I wrote a article yesterday entitled I am scared for my black husband and the comments went off the charts.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
As a result I am deciding to post this article I found. I hope it will help many to understand why this recent outpouring of racial animus is so frustrating to African-Americans and why it is hard for so many of us including President Obama to confront it head-on.
Please jump...
Unmasking 'racial micro aggressions'
By Tori DeAngelis
Print version: page 42
Some racism is so subtle that neither victim nor perpetrator may entirely understand what is going on—which may be especially toxic for people of color{snip}.
...Creating a vocabularySue first proposed a classification of racial microaggressions in a 2007 article on how they manifest in clinical practice in the American Psychologist (Vol. 2, No. 4). There, he notes three types of current racial transgressions:
• Microassaults: Conscious and intentional actions or slurs, such as using racial epithets, displaying swastikas or deliberately serving a white person before a person of color in a restaurant.
• Microinsults: Verbal and nonverbal communications that subtly convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person's racial heritage or identity. An example is an employee who asks a colleague of color how she got her job, implying she may have landed it through an affirmative action or quota system.
• Microinvalidations: Communications that subtly exclude, negate or nullify the thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of color. For instance, white people often ask Asian-Americans where they were born, conveying the message that they are perpetual foreigners in their own land.
Sue focuses on microinsults and microinvalidiations because of their less obvious nature, which puts people of color in a psychological bind, he asserts: While the person may feel insulted, she is not sure exactly why, and the perpetrator doesn't acknowledge that anything has happened because he is not aware he has been offensive.
"The person of color is caught in a Catch-22: If she confronts the perpetrator, the perpetrator will deny it," Sue says.
In turn, that leaves the person of color to question what actually happened. The result is confusion, anger and an overall sapping of energy, he says...
Read full article: http://www.apa.org/...
My husband and I relocated last year to take a new job.
The job was offered with the opportunity to move up and take over the position of director in 1 year. He was the only African-American on the floor.
He has been working in a specialized field for 16 years. My husband attended one of the top Ivy League colleges and you would think it would have been easy for him to move up in his chosen field. In fact many of his white classmates moved up and out rather quickly. They went to Wall Street, K Street, into Law, Banking etc.
Not so for my husband. He did not have the financial support from his parents that so many of his classmates had. As an African-American first generation college-goer he had to create an entire brand new foundation for himself.
Instead of going off to Washington DC or New York to make his way with the support of his spanking new Ivy League degree, he ended up on the floor of a book binding factory. He owed the school some money and could not repay when it came time for graduation so he did not receive his degree for a whole year. Because of this he could not get the type of job he wanted because the employers wanted to see his degree. He ended up working in book binding until his toe was flattened in an accident and was forced to recuperate at home. He received some money because of the accident and was able to finally move forward.
So over the years he has slowly garnered more qualifications and last year he was close to his goal of becoming a director.
However, this was stymied by the recession and by 'racial micro-aggressions' of his boss and of colleagues.
He was told by workers he was supposed to supervise that they had never been managed by a black man before.
When invited to lunch along with his Asian colleague he had to hear a story from one of his white colleagues who talked about how there were not many dogs in Chinatown (dog whistle against Chinese who are thought to eat dog).
He was told by his boss that as manager his job was not to manage.
He was chosen for the job because of his excellent writing skills but once in the job was told that he could not write.
And on and on...
My husband also had experiences over the years where when he turned up for interviews, the interviewer would always walk by him looking for someone else even though he was the only one in the room at the appointed time.
There was one time he had prepped for an important management exam but failed it after weeks and weeks of study. When he went back to work he learned his boss had given him the wrong study packet. He failed because he studied for the wrong exam. Soon a black female was brought in and he lost his job shortly after.
So when I came across this article about micro-aggression I felt like a lightbulb had gone off.
I now understand how insideous racism can be. We blacks know it when we see it, when we hear it and when we feel it but most whites sometimes do not know they are even doing it.
This is why it is so hard for our President to call it out and why it is hard for African-Americans to speak up and out. We just get tired and exhausted trying to explain and educate about what our lives are like day to day.
These ugly demonstrations around the country are an affront to us on many levels but we know as a group that it is useless to call these people racist. They will always find a way to turn it back on us.
So I hope this article and my diary yesterday will help folk of the majority to understand how it feels for minorities here in the USA as we struggle to realize our own dreams in a society that is so deeply rooted in the ugly legacy of racism.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Thanks for all your support.