Page 17 - Microaggressions in Everyday Live Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

Preface

Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation is about
the damaging consequences of everyday prejudice, bias, and discrimination
upon marginalized groups in our society. The experience of racial, gender, and
sexual-orientation microaggressions is not new to people of color, women,
and LGBTs. It is the constant and continuing everyday reality of slights,
insults, invalidations, and indignities visited upon marginalized groups by
well-intentioned, moral, and decent family members, friends, neighbors, cow-
orkers, students, teachers, clerks, waiters and waitresses, employers, health
care professionals, and educators. The power of microaggressions lies in their
invisibility to the perpetrator, who is unaware that he or she has engaged in a
behavior that threatens and demeans the recipient of such a communication.
While hate crimes and racial, gender, and sexual-orientation harassment
continue to be committed by overt racists, sexists, and homophobes, the thesis
of this book is that the greatest harm to persons of color, women, and LGBTs
does not come from these conscious perpetrators. It is not the White suprema-
cists, Ku Klux Klan members, or Skinheads, for example, who pose the greatest
threat to people of color, but instead well-intentioned people, who are strongly
motivated by egalitarian values, believe in their own morality, and experience
themselves as fair-minded and decent people who would never consciously
discriminate. Because no one is immune from inheriting the biases of the
society, all citizens are exposed to a social conditioning process that imbues
within them prejudices, stereotypes, and beliefs that lie outside their level of
awareness. On a conscious level they may endorse egalitarian values, but on
an unconscious level, they harbor antiminority feelings.

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