The APS article that thinks InfoWars is a reliable source

The current edition of Perspectives on Psychological Science includes a review of the concept of ‘microaggressions’ which argues for “abandonment of the term “microaggression,” and call[s] for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists” pending research to meet a range of recommendations for the field (Lilienfeld, 2017). When I first read this article I was preparing to engage conceptually with the content. I will still do this but the more striking issue is some of the sources it chooses to reference. This is concerning because it is not clear that “(Watson, 2015)” in the body of the text is a reference to conspiracy site, namely InfoWars. Yet, such dubious references are used to give spurious rigour to this review. At a time where the far-right are finding a renewed power it is dangerous to uncritically reference their ‘news’ sites within an esteemed peer-reviewed publication.

The ‘news’ outlets this review thinks are acceptable sources
In total 23 news sites are referenced in this piece. The articles referenced are listed below. This includes articles from a number of pretty questionable sources including InfoWars, home of 9/11 Truther and arch far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

1. Washington Post
2. Minnesota Brown
   — This seems to be some random blog about Minnesota (yeah, I don’t know either)
3. RealClearPolitics
   — This article includes lines such as “Facts are racist.”
4. Fortune
5. The Atlantic
6. The Huffington Post
7. EAG News
   — The founder and CEO of this site co-wrote a book with Glen Beck
8. The Wall Street Journal
9. The Daily Caller
   — Just click through to this site. It’s far-right pro-Trump nonsense
10. The College Fix
    — Another far-right partisan source
11. Gateway Pundit
    — Honestly click through to this one. It’s the cheapest looking site ever.
12. The Atlantic
13. Time
14. USA Today
15. The Daily Caller
16. The Denver Post
17. The Chronicle of Higher Education
18. MLive
19. reason.com
20. Psychology Today
21. Bloomberg
22. InfoWars
23. CBS News

Other miscellaneous issues with the piece
This is a very scattershot collections of issues I had with the piece. It’s by no means comprehensive but might serve to give a flavour of what it’s like.

1. The author talks about how important it is to not let political biases influence one’s scientific views. However, judging from the dubious far-right websites he references this seems to be exactly what he’s doing.
2. He talks about how difficult it is to get independent verification for microaggressions. This is again ironic given his fondness for partisan right-wing websites.
3. The author seems to claim that we should only care about and address things for which there is a large body of scientific evidence. Whilst evidence of this form is certainly important, it is also possible to trust people of colour in the meantime; the day-to-day undermining by white folk of people of colour has been written about pretty extensively! Relatedly, ‘evidence’ seems to be construed rather narrowly here. Personally I feel like the collective experiences of people of colour provide enough evidence to satisfy me that this is a serious issue.
   — There are many things that negatively affect people’s daily life despite our ‘scientific’ understanding of them being limited. I think ignoring people’s reported experience and waiting on the evidence is unwise and potentially dangerous.
4. The author repeatedly uses the term “transgendered”, which is regarded as outdated and offensive see here.
5. “It is doubtful whether an action that lies largely or exclusively in the eye of a beholder can legitimately be deemed “aggressive.”” (pp. 143)
   — Relying on a corroborating white gaze leaves us at the mercy of white ignorance.
6. The author uses nebulous examples as a rhetorical device. This does exactly the thing the author accuses ‘microaggression’ of by being too vague and ambiguous to be useful. To take one of the author’s examples: discussion of (supposed) racial differences in IQ would or wouldn’t be aggressive depending on broader context. E.g. if it was placed within a broader discussion of the tools of white supremacy.
7. Is it so ridiculous to think that most of the way we speak is racist in a white supremacist world? [1].
8. The author seems to misunderstand why people argue meritocracy is a myth in reducing it to differences between individualist and communitarian perspectives. The reason people say meritocracy is a myth is because white supremacy means that mediocre white people are afforded unfair advantage due to their race. This has nothing to do with where people lie on the individualism-comunitarianism spectrum. White supremacy is materially constituted by, for example, the higher proportion of people of colour who live in poor housing, attend poor schools, work low paid jobs, get harassed by police etc.
9. The author seems to argue that colour-blindness is a laudable ideal state. As scholars in critical race theory have argued, this view makes the mistake of imaging a world that is not possible given our collective history. That is, in a world where Race has been invented, such a colour-blind society is unattainable (this point is from one of Charles W. Mills’ talks on YouTube).
10. The author goes from the finding of one study that 22% of Asian Americans reported “no microaggressions in a 2 week period” to the suggestion that “a number of minority individuals report few or no microaggressions”. There’s a big difference between not having experienced microaggressions in the past 2 weeks and not experiencing them.
11. The author suggests that personality traits such as negative emotionality explain a substantial part of reporting of microaggression. This claim is made from a correlation of .21 (i.e. we’re talking about 4% of variance)
    — Also elsewhere the author criticised people for making causal interpretations of correlations. It seems plausible that people might score more highly on negative emotionality measures due to being worn down by the constant stream of microaggressions.
12. The author suggests that “race-based rejection sensitivity” makes a substantial contribution from a correlation of .27.
    — The line of argument strike me as particularly pernicious as it offers a way to dismiss those who are more conscious of white sumpremacy. Again, we could equally image that experiencing microaggressions makes you more conscious of racism.
13. “More speculatively, a heightened attention to microaggressions may sensitize minority individuals to subtle signs of potential prejudice, leading them to become hypervigilant to trivial potential slights.” (pp. 162)
    — Alternatively it might help us address the pernicious and painful forms of racism that have gone hitherto ignored.

Conclusion
I think this piece has a number of issues. Perhaps most strikingly is the reliance on highly questionable sources. The author might be better off spending less time on InfoWars and more time reading about the lived experiences of people of colour. The scientific recommendations the piece makes for the microaggression field are both reasonable and rhetorically interesting. The author suggests that we should essentially stop talking about microaggressions in the ‘real world’ until these recommendations are met. This will take a great deal of time and, moreover, some of the recommendations may be near impossible to meet. For example, it may never be possible to achieve agreement between white folk and people of colour about this topic given the pernicious phenomena philosophers call white ignorance (see here and the reference above). Thus, the suggestion that we should stop talking about microaggressions ‘for now’ could, in practice, amount to a suggestion that we stop talking about them for good.

Notes
1. Readers skeptical of the term White Sumpremacy should read Charles W. Mills books ‘The Racial Contract’ (First chapter available here). For those without time to read a book search Charles W. Mills on YouTube will provide a number of short and accessible videos such as ‘Does Race Exist?’ and ‘The Racist Roots of Liberalism’