ABSTRACT
In this personal narrative, I illuminate how the roles of “bully” and “target” are enacted communicatively in everyday interactions between host society members and immigrants. I examine my interactions as an immigrant from an Afro-Indigenous-European Caribbean nation to illustrate how power, intimidation, and aggression are contextually situated within host society member-immigrant relations. I also underscore the subtle and insidious nature of verbal microaggressions that for some immigrants living in the United States are a constitutive feature of their everyday experiences forged in and through communication with host society members. As a result, those dynamics created a form of collective bullying where aggressive behaviors were not carried out by the same individual over time but shared by representatives of a dominant group.
