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Centering impact, not intent: reframing everyday racism through storytelling, participatory politics, and media literacy

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Centering impact, not intent: reframing everyday racism through storytelling, participatory politics, and media literacy

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Centering Impact, Not Intent:

Reframing Everyday Racism through Storytelling, Participatory Politics, and Media Literacy

Diana Lee

A dissertation presented to the faculty of the USC Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of requirements for a
Ph.D. in Communication
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
University of Southern California

August 2017

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iv

Chapter 1: Racial Microaggressions, Counter-Narratives, and Networked Political Action ........... 1
Theoretical Frameworks and Key Concepts ....................................................................... 8
Microaggressions ................................................................................................... 8
Racial Microaggressions ....................................................................................... 13
Critical Race Theory .............................................................................................. 16
Racial Context of the U.S. and Why Media Representation Matters ................... 18
Political Resistance Through Culture and Counter-Narrative ............................... 20
Participatory Politics ............................................................................................. 31
Citizenship and Networked Political Action ......................................................... 36
Scope of Dissertation and Research Questions ................................................................ 52
Methodology and Methods ............................................................................................. 54
Chapter Overviews and Data Collection and Analysis ...................................................... 55

Chapter 2: Writing into Existence: Participatory Storytelling and The Microaggressions Project 62
Visibility, Spread, and Impact ........................................................................................... 65
On Storytelling ................................................................................................................. 69
On Writing ........................................................................................................................ 70
Context Matters: Setting the Scene ..................................................................... 72
Where? By Who? Showing a Range of Settings and People ................................ 74
Validating It is Pervasive, It Matters, and It Adds Up ....................................................... 77
What’s It Like? The Emotional Impact in the Moment Scene .............................. 79
The Aftermath: Lasting Effects Scene ................................................................... 92
The Microaggressions Project as Participatory Counter-Story ....................................... 111

Chapter 3: Making Microaggressions Visible: Digital Protest Portraits and the #ITooAmHarvard
Campaign ................................................................................................................................... 113
I, Too, Sing America ........................................................................................................ 113
Context and Origins ........................................................................................................ 115
Visibility and Spread ........................................................................................... 117
The Campus Context .......................................................................................... 122
Dismantling Racist Ideologies ......................................................................................... 128
Colorblind Ideology: “‘I don’t see color’…Does that mean you don’t see me?” 130
“You’re lucky to be black…so easy to get into college!”: Responding to Abstract
Liberalism ........................................................................................................... 131
“Don’t you wish you were White like the rest of us?”: Whiteness and the
“Natural” Racial Order ........................................................................................ 136
Race as Classed Culture: “Why do you look _____? A) Like a Thug, B) Ghetto, C)
Hood, D) Ratchet, E) All of the above” .............................................................. 142
Disrupting Stereotypes: “Are you all so fast because you spend so much time
running from the cops?” ................................................................................... 143

Using Visual Culture to Protest and Resist ..................................................................... 146
Public Art, Visual Culture, and Social Movements ............................................. 146
Those Who Paved the Way ................................................................................ 151
Capturing Microaggressions ........................................................................................... 159
Catching Fleeting Moments ............................................................................... 160
Providing Context and Showing Cumulative Weight .......................................... 161
Yes, It Happened. ............................................................................................... 163
What Can I Do? .............................................................................................................. 167

Chapter 4: Seeing it in Action: Creating, Performing, and Circulating Satirical Videos about
Microaggressions ....................................................................................................................... 169
What’s So Funny? .......................................................................................................... 170
“Do You Have a Normal Name Too, or Just Your White Name?” .................................. 171
Catharsis in Flipping the Script ........................................................................... 178
How to Eat PB&J ................................................................................................. 184
That Dreaded Question .................................................................................................. 187
Where Were You From Before You Were Born? ............................................... 187
What Kind Are You? .......................................................................................... 191
Origins and Motivations ..................................................................................... 196
Who Are the Videos For? .................................................................................. 199
My Voice is My Voice ..................................................................................................... 203
The Voice Box ..................................................................................................... 209
Those YES Moments, and Pain Recognition ....................................................... 211
Torching Mosquitos ....................................................................................................... 212
Because I Was That Guy ..................................................................................... 217
Charm and Disarm .............................................................................................. 220

Chapter 5: Taking Your Foot Off Your Throat ............................................................................. 224
Recognition .................................................................................................................... 225
Reflection ....................................................................................................................... 229
Action ............................................................................................................................. 233
Directions for Future Research ...................................................................................... 239
The Time is Now ............................................................................................................. 242

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 247

iv

Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the love and support of so many people
whose presence in my life has enriched it beyond measure. I am incredibly thankful for you all.

My deepest gratitude goes to my dear advisor Henry Jenkins whose unwavering guidance and
support has encouraged and sustained me throughout this entire PhD journey. He did all the
things a great advisor does when shepherding someone through a project of this magnitude,
from being a valued thinking partner when my ideas were still in formation; to connecting me
with literatures and people that helped make this project come alive; to patiently fostering the
development of my scholarly voice; and gently signposting moments for me when I needed
help seeing the forest from the trees. In countless ways he demonstrates his deep commitment
to the success of his students, and models for us what it’s like to live a life of excellence,
reflexivity, and fun, inspiring us to bring into fruition the possibilities and adventures we each
dare to imagine for ourselves and for the world around us.

I would also like to thank the creators and participants of the campaigns and projects featured
in this dissertation, especially those who took the time to respond and share their experiences
with me: Vivian Lu, Abe Forman-Greenwald, Jenny Yang, Rekha Shankar, Andrew Kornhaber,
Stella Choe, Ken Tanaka, and May Lin, Ze Frank, Sam Ford, and Henry Jenkins for helping me
connect. Your vivid creations and powerful stories have inspired me far beyond the bounds of
academic work, and I am so thankful for your impactful and critically important work.

