From Zero to Netflix: Look How Fast “Microaggressions” Became Pop Culture Dogma
From Zero to Netflix: Look How Fast “Microaggressions” Became Pop Culture Dogma
Other formerly-obscure academic terms also get mainstreamed quickly
Teen Vogue publishes an explainer called “What Decolonization Is, and What It Means to Me,” People magazine tackles intersectionality, and over at Netflix former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick muses about microaggressions.
Decolonization. Intersectionality. Microaggressions.
A short while ago, such terms were mostly confined to the jargon-heavy halls of academia, but today celebrities and entertainment publications invoke them and know that their audiences will probably understand their meaning.
Today teenagers talk like sociology TAs—it’s a most unlikely development.
Academia produces more than 1 million peer reviewed articles each year, most of which are ignored by nearly everyone on earth. Average readership varies by discipline and other factors, so calculating an overall average is tricky.
But the academics Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchher took a stab at it: “We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people.”
Ten!
The authors note that “impacts of most peer-reviewed publications even within the scientific community are minuscule.”
Such publications are an even harder sell to the general public because academic publishing seems designed to be ignored by outsiders.
Thirty bucks to read one article!
And even if you do hand over your credit card number, you quickly confront another obstacle—inscrutable jargon and some of the most punishing prose humanity has ever produced.
You’re probably not eager to add this title to your reading list: “Disrupting and Displacing Methodologies in STEM Education: from Engineering to Tinkering with Theory for Eco-Social Justice.”
Yet against all odds, certain academic terms penetrate pop culture, not just deeply, but quickly.
Google’s Ngram Viewer is a search engine that produces visual depictions of the frequency of a term's use over time.
Below I’ve included Ngram results from 1990 to 2018 (the latest year available) for the following terms: decolonize, intersectional, implicit bias, and microaggression.
The slopes steepen around 2012 or 2014, and then shoot upward.
Consider the term “microaggression.”
Although it was coined by a Harvard professor in the 1970s, it lay dormant until 2007. That year it was popularized by an article by Derald Wing Sue, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College.
The concept became so popular that in January 2017 Perspectives on Psychological Science published a literature review by psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld titled “Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.”
Lilienfeld observes that what he calls the “microaggression research program (MRP)” has “spread to numerous college campuses and businesses.”
[I]t is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application. I conclude with 18 suggestions for advancing the scientific status of the MRP, recommend abandonment of the term “microaggression,” and call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.
Jonathan Haidt responded later that same year. (Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote the bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind, and I directed the soon-to-be-released documentary by the same name.)
Haidt praised Lilienfeld’s contribution and pointed out how microaggression training contradicts ancient wisdom, from the Buddists to the stoics to Jesus:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? … You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Matthew 7:3–5)
Haidt asserted that the microaggression program “may be the least wise idea one can find on a college campus today” since it trains students “to react with pain and anger to ever-smaller specks that they learn to see” in the eyes of everyone they encounter.
Haidt called for a swift response:
An essential first step that every college should take is to renounce the microaggression program and discourage faculty and administrators from even using the term. Instead, colleges that care about fostering diversity and inclusion should ask themselves: How can we teach students to give each other the benefit of the doubt? How can we cultivate generosity of spirit?
Academia is devoted to the pursuit of truth—truth is built into the mottos of our most celebrated institutions.
Is it true that microaggression training does more harm than good, that it encourages students to be fragile and miserable? Did academia halt microaggression training in order to investigate the truth of such claims?
It doesn’t seem like it.
Lilienfeld and Sue did engage in a brief exchange, but I’m unaware of anything that tracks the prevalence of microaggression training. My guess is that Lilienfeld’s review had almost no impact on academia’s enthusiasm for microaggression training.
If anything, the concept appears to be more impervious to criticism than ever.
Once again, academic truth seekers selectively enforce the admonition to “follow the science.”
Apparently, microaggression training doesn’t need to be proven to be safe or effective. It doesn’t seem to matter that most people of color aren’t actually offended by most microaggressions.
Microaggression training marches on—in academia, in corporate America, in the media, and in pop culture.
Only about a decade passed from the time Sue popularized the term to Lilienfeld’s response to the widespread use of microaggression training. The duration shrinks a bit when you factor in the time it took Lilienfeld to embark on the project and go through the review process.
So how long did it take “microaggression” to go from obscurity to academic dogma? Maybe eight years?
But the microaggression story doesn’t end at the university.
How did this academic concept embed itself in pop culture so deeply and so quickly?
I’ll examine that question next week in Part 2.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes “Little Pink House”starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, “Can We Take a Joke?” featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a forthcoming feature documentary based on the bestselling book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.