Abstract
Microaggressions, as defined by psychologist Derald Wing Sue, are “the brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” (Sue 2010: 5; see also Sue et al 2007). Amongst these three different mechanisms, environmental microaggression is most rarely discussed and most poorly understood. On Regina Rini’s (2021: 21) characterization “Environmental microaggressions are distinctive in that they don’t involve any particular perpetrator. They are background facts that regularly confront marginalized people with casual disregard or disdain.” Sue’s own examples tend to primarily involve social arrangements, and his own analyses tend to primarily be about messages communicated. For example, he talks about his own experience, as a non-white person, going into a room of university administrators, all of whom are white, and how this monochromatic scene sends the message “You and your kind are not welcome here.” (Sue 2010: 25–26). However, I contend that the background facts that regularly confront marginalized people are often not only social, but also material. For example, automatic soap dispensers that work less well for darker-skinned users also realize environmental microaggressions. Such objects and spaces are not merely biased against some class of users, but a downstream consequence of injustice toward an oppressed group and an upstream antecedent of further injustices. That is, they are oppressive things that don’t simply reflect or reveal past injustices, they also perpetuate it: in particular, they do so because—on a broadly 4E cognition perspective—our thoughts and actions causally depend on, and may even be partially constituted by, our cognitive environment (Liao and Huebner 2021). My proposal can be thought of as a generalization of Alison Reiheld’s (2020) account of microaggressions as a disciplinary technique for fat bodies. Specifically, Reiheld gives examples of furnitures that are not built to fit fat bodies as examples of such environmental microaggressions. But the world is also full of similarly materialized microaggressions against oppressed groups along axes of race, gender, disability, etc. and their intersections. These objects and spaces have the same epistemic profile as verbal and behavioral microaggressions. People in the oppressive group tend to not notice the existence of such materialized microaggressions. But even people in the oppressed group tend to not notice their systematicity: that is, they might be inclined to explain away individual interactions as isolated incidents. In particular, the connections between materialized microaggressions and other manifestations of oppression remain opaque. Taking seriously the materiality of environmental microaggressions also challenges Sue’s own understanding of the concept. While he focuses on social arrangements and symbolic communication, a materialist conception of environmental microaggressions emphasizes their role in scripting thoughts and actions. To address environmental microaggressions, we do not need training sessions with consultants; instead, we need to gradually, but quite literally, remake the world.