Thank you to my dissertation committee members, whose generous feedback and engagement
has helped shape me into a better scholar and more empowered voice. I would like to thank
Danny Solórzano, whose scholarship on racial microaggressions and soul-affirming practice of
CRT pedagogies has paved the way for so many of us to heal, learn, commune, and grow. He
taught me what it means to show up for people, and for that, I am profoundly grateful. Thank
you to Alison Trope and the Critical Media Project, for doing the hard work of putting theory
into practice. Through her incredible dedication, creativity, and “get it done” attitude across all
areas of life, she has shown me what it can look like to affect change with compassion and
purpose. Thank you to Kjerstin Thorson for being an engaging, accessible teacher, and for
conversations thinking through how to interface with multiple fields, methods, and
perspectives. Her humor and positive energy has helped keep things in perspective, and
continues to push me to recognize and stand confidently behind my intellectual contributions.
Thank you to the fierce feminist Sarah Banet-Weiser for her charismatic teaching and
leadership, and for the open-minded, gracious Brendesha Tynes for their generous investment
in my success as quals committee members and more.

Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thomspon, Gabe Peters-Lazaro, Alex Margolin, and the
MAPP and Civic Paths core teams and extended networks have also played a huge role in
keeping me grounded, supported, and inspired in academic life, showing me the incredible
things that can happen in collaborative, participatory cultures. I have grown so much from

v

being a part of these teams and am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such
talented, generous people making the world a better, more vivid, more equitable place.

I would also like to acknowledge Paul LeMahieu, who has been like an honorary committee
member and cloud-flying sprit animal in my life, offering sage advice and affirming counsel for
so many things academic and non. He was the first person who ever called me “Dr.” ten years
ago as a way to tell me he believed I should and could pursue a PhD because he saw something
in me I did not yet see in myself, and that has made all the difference. With good humor and
kindness, his sharp intellect and expansive generosity has sustained and supported me across
three advanced degrees and countless other adventures. Thank you.

USC’s Graduate School and Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has not only
supported this dissertation and my development as a scholar, but has also given me the great
gift of meeting so many brilliant and incredible people along the way. In addition to the people
above, I am thankful to have worked with and learned from so many inspiring scholars,
including Larry Gross, Tom Goodnight, Lynn Miller, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Sharon Hays, Leland
Saito, Sarah Gualtieri, and Randy Lake, and am infinitely thankful for Annenberg’s staff,
especially Anne Marie Campian. Thank you also to Josephine Kim and Carola Suárez-Orozco, for
helping me first name microaggressions years ago, and to Marita Sturken, who introduced me
to visual and cultural studies.

Academic life would be nothing without the camaraderie of those who intimately understand
the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of this path we have chosen. Thank you to my cohortmates
and fellow PhD friends, without whom I would not have survived. Special thanks to fellow
Henry cohort advisees Raffi Sarkissian for one-on-ones across LA, Japan, and beyond, and Sam
Close for virtual and in-person hugs; Chi Zhang for orthogonal rotations and stats bonnets, and
Bei Yan’s good humor in any language; Wit Thainiyom and Nahoi Koo for sushi dinners and
future-casting; for the most generous Katie Elder and her perfect puns, and for Leila Bighash,
the rarest bird. Jimmy Milner, I look forward to writing our book together so we can discover
the answer to honey mustard or honey mustard? and life’s other profound questions.

I am also grateful for so many Annenbergers who have come before me and for those who
continue to make the community a community, including the kindest, helpfulest Ritesh Mehta,
my food buddy Andrea Wenzel, Renyi Hong and Brittany Farr who I got to know just in time, the
lovely Lana Swartz and Kevin Driscoll, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik for many pearls of wisdom, LeeAnn
Sangalang, Cynthia Wang, Laurel Felt, Meryl Alper, Yomna Elsayed, Brandon Golob, Matt Bui,
and Rogelio Lopez. Nikita Anderson, Joel Lemuel, Alex Agloro, Janeane Anderson, Marcus
Shepard and his family for laughter, friendship, and solidarity. Thank you to my dear friends
Kelly Song, David Jeong, James Lee, and Xam Chan for heart-shaped cakes and Kelly weeks. May
we always have the opportunity to reunite for laughter and meals.

Thank you to my sociology sisters Jennifer Candipan for night convos and artisanal ice cream
runs, and May Lin for always holding metaphysical and astrological space. Fish tacos and family

vi

dinners forever. Thank you to Steph Cariaga and Edwin Hernandez for helping connect me with
Danny and his beautiful, liberating RAC.

To my dear, far-flung friends who didn’t always know what I was doing, but supported me
nonetheless, thank you Jennifer Kung Lobendahn, Jennifer Haug, Hau Yeung Green, Kristin
Trott, Jenny Lam, Alice Lin Hehman, Shirley Tsai, Stacy Fat, Wendy Chen, Jessian Choy, Irene
Pak, Beth O’Brien, Ilana Bercovitz, Tanya Cornejo, Linnete Manrique; and my sister’s crew, who
always treats me like family: Karbo, Ivy, Sandy, Jerry, and Kym. Thank you to Farzy Noori, Susan
Priver, and Bridget Pudi for the gift of a yoga practice, to Crystal Jones for our beautiful
friendship, and to Joe, for his fellowship and encouragement.

And finally, words cannot adequately express the depth of love and gratitude I feel for my
family, who from the beginning have always encouraged me to see the world and open my
mind through learning. I am blessed beyond measure with a mom and dad, sister, aunties and
uncles, cousins, grandparents, and godfather, whose legacies and lifetime of love and support
have given me roots to stay grounded and wings so I can fly. You have each nourished my mind,
body, and soul in countless and unfathomable ways, and I can only do what I do because of
your love.

