The weight of little phrases

Individual racism does not always wear the face of an insult. It also slips into ordinary remarks: "Your French is so good!", "But where are you really from?", or the reflex of taking a Black student for a member of the cleaning staff. As early as 1970, the American psychiatrist Chester Pierce gave these acts a name: "microaggressions."

In 2007, psychologist Derald Wing Sue and his team defined them, in the journal American Psychologist, as brief, everyday indignities, verbal, behavioural or environmental, intentional or not, that communicate a hostile or demeaning message to racialized people. They distinguish three forms: the microassault, which is explicit; the microinsult, which demeans an identity; and the microinvalidation, which denies lived experience, like the familiar "Come on, you're exaggerating."

Taken one by one, they seem harmless. Added up, they weigh. In 2019, a meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, pooling 72 samples and more than 18,700 participants, found a modest but significant link between experienced microaggressions and adjustment difficulties, especially stress and inner distress.

The good news is that what plays out in a sentence can also be repaired in a sentence. Listening without getting defensive, apologizing simply, asking a question out of curiosity rather than suspicion: so many gestures that make the other person larger, and us along with them. That is Ubuntu's intuition: our humanities grow or shrink together.