thrown back into a colder world. Not that I’m out to divide black folks along class lines. While I don’t conflate Affirmative Action within a meritocracy with reparative justice for the black nation, I also don’t mock conflicted emotions of upwardly mobile Afro-Americans or assume their lives are creamy. (Nobody conscious of the constancy of disrespect shown to Barack Obama can be entirely clueless about injuries endured by black American climbers.)
I can see how the theory of microaggression might spark acts of black solidarity (like the one Russell Banks evokes in his moving piece here), but I think such discourse is more likely to deflect attention from what’s unique about Afro-American experience in all its pain and glory (and at every level of society). Academics who talk that talk often mash up social blocs, invoking outrage at America’s crimes against black humanity to justify bluster about complaints lodged by members of other ethnic groups and minorities. The Chinese-American professor named Sue who’s done most to popularize the theory of microaggression is a serial offender on this score.
Take the narrative near the top of one of his latest texts, Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence. Sue tells how a “Chinese American award-winning” journalist who went to interview the president of large corporation was insulted when an executive assistant there mistook him for a “Chinese food delivery person.” Sue cautions against those who might be tempted to wonder “what great harm has been done” to the journalist. He sums up the case for theorizing this slight in a graph that exposes the conflation at the root of his own fabled cultural competency. (Note his citation, by the way, of his own work in the following passage. His numberless nods to “Sue et al.” are tells that give the lie to his self-presentation of scholarly authority.)[2]
Research….shows that while racial microaggressions might seem to be micro acts or small slights, they oftentimes have devastating macro harmful consequences (Sue et al., 2007; Zou & Dickter, 2013). For example, believing Black males are prone to violence and a menace to society can result in situations of racial profiling, more severe or greater likelihood of death sentences given to Black defendants than to White ones, and greater inclination to shoot Black suspects (Correll, 2009; Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2007; Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006; J. M. Jones, 2013a, 2013b). In the case of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, sadly to say, it may have resulted in their deaths.
But Sue’s example is inconsecutive. That Chinese American journalist doesn’t share the same burden as Afro-Americans who really are at risk because of white supremacist myths they are “prone to violence and a menace to society.” It’s mad to mix up the insult to the journo with bullets that ended black lives. Sue should be called out for his tricky (all slights matter?) admixtures, but, on the real side, he’s such a maladroit writer/thinker I doubt he grasps his own sleight of the hand. The chain of (what passes for) analysis in the following passage isn’t a con; it’s just dim:
Microaggressions…are plentiful as indicated by the examples below. A lesbian client in therapy reluctantly disclosed her sexual orientation to a straight male therapist by stating that she was “into women.” The therapist indicated he was not shocked by this disclosure because he once had a client who was “into dogs.” (Hidden message: Homosexuality is abnormal and akin to bestiality.) A gay adolescent was frequently made to feel uncomfortable when fellow classmates would describe silly or stupid behavior by saying “that’s gay.” (Hidden message: Homosexuality is deviant.) A blind man reports that, when people speak to him, they often raise their voices. A well-meaning nurse was actually “yelling at him” when giving him directions on taking his medication. He replied to her: “Please don’t raise your voice, I can hear you perfectly well.” (Hidden message: A person with a disability is defined as lesser in all aspects of functioning.) During a parent –teacher conference, a teacher suggested to a mother that her son, 16-year-old Jesus Fernandez, had learning problems. He was inattentive in class, unmotivated, late with homework, and frequently napped at his desk. The teacher was unaware that Jesus worked 4 to 5 hours after school to help support the family. (Hidden message: Lack of consciousness about how dealing with poverty can sap the energies of people.) In referring to outfit worn by a woman on TV, the viewer described it as “trashy” and “classless.” (Hidden message: Lower class is associated with being lesser and undesirable.)
This chain of foolishness has a hidden message: Sue’s theory is a clusterfuck—an assault on clarity (and literacy). I’m struck in particular by the plaint about “Jesus Fernandez’s” teacher. While Sue probably meant to complain the teacher had jumped too fast to suggest an overworked student might have a learning disability, that’s not all clear. As it’s written (and might be read by poor souls who may be assigned this bad book in a college class), the text seems to be trashing the teacher for having the temerity to tell parents their son has been napping in class.
The bogus “vignettes” Sue uses to back up his weak linkages tend to be out of time and locked in the context of no context. History isn’t Sue’s thing. He’s a social psychologist, which is to say he often tells you in bad English what you already know: “Groups that are marginalized by our society exist on the margins (lower or outer limits) of social desirability and consciousness.” It’s all in the parens again here: “Indeed, the intensity of the interactions resulted in one student crying (generally a sign of becoming overcome with emotion).”
