Page 136 - Microaggressions in Everyday Live Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

CHAPTER SIX

Microaggressive

Perpetrators and

Oppression: The Nature

of the Beast

All the white people I know deplore racism. We feel helpless about racial injustice
in society, and we don ’ t know what to do about the racism we sense in our own
groups and lives. Persons of other races avoid our groups when they accurately
sense the racism we don ’ t see (just as gays spot heterosexism in straight groups,
and women see chauvinism among men). Few white people socialize or work
politically with people of other races, even when our goals are the same. We
don ’ t want to be racist — so much of the time we go around trying not to be, by
pretending we ’ re not. Yet, white supremacy is basic in American social and eco-
nomic history, and this racist heritage has been internalized by American white
people of all classes. We have all absorbed white racism; pretence and mystifi cation
only compound the problem. (Winter, 1977, p. 2)

Spoken by Sara Winter, a White woman, nothing could be a more straight-
forward statement about the internal struggle that she and many other well -
intentioned people experience as they confront racism, sexism, and heterosexism:
(1) a realization of the pervasiveness of oppression and injustice toward mar-
ginalized groups; (2) burgeoning recognition of their own role and complicity
in the oppression of others; (3) pretending that they are free of biases and

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