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At universities across the country, students of color have organized and participated in protests, walkouts, and social media campaigns to call attention to racialized experiences that they feel have been largely ignored by their campus communities. Often these students of color are confronted with acts of racism that take the form of subtle everyday insults, known as racial microaggressions. Given the prevalence of racial microaggressions in higher education, the question arises as to how educators and administrators can effectively educate students on this concept in order to increase their cultural competency and combat these racialized acts. In this chapter, we consider how the classroom can be an active space to increase students’ competency and validate the experiences of marginalized groups. Drawing from critical race theory, previous literature, and our own experiences in the classroom, we outline several pedagogical strategies for educating students on racial microaggressions. First, we encourage faculty to arrange their classrooms for effective dialogue by being reflexive of your own positionality and privilege, collaborating with students on class ground rules, and unpacking the complexities of racial discussions with students. Next, we draw upon social media, popular culture, student-centered activities, and interdisciplinary research in order to demonstrate lived experiences of racial microaggressions and their consequences within higher education. Finally, we work with students on examining how they might contest these racialized insults in their own lives and potentially work toward larger social change.

The present study aims to apply the construct of microaggressions to organizational contexts by examining perceptions of discrimination in ambiguous interactions between White supervisors and Black subordinates and their impact on work outcomes under varying conditions of leader fairness.

US participants (N=387) responded to scenarios describing supervisor‐subordinate interactions involving subtle to blatant discrimination, after being told either that the supervisor had a history of fair, equitable treatment of subordinates or that the supervisor had a history of unfairness and inequity.

Leader equity impacted discrimination perceptions, affording leaders greater benefit of the doubt in ambiguous interracial interactions. For all levels of microaggression severity, microaggressions were perceived less when the supervisor had a reputation for equity and fairness; expected work outcomes were also better when the supervisor had a reputation for equity and fairness at all levels of microaggression severity.

As blatant discrimination grows more and more unacceptable, examining the subtle and sometimes unintended aspects of workplace discrimination is increasingly important. The authors’ results suggest that a leader's reputation for equity and fairness may mitigate the effects of racial slights.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of leader equity on microaggressions and the first to empirically explore the impact of microaggressions on work outcomes. Their results suggest the importance of establishing leader reputations of fairness and training staff to recognize even subtle forms of discrimination and exclusion.

The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of experiences of anti-social behaviour in LGBTIQ+ youth in university settings.

The discussion reflects on qualitative interviews with LGBTIQ+ young people studying at university (n=16) exploring their experiences of anti-social behaviour including harassment, bullying and victimisation in tertiary settings.

The findings demonstrate that attention should be paid to the complex nature of anti-social behaviour. In particular, LGBTIQ+ youth documented experiences of microaggressions perpetrated by other members of the LGBTIQ+ community. Using the taxonomy of anti-social behaviour against LGBTIQ+ people developed by Nadal et al. (2010, 2011), the authors build on literature that understands microaggressions against LGBTIQ+ people as a result of heterosexism, to address previously unexplored microaggressions perpetrated by other LGBTIQ+ people.

Future research could seek a larger sample of participants from a range of universities, as campus climate may influence the experiences and microaggressions perpetrated.

Individuals within the LGBTIQ+ community also perpetrate microaggressions against LGBTIQ+ people, including individuals with the same sexual orientation and gender identity as the victim. Those seeking to respond to microaggressions need to attune their attention to this source of anti-social behaviour.

Previous research has focused on microaggressions and hate crimes perpetrated by non-LGBTIQ+ individuals. This research indicates the existence of microaggressions perpetrated by LGBTIQ+ community members against other LGBTIQ+ persons. The theoretical taxonomy of sexual orientation and transgender microaggressions is expanded to address LGBTIQ+ perpetrated anti-social behaviour.

There is more to culturally responsive teaching than selecting multicultural texts and designing inclusive lesson. This paper aims to support teachers in becoming more culturally responsive by guiding them in how to recognize and respond to microaggressions in their daily interactions with students, colleagues, and parents.

Microaggressions have been defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color”.

When classroom interactions contain microaggressions, students are damaged in both seen and unseen ways. Interactions between teachers, students and parents afford powerful occasions to analyze classroom communication and provide windows into the nature of student–student, student–teacher and teacher–parent relationships.

Regardless of where, when, why or how they occur, these interactions provide brief opportunities for culturally responsive teachers to demonstrate that they respect their students’ home and community cultures, accept who their students are and honor the education that they receive both inside and outside of school.

Becoming more adept at recognizing and addressing microaggressions is one way that teachers can become more culturally responsive. For students, being able to identify and respond more effectively to microaggressions creates greater opportunities for all students to think critically and engage in social action.

This paper presents an original viewpoint on identifying and reducing microaggressions in classrooms and school communities.

Given the nascent stage of research on microaggressions, the study is an attempt to better understand the experience of microaggressions and examine it from the point of view of different marginalized minority identities. The purpose of this paper is to report on the subjective experience of microaggressions from the lenses of gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.

To explore how microaggressions are experienced by different identities, the authors conducted four focus group studies with university students at a prominent Midwestern university. Each focus group focused on the experience of microaggressions for a particular identity group.

The authors discuss the nature and forms of exclusion that occur through microaggressions, and offer six microaggression themes that emerged as common across the marginalized identities studied. The authors add to the microaggression taxonomy and highlight the role of repetition in how microaggressions are perceived. The authors also discuss intersectional microaggressions.

