Micro-aggression Stitches

It is difficult to listen to the evening news in this pre-election season when one is bombarded with microaggressions, or outright aggressive threats, aimed at certain populations. Sexism that affects half of humanity, racism, ableism, ageism, and LGBTQ+ stereotyping cause everyday harm for many individuals. Targeted victims often incur deep wounds. It is easy to blame a few people when the real issues are buried within cultural caskets of prejudice layered with new soiling every century.

Psychology researcher Derald Wing Sue grew up in Portland, Oregon. He was not accepted in childhood as a Chinese American and often received cutting rude and crude discrimination. His later education led him to study institutional racism by way of Martin Luther King, Jr’s leadership. As coping siblings, two of Dr. Sue’s brothers also found their way to the field of psychology. Derald Wing Sue and his brother Stanley co-founded the Asian American Psychological Association.

With his brother David, Sue co-authored Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practice. The adaptive approach to microaggression is what Sue terms “microintervention” — making the invisible visible, educating the perpetrator, disarming the microaggression, and seeking outside support. These goals need to be sewn into country-wide New Year’s Resolutions.

According to a 2023 survey by the Boys & Girls Club, 40% of school students (ages 9-18 across the U.S.) reported being bullied on school property; this represents a higher number than previous years. Of those bullied students, 55% said that they never told an adult about what happened. Cyberbullying is even more prominent with 82% of adolescents reporting offenses. These aggressive attacks can result in a student’s poor school attendance and performance, as well as an increased substance abuse risk and/or other mental health issues –  including suicide.

Violinist Tyler Clementi committed suicide in 2010 after cyberbullying. His Rutgers University roommate live-streamed Tyler and another male student in a sexual encounter shortly after Tyler’s freshman year began. No one deserves such treatment.

Bullying includes:

• An aggressor with a sense of power (either real or perceived) and a targeted individual (who may be a victim in circumstances where no one even views the bullying behavior).

Bullying often includes:

• Bystanders who either witness or hear about abusive behaviors but do not intervene or Upstanders who intervene (through interruption and reporting bullying) as well as offer support to targeted individuals.

Today we often hear the admonishment to “tone down the rhetoric.” This is like putting a butterfly band-aid on a large gaping wound. We need psychological stitches for those wounded by bullying.

Schools at every level must approach micro-and-macro aggression with ongoing system-wide approaches. Some teachers bully other teachers; they also require bullying prevention training. An anti-bullying program is available for free downloading through the Tyler Clementi Foundation’s #Day1 Campaign (to be administered on the first day of school or any time during the school year). https://tylerclementi.org/about/

Pearls of Peace (PoP) Quiz 

337. What microaggressions do you encounter as an adult?

338. When have you acted as an Upstander?