It's not a fucking microaggression!

Or some thoughts on marketing books with right-wing talking points

I always learn from Audre Lorde’s observation “racism and sexism are grown up words.” We experience sexism and racism before we have the words to explain that experience. Words can be tools allowing us to hammer away at the past revisiting our own experiences as well as that of others. Many of the words that matter in our struggles for justice are those that help us to see structures or to see them more clearly.

The impact of a structure can sometime be obvious: it can hit you like a door shut in your face, how some people are stopped from entering, told they are not meant to be here. You can glimpse a structure in a more subtle way: in a look, a sideways glance, a murmuring sound of surprise or disapproval, conveying a similar message, that you are not who they expected, that you are not meant to be here.

When a door is shut on a person, and they are told, you are not meant to be here, we are not just talking one door and one person, however much it might feel like that. We are talking of a more complex apparatus, a set of practices that have sedimented over time, which mean some people “hold the door” to an institution, deciding who does not belong, who is trespassing, has no legitimate purpose.

That is why structures are also communication systems, messages sent and received about different people.

A couple of weeks back I listened to journalist Ash Sarkar talk about her new book, Minority Rule. I will read the book at some point. I want to comment here on the marketing campaign for the book, which I am sure did not do it justice.

I am interested in words, what they do, where they go, the political careers of words if you like, and in the “terms” of an argument. And I was stuck by how, throughout the campaign, Sarkar used terms including “woke,” “liberal identity politics” and “microaggressions,” as if they had a clear referent (denoting a certain timescale and a certain type of politics). Using these terms as if they are referential meant accepting how they are used to frame situations.

One possible interpretation of this non-problematising of terms typically used in problematic ways, to demarcate and often to demonise, is that it was cynical rather than ideological: these terms were used because they are selling points. And if the point was to sell books, I guess it worked. The book became an “instant best seller.” But at what cost?

I am writing this post as a critique of a pattern not a person. I am risking the judgement of being too critical of a person because I think it is important to identify that pattern. So, I will pull out just some statements made during the campaign (1).

This was a statement made on social media.

“Police violence, wealth inequalities, the immigration system, discrimination in housing and employment – these are the material harms of racism. It's that which deserves our focus, not navel-gazing about our experience of microaggressions.”

Of course, we should be talking about the material harms of racism.

But the implication is that some people have not focused on these harms, that they’ve had the wrong focus because they were talking about their “experience of microaggressions,” instead.

Who is doing the navel gazing?

It seems part of the point was to say:

Oops! That was me!

This might seem rather sweet, showing signs of growth and maturity, but it does seem a bit, well, self-focused, especially if the point is to critique self-focus.

This is another reported statement, “I no longer care about microaggressions – pronounce my name however the fuck you want.”

I can understand why a mini-rebellion might be imagined as lurking in resilience but it’s hard not to wonder: doesn't this statement make microaggressions about “me,” putting a “me” into microaggressions?

Is there an implication that if “I” don’t care, then other people can (or should) learn not to care, that they too could toughen up, laugh it off, treat the mispronunciations of their “foreign” or “difficult” names as trivial in comparison to real material harms?

But what if what seems small to you is not small to someone else because of what they been through or what else they have or don’t have behind them?

The term microaggressions is meant to capture how small incidents accumulate over time, becoming heavier. I don’t tend to use the language of microaggressions because I know how often power is reproduced by making some forms of violence and harm seem not only small but subjective. But I am still heard as talking about microaggressions because of what else I am talking about. The words used to describe the work sometimes tell us more about how that work is received than about the work.

Examples from my complaint research:

When a head of department physically assaulted a lecturer he had been bullying, he was described in the report that followed as having a “a direct style of management.”

Assaults can be treated as speech.

That’s how complaining about physical assaults and bullying could be treated as “caring about microaggressions.”

A man accused of domestic violence and sexual assault was called a “rough diamond” as if being violent was just a rather blunt way he had of expressing himself.