To all the beloved people who’ve cleared the path ahead of me, stood behind me, and walked
with me here, thank you.

1

Chapter 1:
Racial Microaggressions, Counter-Narratives, and Networked Political Action

When something racist happens to me, I find myself taking to social media to vent my
frustrations and find solace in a network of people that understand and are with me in the
struggle. This happened recently when I was walking around San Francisco’s Embarcadero area
by myself one weekday afternoon and unexpectedly ended up cursing out a group of three
twenty-something men who made a catcalling, “Japanese tourist” leer at me. I was making my
way to the subway after lunch with a friend and had paused to take a picture with my phone of
the scenic harbor in front of me. Seeing me, the guys had whistled, gyrated their hips, and
mimed photograph taking while laughing and yelling in exaggerated Orientalized voices, “Oooh,
konichiwa! America! I’ll come help you take a picture!” Their taunting words, gestures, and
laugher cut through the air like a knife. I was abruptly jolted out of the moment and instantly
filled with burning humiliation and intensifying anger that this group of men had ruined my
afternoon just because I was an Asian woman walking alone down the street. I was furious that
they felt they could exert that kind of power over me, and without being able to think about it
or stop myself, I told them so. There were a lot of expletives. And the force of my reaction
surprised them. Instead of walking away and letting their comments and gestures fade into the
wind, I had instead turned to face the three of them and told them loudly and in no uncertain
terms that what they said and did was racist and sexist. Two of them were White, but the one
who looked mixed race had a fleetingly apologetic look on his face as he ushered his friends
away. As I stared at their retreating backs with blood pounding in my ears, I felt an awful
adrenaline-fueled mixture of pain, rage, and shame, and I was suddenly alone again, but raw,

2

exposed, injured. A small voice in the back of my mind was telling me to move to a more
populated area, so I willed my body to put one foot in front of the other as my distressed brain
tried to process what had just happened. I realized that my phone was still gripped tightly in my
hand, and before I even got to the area with more people, I had already started typing.
Looking back, you can see that my Facebook and Twitter timelines reflected my
emotions and reactions as they were happening, including a series of posts describing how I
was shaking with rage not only at the guys’ words, but also at my own uncharacteristic
expression of anger, and then calming down after awhile and only half-jokingly broadcasting my
location in case there was violent retribution and I went missing. The response I got from
friends across the country was almost instantaneous. “I had a similar urge last night when I
heard two boys behind me having an extremely offensive discussion about an Asian policeman.
I’m glad you had the guts to say something.” “Omg, flashback to [living in] NYC! So sorry this
happens!” “You have every right not to be oppressed!!!” “Power! You rock, Diana.” My other
concerned friend who was at work nearby saw this playing out on social media, texted me to
see if I was ok, and ended up picking me up to debrief over egg tarts. Sitting in a park in the
middle of SF Chinatown, we shared other similar experiences from the past and reflected that it
might not have been smart or safe of me to have done what I did, but that it was an
understandable, maybe even justified reaction, even though I felt horrible because of it. As a
pedagogically-oriented communication scholar, this is not exactly my idea of what a teachable
moment looks like.
Flash forward to the time I’m writing this, from Los Angeles, and my latest post to
Facebook reads:

3

Today’s post-yoga zen lobby moment: While I was in conversation with them, a White
man described an Asian man to a White woman who didn't know him by saying his
name and then pulling back the corners of his eyes with his fingers. In front of my face.
It was just the three of us talking. PULLED BACK THE CORNERS OF HIS EYES! What the
everloving fuck, people.

Although you can hear the anger in my writing, I had not caused a scene this time. These were
otherwise friendly people in a place I go to find calmness and stress relief several times a week,
every week. In the moment, I’d muttered something about having to be somewhere, quickly
gathered my things, and left. I just needed to get out of there. The safe, inclusive, community-
oriented space was no longer safe, inclusive, nor did it feel like much of a community. It had
happened so fast and I did not know how to respond, especially because the man who had
pulled back his eyelids to communicate “Asianness” was also the same genial, seasoned yogi
who, when I first started yoga and even the most basic poses seemed impossible, encouraged
me to be patient with building strength and flexibility and to continue the practice for the
rejuvenating, calming, and centering benefits that I have come to so deeply value it for today.
He’s not a bad guy, I reasoned, but he did just do something that attacked me. What was the
“right” thing to do? I still feel conflicted about my reaction and what it should have been.
Should I have called him out on it? Attempted to aggressively or patiently address the racist
offense so it wouldn’t happen again to me or to other Asians in his vicinity? What kinds of
gestures does he use to describe other marginalized peoples? How could something like this
happen, in this time, and in LA?
Because I had remained silent in the moment and was bursting with frustration,
humiliation, and regret, I once again vented to friends online. The reactions I received were
once again swift, compassionate, and piercing. “Maybe he had something in his eye(s),” one

4

friend jokingly commented. “Arrgh. No words :(“ another wrote. “Wtf.” “Ugh.” “No.” “Idiot.”
Others communicated their empathy and frustration with emoticons and symbols that
reflected stronger language and reactions. Another friend wrote about a similar experience,
when her White high school history teacher did the same thing to prompt the class to answer a
question about U.S.-China trade agreements. An Asian-American friend sarcastically asked, “Did
he then turn to you and say, ‘How do you even see through those small slits?’”
I grimace-laughed at that last comment, knowing that although my friend was being
blatantly racist exasperatedly, he was also reiterating something that some people really do ask
Asian people - if our “abnormal” eye shape impacts our vision. These instances described above
are microaggressions, “the brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental
indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or
negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person
or group.”
1
Specifically, racial microaggression are the layered, subtle, and often unconsciously
perpetrated forms of everyday racism experienced by people from marginalized racial (and
ethnic) populations.
2
Unlike more direct, overt, or deliberate acts of discrimination,
microaggressions are often subtle, happen quickly, and are frequently, though not always,
unintentional. Their assaultive power comes from their cumulative and lasting effects, from
experiencing them all the time, everywhere.
These are just two of hundreds of experiences I’ve accumulated over the past 30+ years
as a woman of color in the U.S., and my identities allow me many relative privileges in this

1
Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life, 5.
2
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research,”
2
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research,”
298.

