Matt Driscoll: What is a microaggression, and why do they matter?

When I reach Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, he puts into words what some Republican legislators in Olympia — nearly 3,000 miles away from his office in New York — are obviously feeling.

“It’s taking the profession by storm, but it’s also become very big in the social media, and in the social discourse,” Sue tells me by phone.

He’s talking about microaggressions, a subject he knows better than most. Sue literally wrote the book on these misunderstood slights back in 2010, the oft-cited “Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.” He’s been studying and helping to explain them for a decade.

“It’s almost like the waters are being stirred up,” he says of the current landscape. “Diversity is changing, and people now have a means of sharing what is happening with them.”

To hear Sue tell it, that’s a good thing.

In the preface to his 2010 book, Sue describes microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.” He writes that “the power of microaggressions lies in their invisibility to the perpetrator, who is unaware that he or she has engaged in a behavior that threatens and demeans the recipient of such communication.”

Their destructive power, Sue tells me, comes not in the individual instance, but in the cumulative effect over months, years and decades. Examples of microaggressions include a white woman clutching her purse when passing a minority on the sidewalk, the assumption that Asians are good at math, or the refusal to use the pronoun consistent with someone’s gender identity.

Long dismissed as harboring overly sensitive reactions to everyday, unintentional occurrences, marginalized groups now have a language and taxonomy to describe their collective experiences.

In other words, Sue says, progress.

But listening to state legislators like Rep. Matt Manweller, R-Ellensburg, you get another perspective completely.

Earlier this session, Manweller — a professor of political science at Central Washington University — championed a legislative effort he called an “academic bill of rights,” a reaction to what he and other lawmakers fear is a loss of free speech on college campuses.

While the bill died in committee, it’s unlikely we’ve seen the last such efforts.

“I think there is a growing concern, on the broader 30,000-foot level, that universities have become so concerned with the notion of safe spaces and not being offensive to anyone, that they’ve lost their primary mission, which is to introduce students to ideas that they might not be comfortable with,” Manweller told The News Tribune’s Melissa Santos earlier this month.

In some ways, Manweller has a point. It’s not hard to find instances in which students or faculty members at universities across the country have seen free speech suffer in the ongoing quest for political correctness. To dismiss the fear as simply conservative paranoia, as tempting as it might be, doesn’t do the conversation justice.

And — however misguided — it’s also apparent that when lawmakers like Manweller suggest legislative fixes like the “academic bill of rights,” they’re tapping into a political correctness backlash that’s real and seems to be gaining steam. It’s no coincidence that nearly every Republican presidential candidate this election season has, at one point or another, railed against the threat of PC culture.

Recognizing the damage done by microaggressions, however, isn’t simply political correctness run amok, and that’s what makes efforts to protect their use dangerous.

Manweller’s bill (which included a clumsy, potentially harmful definition) sought to prohibit academic institutions from punishing faculty or students for using them. It’s unclear how often that happens, but it’s rare at best.

As University of Washington spokesman Victor Balta tells me via email, “We don’t ‘sanction’ people for expressing points of view. But we do try to sensitize and educate faculty and others about the impacts language and assumptions may have on students, and we work hard to make the environment here welcoming for all students and conducive to their success.”

Washington State University spokesman Robert Strenge, meanwhile, says the school has never punished a student or employee for a microaggression. Strenge did acknowledge that WSU “might consider microaggressions as part of a pattern of discriminatory harassment,” prohibited under its policy prohibiting discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct, but that such a determination “would depend on all the facts found in an investigation.”

Punishing someone for the unintentional use of an everyday microaggression, it’s worth noting, isn’t even what the academic who wrote the book on them thinks is appropriate.

People should have the right to use microaggressions — and have them pointed out. That might feel like a punishment, but it’s something different. If we’re being honest, they’ll always exist. I’ve used them, and you probably have too. Change isn’t easy, and objective self-reflection can be sobering and painful.

But as a society lurching toward a more just and equitable future, we’re obligated to identify microaggressions when they occur. That’s really what this is about.

Microaggressions don’t need to be protected. They need to be acknowledged.

“After that, it’s a matter of deciding what we do about it. I think continuing education, for faculty and students, is really a necessity here,” Sue explains.

“Free speech should never be a cover for bias, bigotry and prejudice, and we have to recognize (a microaggression) for what it is.”

This story was originally published February 22, 2016 at 1:14 AM with the headline "Matt Driscoll: What is a microaggression, and why do they matter?."