A New Definition of Microaggression / Microaffirmation

Recently, I’ve learned two new words: ‘microaggression’ and ‘microaffirmation’ in the process of searching for similar words, except what I was looking for were those words in a broader sense. Why was I looking for these new words? Because I thought that our suffering nowadays and its remedy must come from our environment, and there was no word to explain such circumstances; it was like a million paper cuts that ruin your self-esteem, trust in society, and your outlook. Take kids who hate their body because of the media and cruel school cliques, for example.

Not only kids, but also we adults have been getting these paper cuts for a whole lifetime, and we don’t even know when you get them or how they affect you. But you instinctively understand the judgments your gender, skin color, appearance, and behavior invite, and you self-censure to avoid these harms unconsciously, even though you have no reason to do so.

Maybe, if you are brave enough, you say something to someone who insults you, and you find justice. But it’s not always someone rude in an obvious way. Sometimes it’s a ‘helpful’ ad suggesting you be more attractive by editing yourself to look less like your actual age or race. Sometimes it’s a movie and drama where the bad guy is always the minority group or the ‘other’ that makes them less empathetic to the audience. Sometimes it’s someone at a party who’s trying to be the manic strange Asian everyone there expects him to be.

Some people, well, people in my demographic, will find these experiences familiar. I call them microaggressions in the sense that they make us uncomfortable, but it’s difficult to pinpoint why. You might say “You shouldn’t care about what other people do” or “You think too much,” but that’s not the point. We’re not taking it as a direct insult. It makes us uncomfortable because we know that these behaviors are contributing little by little to the system of discrimination. We need to identify them, maybe by naming these circumstances or reframing existing words, in order to stop reproducing and maintaining the norms of discrimination.

Microaggression usually specifically means an act by an individual or some other circumstance that unintentionally contributes to the systematic discrimination of a marginalized group. But this definition could be misleading; just like I said, those paper cuts scrape off something significant within you, seemingly by the environment itself rather than an individual.

Conversely, microaffirmation means an affirmation that is done to encourage you. But it’s not always by you. Sometimes it’s your new friend who encourages you to stay for one more drink because you’re having a great time. Sometimes it’s someone who shows you appreciation for what you’ve done rather than how you look. Sometimes it’s the moment you realize that your mom simply said ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’, which she couldn’t have done when she was struggling with domestic violence.

I assume those experiences might be familiar to many people. They warm your heart and mend something lost within you. You can affirm yourself in other way like, listening to “Love Myself” by Hailee Steinfeld, of course, and it works. But I think affirmations that arise between you and society make more sense, because we’re social monkeys after all; in other words, these paper cuts from others hurt so much, which means, paradoxically, we are craving relationships, trust and honour in society. Society owes us a big fat microaffirmation (I know it’s a weird phrase.)

Microaggressions and microaffirmations are often unitentional, not a deliberate action done by someone, and from now on, I’m gonna use my own definition for these words.

Today, that’s it. I actually have a lot of things to write that are related to those words and my train of thought. But I’ll take my English teacher’s advice: Don’t try to write everything in one article; it will make more sense when you write several related articles.

For now, the conclusion of this article is: Let’s focus on noticing microaffirmations rather than microaggressions and appreciate every bit of them.