5

society. Even so, I can tell you that experiencing racial and gendered racial microaggressions
repeatedly over the years has had a serious impact on me. It’s changed the way I move through
spaces, it’s changed my interactions with people - who I talk to, what I say, who I feel I can
trust. It’s affected my ability to focus at school and at work every time a microaggression
happens, and it happens often, not only at school and at work, but walking on the street, at the
grocery store, at the bank. I am fortunate to have been in spaces and among people who have
helped me learn to recognize and name my experiences and to be resilient and cope with the
negative effects of these constant and unpredictable stressors, but they do continue to impact
my physiological and psychological well-being. It takes an incredible amount of energy to
navigate these everyday manifestations of systemic oppression, to decide whether to challenge
each instance, and if so, how. I have to work at finding ways to protect the parts of me that
continue to engage with these issues to keep fighting the fight, including having to repeatedly
remind myself that there is no “right” response to microaggressions, and that it is ok to not
always engage. That self-care, like Andre Lorde tells us, is “an act of political warfare.”
I have also come to know that I am not alone in my experiences. Whether based on
layered assumptions about skin color, phenotype, immigration status, nationality, ethnicity,
language, ability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, or class, microaggressions happen
constantly to people with marginalized identities. Additionally, the prevalence and valence of
microaggressions, and corresponding urgency to address them, can change depending on social
context. As we are seeing in the contemporary moment, when powerful public figures are
rewarded for fanning the flames of fear, anger, division, white supremacy, misogyny,

6

xenophobia, and bigotry, it is no surprise that blatant instances of everyday prejudice are loudly
manifesting in many physically and symbolically violent forms.
As mentioned in the stories above, part of my own coping mechanisms dealing with the
deep frustrations that come from continually having parts of my identity be humiliated,
questioned, invalidated, silenced, or otherwise put down is to use social media to articulate
myself in a space where I know people will acknowledge or identify with my experiences,
communicate their support, commiserate by sharing similar experiences, and sometimes even
help me deal with whatever consequences came from however I responded to the
microaggression of the moment. The sharing of my experiences helps me channel my
frustrations, get feedback and support, and for friends in my social network who do not
frequently encounter racial microaggressions, maybe even serves an educational function –
showing them that these things happen, what they look like, how they make people feel, and
why they’re problematic. Maybe the act of me sharing my story gets everyone, including
myself, to reflect on our daily interactions, and to see how they are connected to larger systems
of power and oppression. Maybe someone hearing about my stories will stop themselves or
their friends from yelling gendered racial slurs at strangers on the street, or from pulling the
corners of their eyes back when talking about Asian people. Maybe next time, the cumulative
pain of these frequent, small, cutting interactions won’t be as readily dismissed. But in the end,
I am just speaking with my relatively small, closed network of friends and this is just a
microcosm of what could happen on a larger and more public scale. What happens when
people strategically use digital tools and networked communication avenues to address
individual experiences with microaggressions collectively?

7

This dissertation explores participatory, mediated, storytelling and resistance practices
that aim to collectively process, speak back to, or educate about racial microaggressions. These
layered, cumulative, often subtle and unconscious forms of everyday racism experienced by
marginalized populations reflect and function to maintain the racially biased structures and
ideological beliefs of the societal context in which they occur, and frequently experiencing them
can have lasting negative effects on individuals.
3
Through case studies of select projects and
campaigns focused specifically on addressing racial microaggressions, I will explore how people
are mobilizing and using personal stories told through a range of communication and media
practices, platforms, and networks to individually and collectively process, reframe, and
educate about these everyday experiences.
Three aspects of participation in these kinds of resistance activities will be explored
through analysis of the mediated creations and interviews with creators and participants: 1) the
mediated communicative practices themselves, in terms of the various affordances and
limitations of communicating and spreading these messages through different visual
storytelling strategies and platforms, 2) the reasons and impact for the people creating and
participating in these projects (who are likely frequent experiencers of microaggressions), and
3) the potential pedagogical value of using these creations (such as archival websites, Tumblr
image campaigns, and satirical short videos) as identity developing media literacy and civic
engagement teaching and learning tools.
The case studies examined are (Chapter 2) The Microaggressions Project, a collectively-
generated web archive of thousands of written microaggression stories, (Chapter 3) the digital

3
Ibid.

8

protest portraits from the I, Too, am Harvard campaign, and (Chapter 4) a group of
professionally-produced satirical videos about racial microaggressions. More details about the
cases and methods are at the end of this introductory chapter, but first, the next section lays
out the theoretical frameworks that guide this work.

Theoretical Frameworks and Key Concepts

Microaggressions

Over forty years ago, African American psychiatrist Chester Pierce coined the term
“micro-aggression”
4
to describe the “subtle and stunning”
5
forms of everyday racism
encountered by People of Color, and the “unimaginable magnitude”
6
of their impact due to the
incessant “torture,” “terror,” and “disaster”
7
that accumulates over a lifetime. Although the
theory and term originated in academia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the concept of
microaggressions has in the past few years been launched into popular vernacular and
prominently discussed and debated in the popular press, such as in news and print mediums
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
This surge of mainstream visibility and contentious debating about the meaning and value of
the concept was influenced by decades of academic research, but also came about at this
moment because of the energies and actions of student activists utilizing networked,
participatory communication to make their voices heard. The creation of dozens of visually-
compelling, spreadable student campaigns, hashtags, tweets, images, and satirical videos

4
Pierce, “Offensive Mechanisms,” 267.
5
Ibid., 266.
6
Ibid.
7
Pierce, “Stress Analogs of Racism and Sexism: Terrorism, Torture, and Disaster.”

