This Is Not a Fairy Tale

Why There Is No Such Thing as a Microaggression

A quick reminder that our summer book club, for which we will be reading “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” by Herman Melville, will begin soon. A free version of the story is available here, or you might have a copy knocking around somewhere in your old college textbooks. The story is about forty pages long, so we will have plenty of time to read it before July. At the end of my July 5 post I’ll offer some questions to think about as we read. Our discussions will take place in the July 12 and 19 posts. Thanks in advance for participating, and happy reading, everyone! Now, on to this week’s post.

It is possible that my title has alienated my compatriots on the left, but I hope that you will hear me out anyway. I have been thinking about microaggressions since watching Enchanted (2007) a couple of weeks ago. What light could this adorable updated fairy tale possibly shed on our current culture wars? For readers who haven’t seen the film, the story begins in the comforting two-dimensional cartoon world of a fairy tale. And then our heroine, Giselle, is pushed through a portal and emerges as a three-dimensional human in Times Square. The rest of the film is a charming fish-out-of-water story, in which Giselle brings her innocent goodness to all her encounters with cynical New Yorkers, thereby transforming them into happier, more hopeful people.

Isn’t she just darling? I found this image here.

In one scene, Giselle visits the law firm where her friend Robert is a divorce attorney. Two clients are in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, and Giselle sits next to the wife, Phoebe, who is Black. Giselle exclaims, “You have beautiful hair!” and touches Phoebe’s hair without asking first. Not only does Phoebe not mind, but she smiles at the compliment. We later learn that Giselle’s sunny optimism about love and humanity has persuaded the couple to reconcile.

So obviously this scene reads differently nowadays, a mere sixteen years later. It is now rightly understood that we should never touch a stranger’s hair, especially if she is Black.¹ Even asking to touch a Black woman’s hair will put her in an awkward position and make her feel self-conscious. It’s difficult to imagine she would smile as Phoebe does in Enchanted. Touching—or asking to touch—a Black woman’s hair is something we shouldn’t do.

And yet I contend that even an action so inappropriate as touching a stranger’s hair is not a microaggression. It isn’t aggressive, micro or otherwise, to be curious about hair textures that are different from our own, and while curiosity of course doesn’t license us to touch a stranger’s hair, touching their hair is also not the same thing as attacking them. If we want to be happier and to make the world a fairer place, it helps to reframe such encounters not as aggressive but rather as clueless or rude, or even as misplaced attempts at friendliness. After all, when people are clueless or rude we can talk it out and hopefully make the situation better, while if we think of them as aggressors, we will be tempted to escalate the conflict, which benefits no one.

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Is It a Microaggression—or Merely Human?

Below are several scenarios in which many people would say a microaggression has been committed. See what you think.

I took this photo of Mürren on a hike last year. Is it any wonder that I love to hike here as often as possible?

1. My favorite place to hike is above the Lauterbrunnen Valley around Mürren, a tiny, car-free village perched on the edge of a cliff. At the end of my hikes, I enjoy stopping for a beer and chatting with the people I encounter along the way. A few months ago, a young family and I got to talking, and they mentioned that they were from Michigan and lived outside Detroit. The family looked Iranian, and because I knew there was a large Muslim-American community outside Detroit in Dearborn, I blurted out, “Oh, are you from Dearborn?” Momentarily taken aback, they replied that they were.

2. At the end of another hike, this time in the Jura mountains, I passed by a house where a man brewed beer in his garage and sold it to passers-by. Wunderbar! Of course I had to try his wares. (You may be thinking that garage-brewed beer is a dubious prospect, but I assure you that it was delicious.) The man was friendly, and we had a nice conversation in German. While I can get along in the language pretty well, no one would ever mistake me for a native speaker, and the man asked me, excitedly, “Are you Irish?” It turned out that he has an Irish friend, and my accent reminded him of her.

3. A dear friend is from Iceland, and her name contains a phoneme that doesn’t exist in English, and that I just can’t pronounce, despite repeated attempts. So she has kindly told me that it’s ok for me to call her by her nickname.

4. When I was a TA for freshman humanities, I had a student whose writing suffered from frequent grammar, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary errors. The university had just opened a writing center to provide free help for ESL students, and, because this student had a Spanish last name, I assumed that she struggled with English because she was not a native speaker, and so I suggested that she visit the center for help. Turns out that she was in fact born in the US and was a native speaker of English. Oops.

In all of the above examples, someone has called attention to another person’s difference, whether by making assumptions about where they’re from, noticing their struggles with the language, or butchering their name. These are all classic cases of microaggressions, according to identity politics.² And I get that being on the receiving end of these actions over and over again could wear after a while.