While various studies have focused on reporting microaggression themes with regard to singular identities, this study is potentially the first that explores microaggression themes across different marginalized identities. The findings highlight novel forms of microaggressions such as the revealing or making visible of marginalized identities, and microaggressions emanating from within a minority group directed at other members within the same identity group, what the authors call as in-group microaggressions. The authors highlight and point to the need for more work on intersectional microaggressions.

Ethnoracial minorities report a variety of discriminatory experiences due to systemic racism. Yet, few studies have examined whether gender and race/ethnicity interact to predict institutional discrimination and racial microaggressions through an intersectional approach.

A predominantly female (60%), ethnoracial minority (20.8% Black, 31.6% Asian, 30.8% Latina/o, 8.2% White, 6.6% Middle Eastern) sample of 895 undergraduates attending a minority-serving public university in an urban setting completed self-report measures of sociodemographic characteristics, experiences of racial microaggressions and institutional discrimination.

Significant (p < 0.05) gender × race/ethnicity interaction effects were found in several institutional discrimination domains: Males reported more police/court discrimination overall, but gender differences in police/court discrimination were less pronounced for non-Black vs Black students. While males tended to report more institutional discrimination than females, the reverse was true for the Middle Eastern group: Middle Eastern females reported institutional discrimination in more domains and more discrimination getting hired than their male counterparts. There was a significant race/ethnicity × gender interaction effect for environmental microaggressions: White males reported more environmental microaggressions than White females, but gender differences were not found in the overall sample.

This study is the first to the authors’ knowledge to assess the interactive effects of gender and ethnicity on the type of microaggressions experienced in a diverse sample that includes individuals of Middle Eastern descent. The authors highlight the range of discriminatory events that ethnoracially minoritized undergraduates experience, even at a minority-serving institution.

Discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in South Africa has shifted from overt hate crimes to covert microaggressions. Microaggression is a term used in psychology to describe casual discrimination against socially marginalised groups, and they occur in three forms: microassaults, microinsults and microinvalidations. Microassaults include verbal and non-verbal discriminatory behaviours. Microinsults include actions or statements which demean a person's identity, and microinvalidations negate the thoughts, feelings or lived experiences of a certain people. Microaggressions have detrimental impacts on lives of people experiencing them and on their interpersonal relationships. The chapter presents a focus on microaggression theory together with microaggression experiences of South African Indian LGBTQ+ people, who have been under-researched. Reference is made to interview extracts from research studies focusing on South African Indian LGBTQ+ people and from e-zine articles focusing on the experiences of South African Indian LGBTQ+ people.

Microaggressions have gained heightened attention in academic milieus (Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000). Originally Pierce (1995) defined microaggressions as “subtle, stunning, and unconscious put-downs of those in inferior status” by a collection of individuals in power (p. 313). Sue (2010) suggests that specific interactions involving race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion, class, etc. can be susceptible to a potential racial microaggression.

This chapter will begin with a summary of the rewards and challenges of my doctoral journey. I will share highlighted perspectives from a faculty socio-cultural phenomena perspective. Next, the chapter will explore the phenomenon of monochromatic microaggressions (MM) through the lens of my initial experiences as a new and unknown tenure track Assistant Professor and African American (AA) female.

An additional motif presented in this narrative is a discourse on silent forms of microaggressions and monochromatic microaggressions, both in and out of the classroom (Hendrix, 2007). Monochromatic microaggressions represents hostilities from two distinct, yet combined, groups of individuals at the same time. The term connotes concerted and combined microaggressions and MM associated with the dominant group and horizontal violence perpetuated with oppressed groups. Both groups, identifying from different plateaus, elicit a duality of enmities (e.g., one from underprivilege and the other from privilege).

The intention of this narrative is to write a new future, provide mentoring to those that may be vulnerable to similar experiences and to encourage resilience and broad networking. This chapter presents a personal, transparent, inspirational, but heartfelt narrative.

This article sheds light on the impact of collective characteristics of microaggression in a community and how this affects the perception and experiences of its underrepresented members through the lens of critical race theory (CRT). Using the Springfield community of the southwest Missouri Ozarks region in the United States of America as the authors' focus, the authors explore the barrier of microaggression in the lived experiences of a community striving for diversity and inclusion.

The authors performed a systematic analysis using four CRT tenets: race is a social construct; racism is systematic, racism is commonplace and listening to lived experiences is essential. A sample of underrepresented professionals from the region was surveyed to obtain their lived experiences. Qualitative media analysis on varied media pieces was conducted to obtain context for the environment that precipitated these experiences.

When residents from marginalized backgrounds face consistent microaggressions, their sense of belonging and contributions to the community significantly diminish, which has adverse implications for the community. If these issues are unaddressed, they might choose to leave due to feelings of underrepresentation. Community leaders must proactively implement strategies to welcome an evolving population and educate stakeholders about the detrimental effects of microaggressions on community cohesion.

Historically, the heartland of the United States of America has been a bellwether of the pulse of its average citizen. This region is currently experiencing an increase in diversity along with a significant rise in persistent microaggressions. Using CRT to analyze the impact, lessons learned and challenges, the authors provide recommendations for potential changes that could benefit the nation as a whole.