9

speaking back to these everyday experiences forced people to recognize and grapple with the
implications of racial microaggressions in an alleged postracial society. In a time where
“diversity” was loudly championed, yet racism still thought of by many as individual
discriminatory acts as well as a thing of the past, race and cultural scholar Jeff Chang describes
why student creations like the one explored in Chapter 2 contributed powerfully to the visibility
and public discourse about what everyday racism looks like and why it continues to matter.
In 2010, two Columbia University students named Vivian Lu and David Zhou, angry
about racist and sexist flyers distributed by candidates for student government, began a
Tumblr blog called The Microaggressions Project to document the regular indignities
they and their classmates faced…The idea quickly went viral. Hundreds of other
students on dozens of other campuses set up their own blogs and began organizing
activist work around them. In time, discussions over microaggressions had spread from
the campuses into the mainstream, and the American Dialect Society declared the word
itself one of the “most useful” words of 2015. The language of microaggressions gave
students of the “post-racial” moment a way to talk about the gap between society’s
regular celebration of diversity and its continuing inequality.

Similarly, in their reflections about past and future directions for microaggressions research,
critical race and education scholars Kenjus T. Watson and Lindsay Pérez Huber reference the I,
Too, Am Harvard campaign (explored in Chapter 3) as an example to describe how these kinds
of student campaigns contributed to the surge of visibility, knowledge, and more common
usage of the term “microaggression” during this time.
In 2014, college students across the U.S. thrust the concept of racial microaggressions
into public discourse with social media campaigns (like I, Too, Am Harvard) to call
attention to the everyday racism Students of Color encountered on their college and
university campuses. Racial microaggressions quickly became a term to explain
experiences with racism in a “post-racial” era. Since then, numerous scholars and
columnists have challenged racial microaggressions to argue that this concept attributes
to the “coddling” and “hypersensitivity” of U.S. college students that can create a
“vindictive protectiveness” that impedes student learning in higher education.
8

8
Watson and Pérez Huber, “Micro In Name Only,” 1.

10

As the quote above succinctly captures, more people were using the term to name and claim
their experiences, but as their voices got louder, so too did the vehement, condescending, and
dismissive backlash that followed. For example, in the article “The Coddling of the American
Mind,”
9
published in the September 2015 issue of The Atlantic, two White men, Greg Lukianoff
and Jonathan Haidt, argued against the naming and centering of the pain and damage of racial,
gendered, and other kinds of microaggressions. They contended that this concept essentially
makes our nation’s young people more sensitive than they should be to issues that are just
reflective of the way things are. College students and kids, they said, should not be “coddled”
and protected from dealing with the inevitable manifestations of these real world issues, nor
should they be encouraged to become detrimentally “hypersensitive” or “vindictive,” which is
what would happen, they argued, when you learn to reflect on your own life and listen to and
value the identities and experiences of people different from you. The policies that higher
educational institutions across the country were putting in place to try and systematically
address issues of everyday racism and sexism, they argued, were uncomfortable and oppressive
for them, they said. Why did they have to be careful and considerate about the language they
used to talk about sensitive topics and complex issues like racial identity, structural racism,
sexual harassment, homophobia, religious persecution, and other topics that might cause
students to relive incessant everyday indignities and fears, or their most horrific and traumatic
experiences? The “free speech” rights of professors and lecturers were being threatened, they
said. Why were institutions of higher learning acting “oppressively” by forcing those in power to
reflect on and act with awareness of their own privileges and roles in upholding the unequal

9
Lukianoff and Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

11

power systems that systemically marginalizes the already marginalized? Why should the care?
Why did they have to change when everything was already working so well for them? The oft
circulated, but unattributed quote, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like
oppression” feels particularly appropriate here. As Watson and Pérez Huber write, “The
characterization of racial microaggressions as ‘vindictive’ illustrates the lack of understanding
about the theoretical origins of this concept…(which was originally) theorized to acknowledge
the harm everyday racism can cause People of Color - those groups whose rights have been the
least protected throughout U.S. History.”
10
For the purposes of this dissertation, the following
are definitions and conceptual frameworks that I will be using to analyze the microaggressions
and resistance practices in my case studies.
As stated at the opening of this section, the concept of racial microaggressions was first
described in scholarship in the late 1960s by professor of psychiatry and education Chester
Pierce.
11
In his work with Black families and students, Pierce described “subtle, stunning, often
automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’”
12
that “controls space, time,
energy, and mobility…while producing feelings of degradation, and erosion of self-confidence
and self-image.”
13
In the last few decades, his and other research on microaggressions has
expanded to consider not just racial microaggressions, but layered, intersectional
microaggression experiences based on other intertwined aspects of identity, such as gender,
sexual-orientation, class, and religion. Educational psychologists such as Derald Wing Sue have

10
Watson and Pérez Huber, “Micro In Name Only,” 1.
11
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research”;
Pierce, “Stress Analogs of Racism and Sexism: Terrorism, Torture, and Disaster.”
12
Sue et al., “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” 273.
13
Yosso et al., “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for
Latina/o Undergraduates,” 661.