Sue’s stuff should bore most readers to tears, but I’m not sure this generation of college students can avoid being subjected to his clunky texts. I’m reminded just now that I recently came across a blog post by a Yale grad student who’d had her mind blown by Invisible Man. This student had found the book on her own and was rightly amazed—and pissed—she’d gone through high school and college without anyone ever assigning her that novel. I hope Invisible Man isn’t being replaced on reading lists by Sue’s work, which really is something close to the antithesis of Ellison’s.
Sue means to micro-manage “racial, cultural beings” but there isn’t a fully human subject in any of his texts. The self really isn’t Sue’s “unit” of choice. The idea of individualism is almost anathema to him as you’ll see if you watch his exchange with a liberal radio commentator near the end of this video. The radiohead had recalled a moment in his student days when he witnessed a Native American professor throw up his hands at the thought of depredations committed by white folks: “I don’t know what it is that came out of the Caucasus mountains.” The interviewer then asked Sue to comment on that prof’s angle on America. Here’s Sue’s wisdom (from the East?):
I would say there’s a clash between individualism and collectivism. Native American philosophy is one of harmony and interconnectiveness. That living beings are connected spiritually to non-living beings. In America we value what I [!] call rugged individualism. That is separation. And we have a saying. “God helps those who help themselves.” “You can do it on your own.” “Stand up for your own rights.” There’s a saying very similar to Native American philosophy among the Japanese when they value collectivism, that the psycho-social unit of identity is not the individual but the family, the group, or the collective society. Their statement is that the nail that stands up is hammered back down again…
Sue seemed to side with the hammer. There’s no real I in his teams of victims. As he went on with his rap that “separating yourself from the group…is pathological,” I flashed on a memorable scene in a (not good) 80s movie, Year of the Dragon, where Mickey Rourke plays the new marshal in Chinatown, spitting on the get-along-go-along tribalism of corrupt Chinese businessmen. Year of the Dragon’s version of the clash between American Creed and alien Asian traditions may be too Hollywood. Its urban Western shtick puffs up American exceptionalism. (Truth is, as Harold Cruse pointed out long ago in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, America’s ethnic groups have sometimes made progress because they refused to melt too early or bow to a WASPy civic religion. Which is one reason why Cruse claimed the Civil Rights Movement’s call for integration would be dicey for black people trying to navigate a pluralist society where groups that hang tight tend to get over faster.) So I’m not down by law with Rourke’s rad cop. Yet the conflict dramatized in Year of the Dragon still seems relevant when it comes to Sue’s group-think, which may have roots in a parochial anti-Americanism. Here’s another snatch from American pop life—a bit by angry genius, Richard Pryor—Sue would probably abhor. Pryor’s riff on Chinese restaurants (in which he…nails a stuttering waiter) must be suspect in Sue’s humorless universe where individualism in the extreme is out of place. I’m pretty sure he’d take Pryor’s inspired act of comic mimesis as a microaggressive assault on a marginal group.
If becoming a “liberated white brother” (per Sue) means giving up Richard Pryor, I don’t want to be free. Though I have to acknowledge Pryor himself gave up the n-word. And no-one can pretend the history of humor isn’t full of politics. That all came home to me recently when I read an old college novel, Stover at Yale (1912) by Owen Johnson, which Scott Fitzgerald once called the “textbook” of his generation. Stover at Yale might engage today’s Ivy students—large swatches of it hold up a century on since gamesmanship among elites hasn’t changed that much. There is, though, one would-be comic chapter that’s so dated it’s nearly unreadable. It depicts a couple of Gentlemen C-Student types playing a joke on an Italian barber who becomes the butt of endless, stupid jibes. I don’t believe I’d’ve ever smiled at this bias attack on Italians and I hope Scott Fitzgerald—who had the sense to mock the racist treatise, The Decline of the Great Race, in Gatsby—resisted those gross pages, but who knows? Maybe Richard Pryor’s wit will seem as tendentious as Stover at Yale’s nativist turns in a century.
Representative Jewish characters play roles in Stover at Yale that indicate Yale’s WASP elite will make their peace with Jews in America. But the novel implies Irish need not apply (yet). And, as I say, the stance toward Italians is even uglier. Any reader of Stover now is likely to end up reflecting on progress made by Irish-Americans and Italo-Americans over the past century.
