Microaggressions in everyday life

Race, gender, and sexual orientation

Bibliographic Data

ID21395166
AuthorsBouke De Vries (0000-0002-7797-0166, Department of Philosophy Universitat Zurich Zurich Switzerland, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume62
Issue3
Pages391-401
Publication date2024-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Southern Journal of Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-4283 • E-ISSN: 2041-6962
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/sjp.12543
OpenAlexW4391945263
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited22

Being the victim of a microaggression, that is, a relatively minor act of hostility that targets someone's (marginalized) social identity, can be distressing, but so can merely being in doubt over whether one has been the victim of such aggression. To address this last problem, Regina Rini has proposed a novel understanding of microaggressions that is meant to eliminate such doubts. On her “Ambiguous Experience Account,” whenever members of marginalized groups believe they might have been subjected to a microaggression, a microaggression will have been committed even if the would‐be perpetrator was not motivated by prejudiced aggression. This article challenges this account on grounds of being incompatible with people's lived experiences, including those of the would‐be victims, and argues that we should instead accept the conventional account on which microaggressive acts must be consciously or unconsciously motivated by prejudiced aggression. At the same time, it shows that those falsely suspected of having committed microaggressions will still merit blame sometimes for having failed to signal that their behavior was respectful of others, which lessens the concerns that Rini's conceptual engineering seeks to address. I conclude by drawing out some implications for the debate on microaggressions and attributional ambiguity

Aesthetics · Aggression · Ambiguity · Attribution · Blame · Hostility · Identity (music) · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Psychology

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