A Reexamination of Racial Microaggressions and Antiblack Misandry as Racial Microburst Among College Men With Policing

• In Event: Division J Vice Presidential Session. Racism and Carcerality in Higher Education

Abstract

In 2007, along with my co-authors Walter R. Allen and Lynette L. Danley, we published an article entitled “Assume the position . . .You fit the description: Psychosocial experiences and racial battle fatigue among African American male college students.” In 2016, I published a follow-up article with Jalil Bishop Mustaffa, Chantel M. Jones, Tommy J. Curry, and Walter R. Allen called “‘You make me wanna holler and throw up both my hands!’: Campus Culture, Black misandric microaggressions, and racial battle fatigue.” Both research studies addressed the hyperinvisibility, hypervisibility, hypersurveillance, and anti-Black misandry targeted against college-going Black men. These Black men were constantly viewed as being “out of place” or “fitting the description” of illegitimate members of the campus community.
It is understood (implicitly and explicitly) by most marginalized racial/ethnic groups that ultimate control is reinforced by white power (i.e., police power, institutional power, and ‘community policing’), which protects white privilege and ‘white spaces’ while imposing stigma on targets of white supremacy. Black men college students experience a social cost when they identify discrimination as the reason for blocked opportunities. Kaiser and Miller (2001) found that no matter how much self-reported discrimination a Black male student faced, he was rated as more hypersensitive, emotional, argumentative, irritating, trouble making, and a complainer when he suggested that discrimination or racism was the source of his frustration, blocked opportunities, and reduced successes. Simply put, this irrational framing aligns with a historical framing of Black men as cognitively inferior and voluntarily lazy (Allen & Jewell, 2002).
The question that I am posing for this session, based on these two studies, is what have we missed by looking at racial microaggressions at the gross level? I believe that by re-examining these data, we will discover micro-traumatic events or microbursts. These microbursts occur rapidly and often go undetected during data analysis. By considering microbursts, we can find the fuller impact of racial microaggressions on racially targeted people, especially when the campus and local police harass them.
 

Author

• William A. Smith, University of Utah