I have used the term microaggression in the last few posts to describe behaviors that indirectly convey a person’s derogatory thoughts about disabled people, such as when I am asked by a colleague who noticed that my class was moved to a different room if I really need special lighting in my classrooms.

I was recently reminded that Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, does not use the term “microaggression.” He explains

I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide. What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.

How to Be An Anti-Racist

I heard him talk today at “A Conversation with Professor Ibram X. Kendi on Being an Antiracist,” an event sponsored by MSU Denver’s Center for Multicultural Excellence and Inclusion, about this and he made the point that the concept of microaggression takes things in isolation, but the person they are directed at experiences them as cumulative. The impact of each microaggression is compounded by all the past microaggressions they have experienced.

I have been thinking about Kendi’s point about calling something what it is in relation to the access fatigue that Annika Konrad identifies and that I have talked about experiencing. When I am asked if I really need a classroom with different lighting, I don’t experience “a microaggression,” I experience

• someone doubting my integrity
• someone questioning whether I have fraudulently secured documentation of my disability
• someone wondering if I am exploiting my disability to get special treatment
• someone judging me as “causing trouble”
• someone resenting me for making their job more difficult

I don’t experience some of these—I experience all of them at once. When the person doing these things is a colleague, which is often the case, I also experience being disrespected by a peer; even worse is when the person has authority over me, such as a department chair or dean. Although I understand the ableist assumptions underpinning the “microaggression” as being institutionalized and transcending the particular interaction, in the moment, it feels personal and I feel the weight of having to defend myself, my need for a classroom with different lighting, and the needs of all other disabled people on campus to be taken seriously.

Kendi’s elaboration in today’s conversation on his reasons for not using the term microaggression made me realize that I have used the term uncritically and that the people who benefit from that are the people who perpetrate the ableist abuse. I do find the term microaggression helpful because it is a convenient shorthand for a long list of problematic behaviors that are typically seen as so small that no one should be held accountable, but the term does not adequately convey the cumulative nature of the effect of each individual microaggression.

Moving forward, I am going to try to use terminology that more effectively articulates the effect of the behavior I am commenting on.