12

developed a taxonomy for different types and expressions of microaggressions, as well as
process models for mapping the psychological mechanisms that are at play in these
interactions. In Microaggressions in Everyday Life,
14
Sue defines microaggressions as “the brief
and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional
or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual-
orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group.”
15
Unlike more
direct, overt, or deliberate acts of discrimination, microaggressions are elusive and hard to
pinpoint because they are subtle, can happen quickly, and are frequently unintentional. This
results in interactions in which the often neutral or well meaning perpetrators of
microaggressions are completely unaware of the negative impact of their words or actions,
which means they are likely to repeat them and/or become defensive or dismissive if
confronted, and people on the receiving end are often left questioning the experiential reality
of the situation and expending mental energy trying to determine an appropriate response and
course of action.
Although each individual instance may be seemingly small and insignificant,
“microaggressions have the lifelong insidious effects of silencing, invalidating, and humiliating
the identity and/or voices of those who are oppressed.”
16
The cumulative effect of repeatedly
experiencing these invalidations has a tremendous psychological toll and far-reaching
consequences for the long term mental health and well-being of individuals.
17
This constant

14
Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life.
15
Ibid., 5.
16
Ibid., 66.
17
Pierce, “Stress Analogs of Racism and Sexism: Terrorism, Torture, and Disaster”; Solórzano,
Ceja, and Yosso, “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate”;

13

experience of marginalized groups works to “assail the self-esteem of recipients, produce anger
and frustration, deplete psychic energy, lower feelings of subjective well-being and worthiness,
produce physical health problems, shorten life expectancy, and deny minority populations
equal access and opportunity in education, employment, and health care.”
18

Racial Microaggressions

This dissertation focuses on racial microaggressions, with the understanding that all
microaggressions are layered and intersectional, and that racial microaggressions are just one
manifestation of larger, entrenched, racially-biased systems and structures. Along with other
axes of privilege (such as class, gender, and sexuality), the concept of race is a foundational,
stratifying force in U.S. society,
19
socially-constructed and maintained to “differentiate groups
based primarily on skin color, phenotype, ethnicity, and culture for the purpose of showing the
superiority or dominance of one group over another. The social meanings applied to race find
their justification in an ideology of racial superiority and White privilege,”
20
where Whiteness is
seen as “normal” and superior to the features and cultures of all other groups, and racism
operates to structurally and systematically uphold Whiteness and subordinate all other groups.
The hierarchical race-based ideologies that uphold these systems work on micro and macro
levels to influence economic, social, political, and cultural policies domestically and globally.
21

Racial microaggressions, therefore, can be thought of as “the everyday reflections of larger

Steele, “A Threat in the Air”; Sue et al., “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life”; Yosso et al.,
“Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for Latina/o
Undergraduates.”
18
Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life, 6.
19
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.
20
Yosso, Critical Race Counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline, 5.
21
Dyer, White, 1.

14

racist structures and ideological beliefs that impact People of Color’s lives,”
22
functioning as
subtle everyday actions between people and within institutions and systems that keep
marginalized people marginalized.
Following from theoretical traditions that combine examining racial microaggressions in
educational settings with a critical race theory (CRT) perspective, Lindsay Pérez Huber and
Daniel Solórzano define racial microaggressions as “a form of systemic, everyday racism used to
keep those at the racial margins in their place. They are: (1) verbal and non-verbal assaults
directed toward People of Color, often carried out in subtle, automatic or unconscious forms;
(2) layered assaults, based on race and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, language,
immigration status, phenotype, accent, or surname; and (3) cumulative assaults that take a
psychological, physiological, and academic toll on People of Color.”
23
Different from the
aforementioned more psychologically-oriented perspectives, this analytic framework includes
the mental and physical effects of microaggressions on individuals, but also incorporates social
and cultural context, systemic and institutional factors, and the work of ideology in the analysis
of racial microaggressions. In other words, this framework allows for a way to explore “how
everyday racist events are systemically mediated by institutionalized racism (i.e. structures and
processes), and guided by ideologies of white supremacy that justify the superiority of a
dominant group (whites) over non-dominant groups (People of Color).”
24
I will be utilizing this
analytic framework,
25
which takes into account institutional, systemic, and societal context, as

22
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research,”
302.
23
Ibid., 298.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., 309.

15

well as the various types and effects on people involved, to understand the microaggressions
and resistance practices in my research.
The ecological analytic framework Pérez Huber and Solórzano developed for a CRT
approach to microaggressions research also included a model on the microaggression level
26
for
understanding and undertaking this kind of work. In addition to the critical importance of
seeing racial microaggressions within a context of institutional and ideological racism, they also
outlined a framework to help identify and understand the various components of each
microaggression experience
27
(see Figure 1). This includes the need to understand four factors
that influence the experiencing of racial microaggressions:
Figure 1. A model for analyzing racial microaggressions

1) Type of racial microaggression (e.g., how one is targeted, including verbal, nonverbal, or
visual microaggressions),
2) Context (e.g., where it happened, who else was present, and relational power
dynamics),
3) Effect (e.g., “the physiological and psychological consequences…[such as] self-doubt,
anger, stress, racial battle fatigue, poor academic performance, poor health,”
28
and
4) Response (e.g., how one responds to the incident, which can influence the effects of

26
Ibid.
27
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions,” 1–2.
28
Ibid., 1.

16

present and future racial microaggressions).
29

For each case study analyzed in this dissertation, I will be using this framework to analyze the
microaggressions that are highlighted and challenged in each of the projects and campaigns in
order to comprehensively show how these complex, interlocking aspects of racial
microaggression - the type, context, effects, and responses - all work together to cumulatively
impact those who are targeted.