That’s how complaining about sexual assault and gender-based violence could be treated as “caring about microaggressions.”

Violence is treated as slight or a slight.

Made micro.

A complaint: as deriving from hurt.

Also made micro.

One way of making injustices disappear is reframing them as being about hurt feelings.

Damn it even slavery has been treated as a microaggression!

Former happiness tsar, Richard Layard described the wrongs of slavery thus, “Slavery offended their feelings, and that is why slavery is wrong.”

The treatment of slavery as wrong because it hurt “their feelings” is a rather extreme example of this reframing, but it is not exceptional.

If you talk about slavery and colonialism today you are treated as being a bit sad for not having got over it.

You talk about institutional racism: still heard as a bit sad.

Sorry if it hurt your feelings.

Not for the harm. Not for the history.

Not for all the reproductive mechanisms.

I remember an all-white panel at a conference that celebrated the contributions of a Black scholar.

It was the opening panel.

Someone commented on the fact that it was an all-white panel.

A panellist replied, “we are sorry if you feel excluded.”

A Black man in the audience responded,

“Black people don’t feel excluded; they are excluded.”

You point to a structure, they hear feeling.

As if when you point to who is missing you are just sad about being missing yourself.

It is the structure that turns structure into feeling.

If you are the only brown person on the programme, and a white colleague keeps getting your name wrong, or they keep confusing the brown people because there is more than one of us on the programme, the problem is not that it hurts our feelings. The problem is that it is how the workplace is kept white. Those same colleagues might complain about the brown people with their difficult names to their colleagues with names they can pronounce, the same names, so familiar they slip off the tongue, colleagues who went to the same school, who can refer to the same places, the same people, chatting to each other, as they move on, move up, on that ladder, that escalator, confusing, as they so often confuse, motility with merit.

When a diagnosis of a problem is heard as people being offended, the solution is to manage our feelings.

We need to avoid confusing that liberal solution with the diagnosis of the problem.

Which means changing the frame.

So rather than saying: I am not going to talk about fucking microaggressions.

You would say: it’s not a fucking microaggression.

In one interview during the campaign, this statement was made, “everyone’s very mindful about microaggressions but that won’t stop us from being really exploitative in our employment contract.” The same interview included the statement that employers could become “mindful of microaggressions” whilst being exploitative, “I just wouldn’t call you a slut while I was underpaying you.”

The implication is that we need to talk more about exploitation and less about sexist language because you can stop the latter and keep the former or even keep the former by stopping the latter.

But those who are more likely to be called “sluts” at work are also more likely to be exploited.

Because the more exploited you are, the harder it is to complain. And the harder it is to complain, the easier it is to be exploited.

It is a devastating loop.

Take, for example, the strike action against sexual harassment by workers from McDonald’s in 2018. That strike came about as a result of the failure of the company to respond to multiple internal complaints about sexual harassment. Reporter Alex Press commented, “The employees say McDonald’s ignored complaints about workplace sexual harassment, which included groping, propositions for sex, and lewd comments.” In response, a McDonald’s spokesman “said the company had policies and training in place to prevent harassment and would continue to work with experts to ‘evolve’ these practices.” Having policies against something is often used as evidence it doesn’t exist (an object lesson in why organisations so often deal with problems by developing new policies). As Press argues, this made #MeToo “a tense moment,” because workers were “empowered to speak up about sexual harassment,” at the same time their collective bargaining power was being “eroded.”

We need that bargaining power.

I read recently Ana Avendaño brilliant book, Solidarity Betrayed: How Unions Enable Sexual Harassment and How They Can Do Better. She describes it as a ‘“tough love letter” to the labour movement. Avendaño had served as Vice President for Labour Engagement at United Way Worldwide, one of the largest charities in the world. In 2019, she learnt that union leaders “were sexually harassing female labour liaisons.” Avendaño began to hear from other liaisons that “they, too, had experienced sexual harassment at the hands of labor leaders but had not come forward for fear of retaliation and losing their jobs.” After she published “two articles on the labor movement’s failure to adequately address sexual harassment” she was “falsely accused of bullying [her] staff” and fired. She fought back, sued and won a substantial settlement.

