What initially sounds like a small and insignificant misbehaviour by a single person can have major consequences for marginalized people. This is because microaggressions often add up in everyday life. They have a negative impact on individual well-being. To make the work environment more inclusive, we need to take a closer look at microaggressions.

 

The term microaggressions originates from social psychology and was first coined in the 1970s by the US psychiatrist Chester Pierce, who taught as a professor at Harvard University. He found a term to describe the attacks by white people on the dignity of black people. For people who represent the normative majority in the organization (e.g. white, heterosexual cisgender women or men without disabilities), microaggressions often go unnoticed. And that, of course, is an obstacle to an inclusive work culture.

For marginalized people, such as Black people and People of Color, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, Muslim people or people with disabilities, this can look very different. For example, it is simply difficult for people without a wheelchair to realize that the office is actually only accessible via a staircase and that the building is therefore not accessible for them. Or it is unclear that the question “Where are you from, I mean really?” is exclusionary and racist. Or there is a lack of awareness that there are more than two genders and a person is assigned the wrong gender.

 

Stereotype threat – or: extreme pressure to conform

 

This lack of awareness of different perspectives and needs in mainstream society means that marginalized people go to great mental lengths to fit in with the majority. A survival strategy to better manage the so-called stereotype threat: The fear of being judged based on negative stereotypes or confirming negative stereotypes that exist regarding the group in which the person is categorized. This feels threatening and has a significant negative impact on individual performance, as a study by the University of Ulm shows.

 

How it feels

 

The Zeit journalist Vanessa Vu describes her feelings about microaggressions in relation to the “where do you come from” question as follows:

 

“You can think of it like pinpricks: A prick hardly hurts at all, but being pricked every few days makes your skin sore. And no one brings ointment. No one apologizes. No one asks what they can do for me. Instead, people complain about my pain, label it as a lack of discourse and talk about how they meant it.”

 

I also know microaggressions from my own experience and can therefore understand the feeling described by Vanessa Vu very well. People who are structurally less discriminated against must therefore learn what microaggression is and how they can change their behavior. After all, a question or statement is often well-intentioned, but still opens up a wound in the other person.

 

Examples of microaggressions are

 

• Interrupting people in meetings or stealing ideas (this often affects women in particular)
• Simply ignoring contributions to the meeting or dismissing them as not important enough
• mispronounce the name marked as non-German several times or make jokes about it
• making sexist, racist, homophobic and/or trans-hostile, ableist jokes (ableist = discriminatory practice against people with physical, mental or psychological disabilities)
• When heterosexual cisgender men ask a homosexual cisgender man to behave “like a man” for once
• address a person with the wrong pronoun
• Women say that they should calm down now and not be so emotional

• Comments based on stereotypes: When an Afro-German woman is told that she speaks good German, or: “It’s hot today, but you know that from where you come from”
• “For me, all people are equal” – well-intentioned, but ignores the fact that people and groups are structurally discriminated against on the basis of different personality traits
• Privileges that are only granted to certain groups (for example, training is only granted to cisgender men, but not to cisgender women)
• sexist comments about colleagues’ clothing or bodies
• using someone’s wheelchair as a bag rack without being asked (thanks to Raul Krauthausen)

• …

List on Racial Microaggressions of the University of Minnesota (English)

 

Stress is the breeding ground for microaggressions

 

Microaggressions can happen quickly, especially when things are particularly stressful at work. In stressful situations, the brain particularly likes to fall back on familiar, stereotypical thinking and prejudices because it is easier on resources. However, this makes it more difficult to adopt new, less discriminatory behavior. Pausing for a moment in this situation and reflecting can help. Next time, you will simply do better and apologize sincerely this time.

A busy working day is not a good excuse, because the picks happen on the backs of marginalized people.

Psychologist Derald Wing Sue revived the term microaggressions a decade ago. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, he describes this psychological challenge as follows:

 

“And this message naturally triggers stress in the brain. This means that stress hormones or neurotransmitters, in common parlance we say hormones, nerve messengers that represent stress, are released and the brain sends out signals and says: You can be destroyed. And because of this response from the brain, we can also speak of biological killing when it comes to racial microaggression.”

 

This is precisely the opposite of inclusion. And it is also the opposite of what diversity strategies are supposed to achieve: That every person can contribute and realize their full potential and that they are valued for it.

 

Working together without microaggressions

 

For an inclusive working environment, it is therefore particularly important to take a closer look at how people work together in a team and to listen to subjective perspectives. After all, everything may feel ideal for you in your team – but perhaps not for your lesbian colleague, for example because she feels that she is not allowed to show herself in this way. This doesn’t mean that she is too sensitive. Rather, it means that you need to work as a team to make the company culture more comfortable for marginalized people and different needs. Microaggressions can vary from company to company. You may be able to think of other situations.

 

My idea about microaggressions

 

1. Start collecting typical situations with microaggressions company-wide in a list.
2. Important: I do not recommend this if D&I is new to your colleagues. Feel free to contact us for your strategy.
3. Make this document available in a cloud so that people can write their observations anonymously. However, it must fit in with your corporate culture. Moderate the cloud in a discrimination-sensitive manner.
4. Collect quantitative data: Conduct regular surveys on the well-being and sense of belonging in the team, talk about it and work with experienced experts like us – e.g. for an inclusion survey. This will give you well-founded data on how pronounced the topic is in your company.
5. Practice discrimination-sensitive interaction and solidarity through our allyship training courses. This enables uninvolved outsiders to intervene in critical situations and make life easier for people who are discriminated against. What is Allyship? Read more here.