On Microagressions as Child Abuse
Microagressions are abound, they are literally everywhere — peppered throughout our daily exposure to society. A microagression is a small and subtle slight to a population (usually a minority population) and can include anything from a band-aid not matching the color of your skin to being told that crying is ‘gay’ — microagressions are component parts of dominant culture that serve to reinforce ‘position’ and ‘place’ for members of minority cultures.
If you are lucky enough you might only experience an infinitesimal number of them across your life-course, but the likelihood is that you do experience some of them daily, and like the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ the microagressions add up to marginalization and negative health/mental health/wellness outcomes within your life.
This phenomena has a greater impact on children than it does adults — that is not to say that adults aren’t grossly impacted by experiencing microagressions (they are), rather it is to reflect that childrens’ brains are more susceptible to the over-aching impact of microagressions during maturation — a child’s sense of self, their concept of ‘place in the world’, their understanding of value, their resilience, and their mental health are all impacted by microagressions. We might attempt to limit the exposure of a child to microagressions, but children also learn and grow vicariously through experiencing adults within their lives — we adults model their reality, and they (in turn) mirror our reality; a reality that is shaped by society and dominant culture.
The part of your brain that is reading this sentence is not the part of your brain that I am talking about, the part of your brain that received the greater influence of microagressions has already been affected — it has already ‘learned’ information about your ‘place’ and your ‘role’ within society. You have already been conditioned. The actual horror of this is that we are all taking part in unconscious social conditioning and engineering — now I’m not talking about a conspiracy theory here, I’m talking about science; neuroscience, psychology, and sociology.
As we grow we learn who we are by our relationship to objects and phenomena within the world — we learn social concepts and constructs like value, morality, interdependence, compassion and altruism. We also learn the nature of fear, rejection, anger, power and ‘otherness’. Central to the mechanism of learning is perspective, and it is within the field of self-reference that we process how we fit into society. We literally learn our place by having our place illustrated for us — we are told, shown, pushed and pulled into roles, traits, groups, and standing.
Children that grow up in households with high levels of stress, with unpredictable outcomes, with limited access to physical/mental/spiritual support and with an internalized sense of ‘otherness’ (poverty, belonging to a minority group, having an unsafe or inconsistent home) are more likely to have deficits in critical brain development that supports wellness and functionality later in life. The literal exposure to explicit and implicit microagressions (coupled with overt modes of oppression and marginalization) creates a deficit in a child’s brain that is significant enough to grossly impact their ability to value themselves.
The concept of self-value is important, it is the measure through which we care for self but it is also the mode through which we categorize and interact with others — essentially those with balanced, nuanced and healthy concepts of self are more likely to treat others as well as they care for themselves / those with imbalanced, biased and unhealthy concepts of self are more likely to take advantage of others and to seek self-gratification at the cost of others, or forego self-sustaining behaviors as a consequence of poor self-value.
The fascinating consequence of microagressions is that bias has negative outcomes for children who are the recipients of microagressions as well as those who benefit from microagressions — essentially if you are part of the homogeneous group (fitting in with upper echelons of dominant culture) you are more likely to be ‘blind’ to actions that marginalize and oppress others, you are more likely to be less sympathetic to the plight of ‘others’, and you are more likely to trend toward protecting your status at the cost of others. The outcomes for children who are overt recipients of microagressions (especially if it has been intergenerational) are consistently and predictably poor — this can be reduced if the environment (home, family, community, elders, role-models) acts as a ‘buffer’ to the message from dominant culture — however the impact on a child’s brain during key developmental stages can be far-reaching; in that creating a nurturing and affirming setting for children doesn’t have enough of an impact upon the message coming from outside of the home. Despite what you teach your children society is also teaching them a specific message.
As adults our experience of microagressions reflects back to our childhood conditioning, we are either reinforced, challenged, harmed or homogenized though our exposure. If you have always ‘fit in’ then the messages contained within social communication will increase your sense of self and belonging. If you were marginalized, stigmatized, oppressed, devalued, struggled, bullied, abused or ignored then these experiences are reinforced on a daily basis.
If your body didn’t fit in, if your skin wasn’t desirable, if your intellect was ridiculed, if you went without, if you were targeted, if you had to hide your truth, if you felt shame for being you… these experiences are stored during early development and become reference points for all future interaction. To some extent they become hardwired into our brains.
The intersection of shared social responsibility with regards to cultural sensitivity is not that complex, it is not that hard to understand — gross injustices of equality are just as meaningful as the micro transgressions and aggressions that occur daily, they have just as much impact over the life-course of an individual. We might experience persecution and measure that as a greater ill than being subclass or seen as an ‘other’, but we know that experiencing identity confusion and persistent malaise are clear predictors for mental illness, self-harm, increased aggression, deviant behavior, victimization, criminality, addiction, and poor health outcomes that lead to an early death.
Not taking personal responsibility and accountability for the daily impact that microagressions have upon the varying groups of ‘other’ is being complicit in a pattern of child abuse that underpins the majority of social complaints — we are creating discordance and harm to others within society by benefiting from privilege and not taking themes like sexism, ablism, homophobia/transphobia, classism and racism seriously enough — we do it through the shows we watch, the products we buy, the jokes we make, and the votes we cast. We do it to ourselves.