That progress, in turn, underscores how a mass of Black folks are still stuck, living in separate, unequal neighborhoods marked by concentrated poverty. When it comes to their status, Sue’s theory of everything offers nada. In that video of him I linked to earlier there’s a moment of pathos when he allows his guided trips lead to dead ends:
…[T]hat’s been one of our most discouraging findings. For people to work through the levels, to attain what I call a non-racist identity, a self-reckoning where they really have to search their own soul and come up with a new identity as someone who cannot tolerate bias and racism. But it often does not translate into action…. We’ve only won half the battle when we get people to explore themselves as racial, cultural beings. The second part of the battle is how do we effect major change in the institutions, culture and society we live in.
I’m pretty sure Sue’s theory actually makes it harder to think big about America’s obligation to mount comprehensive long-term programs of developmental assistance—not guilt money—for nearly the entire black population of American. My conviction here was strengthened by Connor Friedersdorf’s Atlantic critique of the demands made last Fall by Amherst College students who were galvanized after black students spoke about how they didn’t feel at home on their own campus. Allies of those students treated their painful affirmations of identity as an excuse to police politically incorrect speech and demand (pointless) official statements of apology. Their letter to Amherst’s president didn’t elaborate on facts of feeling articulated by black kids whose testimonies launched Amherst Uprising. It jumped quickly to a list of demands which began with a Sue-style compound of plaints that sought to comprehend all of Amherst’s and America’s sins. Amherst’s president was directed to offer an official apology to victims of:
several injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latin racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism. Also include that marginalized communities and their allies should feel safe at Amherst College.
Amherst Uprising’s instinct to clarify their college’s “institutional legacy of white supremacy” may be right on. And in an Age of Trump, it seems like a no-brainer to cultivate solidarity among all people of color and anyone whom the Donald might define as a loser. Yet I’m with Friedersdorf who wasn’t wowed by the paltry demands of Amherst’s protesters. Their readiness to settle for diffuse blame games probably testifies to the influence (by osmosis) of runaround Sue. In the absence of his small bore theory, those Amherst kids might’ve demanded their college help sponsor a broadscale effort by public intellectuals to determine what kind of reparations would have the greatest chance of transforming the current state of the African American nation.
The sharpest contemporary advocate for reparations, of course, is Ta-Nehisi Coates. And that’s one reason why I believe Goodheart is probably wrong to link Coates with decriers of microaggression (though they may try to climb on his shoulders). It seems apparent Coates’s materialist instincts run counter to the, ah, spirit of microaggression. To begin with, there’s his focus on violence done to the black body and then there’s his commitment to sponsoring a dollars and sense approach to what America owes black people.
Reparations have been in the news again lately thanks to Coates’s back and forths on the subject with the Sanders campaign and its supporters in the hip hop nation and pro left. Coates has re-upped on his case for reparations (even as he allows he’ll be voting for Sanders) here. He outlines the undeniable historical record of specific injuries done to black populations in America and offers another sharp argument against those who deny “black poverty is fundamentally distinct from white poverty.”
While I don’t believe Coates has ever nodded to the theory of microaggression, I noticed in this last essay he picked up on the current academic buzzword, “intersectionality.” Hope he loses that term of jargon. I doubt it will help anyone understand how a person’s identity is thicker than race or class or gender or sexual orientation. Or how those human strands link up under pressure. (Students now trying to sort out “intersectionality,” would be better off mulling over a line in Claire Denis’s flic, 35 Shots of Rum: “When we revolt it’s not for any particular reason…there are many reasons but we revolt because we cannot breathe…”) “Intersectionality” seems to have slipped out of the Ivory Tower (like microaggression). But it’s still a term likely to mystify everyday people. Permanent democrats should avoid such academese and aim to speak plainly.
Which brings me to the uses of “asshole”—a term that’s been theorized lately by one Aaron James (and which Russell Banks recurred to in his new post). It occurs to me James’s gloss on the term might offer an alternative to the theory of microaggression. An asshole, per James, “systematically allows himself to enjoy systemic advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.”
Down the line, if I’m accused of microaggression I may react reflexively and dismissively. But if you tell me I’ve been an asshole, I’ll hear you right away!
Notes
1 I’ve written about Between the World and Me and I disagree with Goodheart’s assessment of it. I won’t harp on my differences on this front with Mr. G. here though I will say I think he missed the light in World. (Try Coates’s trips through Howard U’s “Mecca” or his account of how his son’s eyes “lit up like candles when we stood out on Saint-Germain-des pres.”) Not that Coates should apologize for refusing to separate the dark from the dark. Americans need to take his bruising journey into the night.
2 Derald Sue is a professor of psychology at Columbia University Teachers College and his bio and list of publications indicate analysis of microaggressions is a family business. He often collaborates with his younger brother who is also a professor of psychology.