And then wrote a book. Itself a collective.

In No Is not a Lonely Utterance I refer to Avendaño’s book as a form of complaint activism. She speaks of how activists, many of whom are working-class women of colour, had to push unions to take sexual harassment more seriously as a labour issue. She explains, “unions have a poor track record of using grievance mechanisms or their power in the shop in favour of women who are harassed at work, especially if the harasser is a coworker.”

She also gives examples of complaint activism coming out of unions. She highlights the United Service Workers West (USWW) chapter of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) representing Californian janitors as a “shining star.” Avendaño gives a history of how the union broke with the “harmful practice of sending survivors to HR” while they “defended the harasser.” That procedural change came from cultural change. She spoke to Alejandra Valles, a Latina activist, also a senior officer for the union, who tells the story of how almost everyone stood up during a board meeting after a facilitator asked, “Stand up, if you are survivor of sexual violence.”

Valles said, “It was a huge moment: it shook everyone.”

The work of organising, of standing up, of being shaken up, is how we learn what is shared. That it is not just me. Or you. We come to realise not only that sexual violence is not some private matter, but the institutional violence of it being deemed so.

The more stand up, the more we learn the impact of a structure.

Hence the need for different practices.

Behind us so much invention.

Avendaño describes how the union began to certify trainers (promotoras) who would go into workplaces to share knowledge and resources with fellow workers.” In 2016, they opened the Ya Basta Centre, “which provides promotoras a space to engage with fellow workers, educate them on their legal and self-empowerment, and continue training the janitorial community to confront and eradicate sexual harassment on the job.” Creating spaces for workers to share their experiences meant that new practices within the union could remain “worker-led and trauma-informed.”

Change is slow. But it can be made to happen. As Avendaño describes, “change is most surely necessary, but it requires confronting painful truths.”

We need a labour movement that does not treat sexist language and sexual harassment, nor racist language and racial harassment, as minor matters, as “caring about microaggressions” or “liberal identity politics.”

It is those invested in an unchanging culture who frame demands for structural change as being about language (we can’t call them sluts! Or even darling!).

One way of failing to recognise demands for structural change is to make them appear as being about symbolic change. As if, for instance, when trans people talk about pronouns they are being the language police and not struggling to exist on their own terms, to have access to the health care they need, or to use the public facilities where they can be as safe as possible, given the world.

Given the world.

We can critique how they gloss over the problem by making it one of language whilst showing that language matters.

Because it really fucking does.

We can critique how they gloss over the problem by making it one of hurt feelings whilst showing that feelings matter.

Because they really fucking do.

Think today of all the messages sent and received about different groups of people, how so many injustices keep being justified. That “we” of the moral and the deserving and the hardworking defined against those understood not just as not being so, but as depriving those who are so of what they have earned.

Of the “from here” against the “not from here.”

Of those assumed to live lives of substance against the airy fairy.

The somber real against the silly fictional.

The happy universal against the sad particular.

The history of how stigma sticks and to whom it sticks.

Right now, when working-class people, disabled people, Black and brown people, trans and queer people, the unemployed, and the undocumented, and women (understood not “adult human females” or some other dictionary-derived definition but those who travel, or try to travel, under that sign) are under increasing attack from a puffed-up anti-woke elite, stripping so many people of their rights, the resources they need to live and to be safe as they can be, undermining their humanity and dignity, we need to keep fighting for freedom.

That also means fighting against the reprivatisation of painful truths.

It is not the time to recycle right-wing talking points even if we are doing that to be funny or to show moral growth or to make our books sell faster.

(1) I am focusing on the use of “microaggressions” in this post. I have offered critiques of the uses of “identity politics” in multiple blog posts and “woke” both in No is Not a Lonely Utterance and my work on commonsense.