WAC Clearinghouse | Across the Disciplines | Special Issue: Anti-Racist Activism | Review Main Page

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Racial Microaggressions and the New Racism

by J Quaynor, Jessie St. Amand, and Moira Ozias

When we talk as a multiracial group about our experiences in sessions, about the options available to us as consultants, about our daily experiences on the OU campus, it can seem as if we live in different worlds. J talks about having the experience—nearly every day—of sitting down next to some white woman (any white woman) and having her scoot away, an almost instinctive fear reaction. Another white consultant talks about having the opposite experience; white people scoot closer to her, nearly onto her lap, in an effort to build a close working relationship. We talk about white students coming in with papers about educational inequality but sidestepping the explicit race-related content of their readings to talk about "urban" students, and about the options available to us in these sessions. If we're white, what is our responsibility to resist the racial triangulation (Geller, Eodice, Carroll, Condon & Boquet, 2007 p. 108)? If we're Black or Chinese American, what is our responsibility to ourselves and our fellow consultants of color? There may be days on which, because of racial battle fatigue (Nauert, 2011), those of us who are not white lose it on the person and straight up say colorblindness is racism. And there may be days when the same racial battle fatigue, and a thin-sliced assessment (Gladwell, 2007) of the writer's openness to conversation about race, make us steer the consultation in a different direction to preserve our own diminishing energy reserves for the other instances of racism we'll face later in the day.

This is race at work in our writing center every day. It's the everyday racism that Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll and Boquet (2007) write about. It's the "new racism" that Villanueva (2006) and Young (2010) describe. As Villanueva (2006) explains, "the new racism embeds racism within a set of other categories—language, religion, culture, civilizations pluralized and writ large, a set of master tropes (or the master's tropes)" (p. 16). In so doing, it silences, elides, and polices talk about racism and halts work toward the new equality: "We get caught up with the individual. We avoid the large. Racism is becoming more taboo than politics and religion as subjects for casual conversation" (Villanueva, 2006, p. 3). We feel this in sessions, on campus. "Don't talk about race." We hear it in the air, even out of mouths: "It's impolite, unprofessional to talk about race and racism." What lies underneath this is the fact that talk about race and racism makes white people uncomfortable. Young (2010) helps us see that the new racism is also slippery and insidious because it's "discrimination practiced not by foes, but by black people's friends" (p. 1). It's those "microagressions" that create racial battle fatigue and make people of color "die a little inside."

The new racism presents different dilemmas for white consultants and consultants of color. The racial microagressions build up to staggering degrees for those of us who live on the wrong side of the color line: microassaults, microinsults, microinvalidations (Sue et al, 2007, p. 274-5). We're aliens in our own lands, the tokens, suspected beneficiaries of affirmative action, always having to answer, justify, testify (Sue et al, 2007, p. 276-7). And for those on the other side, the white side, well, we live the privilege of forgetting and have the responsibility to remember the fatigue and stresses of the new racism for our co-workers, colleagues, and friends who live and work under its pressure every day. Those of us who are white also have the responsibility of naming racism and becoming aware of the ways in which we also "microagress," no matter how unintentionally.

Villanueva (2006) calls us to understand the possibilities of peer writing consulting in this milieu of racism. He writes to us, and other writing consultants. And we take it to heart:

It's you, after all, who do the most important teaching—the one-with-one. You teach writing, but you also have the context with which to teach the art of conversation, of civil discourse handled civilly. We cannot remain so frightened of controversy that 'pc' means 'policed conversation,' turning a blind eye, safe in the silence. We would rail against censorship. Rail against self-censorship. Be bold. So when that next paper comes your way that says there is no racism, please think of the silence, expose it, looking at the Master's Tropes. Let's look to the language. Behind it there is a material reality—the reality of racism, still present, and not all that new after all. (Villanueva, 2005, p. 18)

• "Going There": A Conversation Between Consultants
• Writing as a Vehicle for Learning & Activism
• On Family and Abuse
• A Response to the New Racism (poem)
• Author Profiles

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