Cause And Effect Of Microaggression

Long ago the ability to read and write was given to very few, stories were spread by word of mouth, changing with each telling almost as if they were living breathing beings. They became reflective the cultures surrounding them and of the people telling them. Language is much like the stories it produces. Language is constant evolving, changing with each passing day. New words are created, and older words fade from use. The wealthy and affluent members of society controlled language, shaping to keep themselves in a position of power. Language has been used through history to put people down. Slurs created to push people down and create an “us” versus “them” mentality. “Those who control language have the means to set standards for what counts

Microaggressions are considered are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intention or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color”(Sue, Capodilupo, Torino, Bucceri, Holder, Nadal, & Esquilin, 2007). Microaggressions can be unknowingly be committed. To some they are compliments or questions coming from a place of curiosity. Questions like “Where are you from?” invoke feelings of alienation and assumptions that the person is a foreigner. Even a seemingly harmless statement such as “I don’t see color” are damaging as it is ignoring the recipient’s ethnic and racial experiences. This is another example of how they language we use can be damaging in ways we do not expect. It is important to examine how our views color our interactions with others. Sue and his colleagues suggest that all interactions between two people with different ethnic or racial backgrounds includes

Priming is when a person is exposed to a stimulus and their reaction to another stimulus is effected by the previous stimulus. Words can influence our actions and beliefs. One study addressed the questions of whether priming a trait or stereotype could effect a person’s complex over behavior to go along with the trait or stereotype. To do this, they planned to affect their participants performance on tasks related to their abilities. They wanted to see if stereotype priming could lead to the same effect that trait priming had, since a stereotype has a set of traits associated with it (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). They were able to test and confirm their hypothesis. But what does this mean when discussing language? It means that the words that we use and the stereotypes that attached to them, words like dorm, retard, gyp, or even garbage, linger and effect how we react and things we do. Language has a last effect on how we perceive ourselves and others around