My Microaggressions

Microaggressions: A Personal Account as Perpetrator During a recent evening, when I was feeling good and the weather was calm and warm, I decided to do all my laundry at the common laundry owned and operated by the apartment complex where I reside. I met an older man of color, with the name of Fred, and was at first respectfully distant.

Fred immediately engaged me in conversation and I responded politely, but probably the first unconscious microaggression was my attempt to keep my neighbor, who I had never met before, at a distance. This was an unconscious reaction, but to my credit I did make eye contact as a way to assess the personality of my neighbor and their intentions. I was not shy about making the eye contact, although I was internally surprised when he began to ask me who I was and whether I was his neighbor.

I politely engaged in an ongoing conversation about where we both lived and recent events at the complex. I was always polite and courteous, but with hindsight I realized that I was most scared of making a mistake during our social interaction. As I filled the machines with water, detergent, and then clothing, we conversed in a relaxed manner, but I never fully relaxed the way I would with someone who looked and acted like me.

After the washing machines began to work on my soiled clothing I said my goodbye to Fred and went back to my apartment; however, I set my kitchen timer to go off about 2-3 minutes before I normally would. This was probably my second microaggression. I arrived to find that all four machines still had not finished and were only halfway through. I turned out that someone had turned the water pressure down, so the machines were taking longer than normal to fill with water.

This required me to babysit my belongings, rather than return to the apartment again. I quickly became uncomfortable when I thought of the possibility that Fred could have perceived my early arrival and babysitting of my belongings as a racial slight, but I forged ahead and waited another 5-6 minutes until the machines finished. The above example reveals, at a minimum, that I am aware of race, including my own.

This example also seems to reveal that I have an internal locus of control and responsibility, as does Fred (Sue & Sue, 2007). We have since said hello and engaged in impromptu conversations, so I assume that I did not make Fred too uncomfortable with my unconscious microaggressions (dilemma 3; Sue et al., 2007). The microaggressions described above do not fall under microinsults, microassaults, or microinvalidation, but nevertheless are manifestations of my cultural and ethnic identity as a member of the majority.

On a more personal level, I actually fear encounters having a racial component out of concern that my cultural, ethnic, and religious heritage will impose itself and undermine the quality of the encounter. The fear that played out in my laundry room encounter and probably fit within dilemmas 1 and 2, since I was unable to fully relax for fear of making a social mistake and my unintentional expressions of bias were invisible (Sue et al., 2007).

While I had hoped that returning to the laundry room and babysitting my laundry would not appear as if I distrusted Fred with my belongings, I did notice a slight reaction of his that seemed to indicate surprise and disappointment. To Fred's credit he recovered quickly and acted as if he had not experienced a racial slight, like he probably.