“You are too smart for a woman” “OMG that pink shirt is so gay” “You are too pretty to be disabled” “Are you faking it, I mean you don’t look disabled” “You are Indian, I am sure you are good at Math” “Casteism does not happen in modern India, it is a thing of the past” “Why don’t you pick an easier subject, it will be easier for you to fulfill your household responsibilities alongside” “Your husband is so well placed, Why do you even need to work?” “Mizoram, Meghalaya, Sikkim are, all the same, I mean you all look the same“
Sound harsh? Yeah well, each of these Microaggressions is harsh, especially for the mental health of persons from marginalized groups who face them on a day-to-day basis.
Here’s how microaggressions impact the mental health of persons from minority communities. Because they are faced with microaggressions regularly and repeatedly, two negative processes begin to play out.
Firstly, people from minority communities begin to believe that only they (or people like them i.e. their community are facing microaggressions so they must be different from people who are not facing microaggressions. They become the ‘other’ who is seen as being less than the majority.
Secondly, because they hear microaggressions so frequently and start believing that they are less, they begin to believe that the microaggressions they are faced with are their actual characteristics.
For instance, a woman who is repeatedly told that she is not a good driver because women aren’t good drivers will start believing that she is not a good driver and so, is the other; is less than men who are the norm. Internalization or seeing oneself from their eyes over the long term makes people question their personal capacities which impact their self-worth negatively. Research has shown that low self-worth resulting from the internalization of negative characteristics attributed to them has a significantly high correlation with depression (Torres et al 2010).
The continuous and persistent experiences of microaggression can also be traumatic. Microaggressions are often a source of ongoing stress for most minority communities. Studies have shown that 90% of black women reported facing microaggressions in the past year. Ongoing discrimination of this magnitude often leads to not just anxiety and stress but also chronic stress and even trauma.
In addition, persons from minority communities live with a constant fear that they might face microaggressions anywhere from social gatherings , educational institutions and workplaces. Factually, children from multiracial, inter-religious and multicultural families may even face microaggressions from family members itself. This constant fear makes the brain perceive a possible threat at all times. Therefore the body always remains in a fight or flight response mode leading to chronic levels of anxiety.
What makes things worse is the fact that spaces of support such as mental health service providers and therapists often perpetuate microaggression instead of helping marginalized communities deal with their mental health concerns. Studies show that perpetrators towards persons with mental health concerns are not strangers, but in fact family, friends, and mental health practitioners themselves. That’s basically equivalent to a medical doctor making you sicker instead of providing treatment, imagine that. When supposed spaces of support act as perpetrators, members of marginalized communities have nowhere to go and are unfortunately stuck with mental health concerns while more microaggression continues to be directed at them from a variety of sources.
Talking about the discrimination they face, unfortunately, makes them more susceptible to microaggressions and pushes the majority communities to take responsibility for the historical discrimination that marginalized communities continue to face. This makes both parties uncomfortable thereby making having important but difficult conversations about addressing microaggressions even harder.
Therefore microaggressions continue to be conceptualized as an individual concern, - passing on the responsibility of finding a solution to the very communities that have been facing microaggressions in the first place. Whereas in reality, microaggressions are possibly the best example of why mental health can never be just personal but are perpetuated by society, which is why the onus to counter microaggression lies on society- on you, on me, and on each other and every one of us.
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