Critical Race Theory

As referenced above, a guiding theoretical perspective that influences this approach to
analyzing racial microaggressions is Critical Race Theory (CRT). Critical Race Theory emerged in
the 1970s, and has its roots in critical legal scholarship, radical feminism, cultural philosophy,
ethnic studies, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s. While it has evolved over
time and now includes subgroups with specialized literatures and priorities, at the most general
level, the CRT movement has been described as “a collection of activists and scholars interested
in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”
30
In their work
on developing a racial microaggression analytic framework that can be used as a tool for critical
race research, Lindsay Pérez Huber and Daniel G. Solórzano outline “five tenants of CRT that
guide the use of this framework. They include the: (1) centrality and intersectionality of race
and racism; (2) challenge to dominant ideologies and deficit perspectives; (3) centrality of
experiential knowledge; (4) interdisciplinary analyses; and (5) explicit commitment to social

29
Ibid.
30
Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 3.

17

justice.”
31
While these tenets are not new in and of themselves, the authors contend that taking
them together and “approaching an examination of microaggressions from a CRT perspective
means we engage an interdisciplinary analysis that centers the lived experiences of People of
Color to understand how everyday racism, and other forms of oppression, intersect to mediate
life experiences and outcomes. Moreover, we engage CRT as a strategic goal of recognizing,
analyzing and dismantling racism and other forms of subordination encountered by
Communities of Color.”
32
Through their work and mine, I also hope to contribute to these goals
by centering the voices and lived experiences of people resisting and speaking back to racial
microaggressions through mediated projects and networked communication practices.
Whereas other approaches may focus on the internal psychological effects or
educational potential of these kinds of projects for frequent perpetrators of microaggressions,
the CRT research approach focuses on those at the margins that are frequent targets of
microaggressions. This emphasis of centralizing their experiential knowledge about the impact
of racism as a way to recognize, reflect, and act to dismantle it is reflected in the design of this
dissertation. I have focused my inquiry on how being a part of creating or participating in these
projects impacts the initial creators and participants in dealing with their own experiences of
racial microaggressions. I also consider how for frequent targets not involved in the initial
creation of the projects, just coming across them or sharing them with their networks can help
them learn to name their pain, value their experiences as legitimate and worth focusing on, and
also help them know that there are others that also experience and recognize the weight of

31
Ibid., 301.
32
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research,”
301.

18

these encounters. The question of whether or not these campaigns and projects can be
effectively used to teach frequent perpetrators to learn and ostensibly reduce the number of
racial microaggressions perpetrated is important, but is a secondary focus of this work. This
dissertation is about amplifying the voices and creations of those having to constantly navigate
harmful racial microaggressions and systemic oppression as a way to see how and in what ways
their creations and actions can help dismantle the systems that marginalize them.

Racial Context of the U.S. and Why Media Representation Matters

Though the stories, campaigns, and projects featured in this dissertation have spread
through social media and networked communication practices to influence diverse people
around the world, they all originated from creators in the U.S., and are therefore situated
within debates and discourses relevant to the history and culture of the U.S. national context.
In the United States, race has historically been and continues to be a socially-constructed,
fundamental, hierarchical organizing system that governs the way we understand ourselves in
relation to others as well as how we interact in the institutions and societal systems we
encounter on a daily basis. For hundreds of years of the nation’s history, through force and
hegemonic power, Whiteness
33
(and being male, heterosexual, middle-class, and Christian) has
been held up as the idealized, unmarked norm and everyone else’s stories, cultural practices,
and realities have been systematically defined around this center – as “other,” opposite,
strange, deficient, or in many cases, simply nonexistent, rendered silenced and invisible in the

33
Throughout this dissertation, I capitalize racial categories to visually bring race and its social
constructedness to the fore. In some cases, these words are not consistently capitalized or
phrased because I maintain the original capitalization and phrasing decisions of authors and
publishers when quoting their work.

19

societal “mainstream.” Despite persistent contemporary postracial rhetoric that purports
racism ended after the 1960s Civil Rights Movements, and that “colorblind” values and policies
are the solution to moving past discriminatory practices, whether or not we can recognize it,
racial categorization and the biases that go along with them still deeply affect our everyday
lives - from structural, institutionalized racism entrenched in institutions and policies, to
popular imagination and understandings of different groups, to our everyday interactions with
one another – all of which feed into and reinforce each other. One of the most prominent
places where this process can be seen is in everyday media representations and the meanings
we make of them. Whose stories are being told? How, by whom, and for what purpose? How
are people “writing themselves into existence,”
34
when they don’t see themselves represented?
Why does this matter?
Media institutions, like schools, families, government, religious, art, and legal
institutions, along with others that Marxist philosopher Althusser would also call ideological or
repressive state apparatuses,
35
are powerful societal communication systems through which
people circulate culture and meaning, oftentimes inadvertently reinforcing hegemonic
ideologies that legitimate and preserve existing social hierarchies as the “natural” and
“common sense” social order. This “natural” social order drastically and unequally benefits
some groups over others. In the U.S., the naturalized racial hierarchy consistently places
Whiteness at the top (or as normal), Blackness at the bottom (or as opposite), and everyone
else scrambling for recognition somewhere in between. While this does not go unchallenged

34
boyd, “Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage
Social Life,” 120.
35
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” 318.

20

nor remain stable, dominant ideas of what is desired and “normal” and whose stories are
important and therefore should be featured, seen, and supported are created, reinforced, and
perpetuated through representations in media. “Media” includes print, images, television, film,
the Internet, and other forms of mediated communication that are increasingly ubiquitous in
contemporary society. As media scholar Larry Gross writes about television, film, and
journalism, the politics of “media and visibility helps maintain the powerlessness of groups at
the bottom of the social heap. Not all interests or viewpoints are treated equally, and
judgments are routinely made – by producers and writers, editors and reporters – about what
to include or exclude.”
36
These representations have symbolic and material consequences for
the everyday lived experiences of individuals. They affect people’s sense of self and citizenship
and how they are treated. They also lead to decisions about who needs, can access, and is
deemed worthy of receiving resources such as healthcare, food, housing, employment,
transportation, education, and legal representation, and furthermore, determines who has the
cultural and political power to advocate for these resources when they are lacking.