However, all of these actions can also be understood not as hostile or aggressive, but instead as showing friendly interest, wanting to connect, or trying to be helpful. I live in an international community, and a typical first question when we meet someone is Where are you from? Most people enjoy talking about their home countries and/or cultural backgrounds (please ask me anytime about lefse, the Lutheran choral music tradition, or Prince!). Even better, we humans are naturally interested in other people’s experiences. Our diverse backgrounds are a fruitful topic for conversation, and it is a loss that asking where someone is from has become taboo in some circles. Similarly, when the brewer asked about my accent, if I had become angry or defensive, our interaction would have been unpleasant and awkward, instead of enjoyable and friendly. As for my student, well, I acknowledge that I messed that one up, but at least I was giving her the benefit of the doubt by assuming that her poor writing was the result of a language issue. However ineptly, I was trying to help rather than hurt her.

Finally, I wish we could dispense with the idea that mispronouncing names is a microaggression. Mispronouncing names is a universal human failing, because most of us are terrible at pronouncing any unfamiliar word on a first hearing, including names—especially if the name contains phonemes from another language; if we hear it in a noisy setting like a party, classroom, or meeting; or if we are older and can no longer hear higher frequencies. If we aren’t native speakers of a language, we may not even be able to hear, let alone articulate, certain phonemes in that language.³ And it doesn’t always help to have the name written out, if we don’t know the pronunciation rules for that language—for example, I suspect that most readers pronounce the following names incorrectly: Werner Herzog, Édith Piaf, and Paulina Pořízková.⁴

I once attended a DEI training where the icebreaker question was “Has anyone ever mispronounced your name?” and every single one of us had had that experience, including a girl whose name was Kelly Work. I have a dog in this fight, because my name, Mari, is pronounced exactly as it is spelled, and yet no one ever gets it right the first time. Ever! I’ve been called Mary, Marie, Maury, Maura, Maria, Mariah, Murray, Marla, Maureen, and Mare-eye (which isn’t even a name!). It’s irritating, but it’s not a microaggression; it’s a sign of a normal human limitation.

At this point you may be objecting that I have been making a strawman argument by choosing the mildest examples of microaggressions. You may be asking, What about people who repeatedly interrupt or ignore women or Black people in meetings? Or tell racist jokes? Or “accidentally” show porn to a female coworker? Or forbid their staff to speak Spanish? Or purposely and repeatedly mispronounce or make fun of someone’s name? Well, I would argue that these aren’t microaggressions either; they’re aggressions, full stop. In these cases it is of course unfair to expect the victims of such repeated, deliberate, and hostile behavior to handle it on their own, and they are fully justified in enlisting the help of someone in authority. And if we observe genuine aggressions like this happening to someone, be they a loved one, colleague, or stranger, we ought to speak up, defend them, and make it clear to the offender that what they’re doing isn’t ok.⁵ To paraphrase that inspirational poster, “Don’t sweat the small stuff, but some of it isn’t small stuff.”

Moving from Sie to Du

English is exceptional in that we only have one form of “you”; most languages have a formal (Sie in German) and informal (du) you. The different forms of “you” help to define relationships between people. Are we close, warm, and natural with each other, or are we wary? Do we get along together with little effort, or do we keep each other at a distance and interact through rules and rituals? When we ruminate over microaggressions—combing through our experiences to look for examples of mistreatment, reinterpreting innocuous or well-intended comments as abusive, or worrying that anything we do or say might be taken the wrong way—we remain stuck on the formal, distant, Sie level with each other. Worrying about microaggressions prevents us from connecting and feeling relaxed and spontaneous around people who are different from us.

Besides, accusing someone of committing a microaggression (or, worse, leading a cancellation campaign) is unlikely to win over the transgressor or make the situation better. To illustrate this point, let’s take a brief digression into the required sexual-abuse-awareness training I took before I started teaching high school, which turned out to be reminiscent of Robin DiAngelo–style DEI trainings, and not in a good way. I was initially grateful for the opportunity—and also confused that people kept apologizing and rolling their eyes about it. Wouldn’t we want the tools to recognize signs of abuse in our students so we could help them?

