ABSTRACT
The idea of “microaggressions” has proven a useful way of drawing attention to the potential impact of “small”-scale interpersonal behaviors upon members of historically or structurally subordinated groups. Despite increased public interest in microaggressions, scholarship and activism centering on microaggressions have also brought a range of controversies in their wake. Microaggressions systematically differ from routine insults in quantity or quality; the burden of negative interpersonal interactions falls more heavily upon members of specific, oppressed social groups because the experience of microaggressions by members of these groups is either more frequent, more severe, or both. Explaining how the harms of microaggression are distinct from the harms of everyday slights requires appeal to some explanation of the systematicity of microaggression. Accumulation mechanisms mark and aggregate the marks of individual events of a type, and they can cause or ground disparities. Microaggressions and large-scale harms may be effects of common causal mechanisms.