And then I went to the training. It is impossible to overstate how awful it was. The trainer provided us with no useful information whatsoever. Instead, he yelled at us about how horrible sexual abuse is (we knew that already) and then accused us of being secret abusers. He told us to look around at everyone in the room and then said, “Studies show that 20 percent of people who work with children are pedophiles who took the job so they could have access to children. So one in five of you is probably an abuser, and it’s up to everyone else to discover who they are.” I came away from the training feeling resentful and upset that the trainer was encouraging me to be suspicious of my new colleagues. Luckily, my colleagues and I all decided to reject the training; rather than spend our time scrutinizing our coworkers’ actions for signs of inner evil, we decided to give each other the benefit of the doubt, which is a much more pleasant and productive way of going about our lives.

Seeing Each Other in Three Dimensions

There is no nuance in the world of fairy tales; it is a two-dimensional place. Characters are wicked witches or evil stepmothers—or their virtuous victims. They are monsters or dragons—or the stalwart heroes who defeat them. In fairy tales, words are magic: They transform a pumpkin into a coach and a man into a beast, or they imprison a maiden in a tower and then turn her hair into a ladder for the hero to climb. Words put a castle-full of people to sleep for a hundred years. A single word, “Rumplestiltsken,” disempowers the eponymous tormentor.

We don’t live in that cartoonish world. Most of us are flawed humans trying to do our best; no one is pure good⁶ or pure evil.⁷ We may feel as though words have the power to destroy us, but while it is true that words can hurt our feelings and perpetuate false and discriminatory beliefs, words are also the way we can repair our relationships and the world, through three simple actions. First, if a person says or does something that bothers us, rather than imputing nefarious motives to them and punishing them, we can try talking with them, explaining why their words or actions upset us, and asking them to stop. We might discover that they had no idea they had upset us, and that our conversation will help them become more considerate and understanding in the future. Second, if someone tells us that something we did or said bothered them, we should NOT argue with them or say, defensively, “Can’t you take a joke?” We should listen, apologize, and resolve to do better. Finally, we can stop being bystanders and instead speak up for and support other people when they are being mistreated. It’s worth a try, right? Beats the heck out of canceling people on the internet.

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How about you, readers? Do you agree that there is no such thing as a microaggression? Or do you think that the concept has value and that we ought to retain it to help bring about a more just society? Have you experienced or committed a microaggression? What happened? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Let’s close with another revisionist fairy tale, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. The musical weaves together the tales of Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Rapunzel. The characters learn through their adventures that the real world is complicated and ambiguous, and that the fairy-tale belief that people are either purely good or purely evil is false:

People make mistakes

Holding to their own

Thinking they’re alone

Honor their mistakes

Fight for their mistakes

Everybody makes

One another’s terrible mistakes

Witches can be right

Giants can be good

You decide what’s right

You decide what’s good

Bernadette Peters is one of the greatest interpreters of Sondheim. Enjoy her expressive and moving performance of “No One Is Alone.”

1. For the record, though, girls and women do seem to love to touch each other’s hair. Meghan Daum has an amusing rant in this podcast about how much she disliked it when elementary-school classmates would play with her hair. As for me, I remember a girl in my own elementary school who had a magnificent head of long, thick, straight hair that we all loved to brush and braid. Call it our primate grooming instinct.

2. A quick Google search turns up a veritable mountain of articles arguing that mispronouncing names is a microaggression. For example, here, here, here, and here.

3. Examples of these tricky phonemes include the American r, both th sounds in English, the sound represented by ! in Xhosa, the far-back l sound in Russian, the French r, the ch sound in German words like “nicht,” the Czech ř, and the sound represented by q in transliterations of Arabic.

Someone I knew in grad school has an extraordinary facility for languages; as a child she was admitted to a special language program because when tested, she was able to repeat unfamiliar phonemes perfectly after a single hearing. That ability is exceedingly rare. The rest of us limp along as best we can, which means we wind up sometimes mispronouncing a name.

4. VAIR-ner HAIR-tsog, ay-deet pee-AHFuh, POW-lee-nah puh-RZHEEZ-koh-vah. I chose these examples because they’re from languages whose pronunciation rules I know. See this article for some other examples of celebrities whose names are often mispronounced.

5. The other day I heard a wonderful example of this. Talithia Williams is a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and an eminent public intellectual. She is also Black, which is probably the reason that when she was in labor with one of her sons, the nurse was rude to her, ignored her, and dismissed her concerns. Williams had a doula with her, and the doula, seeing how the nurse was behaving, started calling Williams Dr. Williams instead of by her first name. As if by magic, the nurse began to treat Williams with more respect and kindness. So clever! Sometimes an intervention can be as simple as this. I think we should all try to be justice doulas!

6. With the possible exception of Mr. Rogers.

7. With the possible exception of Aaron Rodgers. (What can I say? I’m a Vikings fan.)