Political Resistance through Culture and Counter-Narrative

Transformation through Struggle

While it is true that media and other societal systems are powerful forces that
contribute to and help maintain the deeply entrenched, ideological values that keep the
powerful powerful, counter-hegemonic disruptions are coming from all levels of society,
constantly working to challenge the status quo. Just as dominant ideologies seek to continually
reassert themselves, the systemic unequal distribution of resources and the unjust treatment of

36
Gross, Up from Invisibility, 4.

21

marginalized groups is always being contested. People are organizing and advocating for a more
just, more equitable society, for more people.
Political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and counter-hegemony (or
counter-hegemonies) helps explain this process of ongoing struggle for social power:
Originally, hegemony referred to the way that one nation could exert ideological and
social, rather than military or coercive, power over another. However, cultural theorists
tend to use the term to describe the process by which a dominant class wins the willing
consent of the subordinate classes to the system that ensures their subordination. This
consent must be constantly won and rewon, for people’s material social experience
constantly reminds them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a
constant threat to the dominant class. Like Althusser’s theory of ideology, hegemony
does not denote a static power relationship but a constant process of struggle…”
37

Influenced by this theory, and in the context of mounting frustration with social scientists
subsuming and conflating race with other social categories such as class, ethnicity, and nation in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, in their landmark conceptualizations of race and the role it plays
in U.S. society, sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant theorized and articulated that race
needs to be understood as a fraught, contested, but deeply impactful category on its own
terms, and therefore related to not as fixed categories of identity, but rather, as “an unstable
and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political
struggle.”
38
Race, they argue, “operates at the crossroads between social structure and
experience. It is both historically determined and continuingly being made and remade in
everyday life.”
39
Because these social categories are unstable, hegemonic, change over time and
context, and are being created through everyday interactions, they are also continually being

37
Fiske, Media Matters, 291.
38
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55.
39
Ibid., 307.

22

contested and negotiated. This means that the socially constructed categories of racial identity,
and the stereotypes associated with them, can be challenged and transformed.

Cultural Resistance

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall also wrote extensively about the importance of engaging
with the politics of identity and representation, especially in the terrain of popular culture,
“where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined,
where we are represented, not only to the audience out there who do not get the message, but
to ourselves for the first time.”
40
Representations in media and other aspects of society are
important because they teach us how to make sense of ourselves, the groups we belong to, and
those who are defined as “not us.” Understanding how representations are crafted, and by
whom, for what purpose, helps uncover and challenge the power relations at work behind
them, and empowers individuals to see, push back against, and collectively create alternative
representations when those that are available are damaging, limit life chances, and are
otherwise unsatisfactory.
The interdisciplinary field of cultural studies has long studied histories of marginalized
groups creating “alternative” cultural expressions and representations, often times through
claiming and reclaiming style, symbols, and public space. For example, in his essay exploring the
meaning of “Black” in “Black Popular Culture,” Hall discusses how black diasporic communities
who were (forcibly or autonomously) dispersed, historically discriminated against, and excluded
from the cultural mainstream took things into their own hands by developing “repertoires of

40
Hall, “What Is This ‘black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” 113.

23

black popular culture,”
41
remixing, reappropriating, and rearticulating popular cultural ideas and
expressions through language, style, physicality and the occupation of public space, articulating
a counter-narrative of identity, and “as means of constituting and sustaining camaraderie and
community”
42
across national and regional boundaries. Similarly, in Time Passages, George
Lipsitz draws on Gramsci’s theory of counter-hegemony and organic intellectuals, showing how
Chicano rock musicians in 1940s Los Angeles formed a coalition, or “historic bloc,”
43
utilizing
strategies such as “bifocality, juxtaposition of multiple realities, intertexuality, and comparison
through families of resemblance”
44
to mobilize diverse groups to challenge unjust, dominant
cultural norms and social systems.
Many of these strategies taken up by marginalized groups involve creating, exposing, or
sharing visual culture and artistic expressions, such as community murals, spoken word poetry,
film, music, dramatic performances, graffiti, sculpture, memorials, fashion, and other kinds of
images or objects circulated or on display to either speak back to oppressive dominant stories,
or to articulate and center their own voices as the valued stories to be remembered. Several
multimedia examples of art activism and how contemporary networked communication tools
and practices change the reach and spread of these expressions will be explored more in
Chapter 3 with the case study featuring a performance- and image-based campaign against
racial microaggressions. These kinds of seen and circulated cultural expressions can act as
powerful symbols representative of individual or collective identities and values, and they also

41
Ibid., 109.
42
Ibid.
43
Lipsitz, Time Passages, 152.
44
Ibid.

24

work to constitute alternative histories in public memory, centering “different” voices and
stories to be heard, told, and remembered.

Telling Counter-Stories

Like cultural studies scholars studying identity-formation and resistance practices via
artistic or cultural expressions, critical race scholars center and trace the long histories of visual,
oral, or written storytelling and counter-storytelling from communities of people whose voices
are often invisible or relegated to the margins of dominant U.S. societal narratives, such as from
African American, Chicano/a, and Native American communities.
45
At the time I am writing this
in Fall 2016, for example, although largely invisible in mainstream press, thousands of Native,
Indigenous, and other concerned people and organizations have been peacefully protesting the
construction of the 1,200 mile Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. The pipeline is planned
to carry 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day from North Dakota to South Dakota, Iowa, and
Illinois, through the sacred sites and burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux people, and
across the Missouri River, which provides drinking and agricultural water for millions of
Americans.
46
On one level, the protesters are fighting the construction of the pipeline for
environmental justice reasons, because in addition to desecrating sacred grounds, it is almost
certain there will be multiple leaks across the pipeline that will poison the water that millions of
people depend on for food and life. However, these water protectors and water warriors are
fighting for more than just clean water. They are also fighting for the survival, liberation, and
valuing of Native lives.

45
Solórzano and Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology.”
46
Stoner, “Library Guides.”

25

Through occupying space, putting their lives on the line, and telling counter-stories
amplified by the affordances of digital and networked communication, Native voices from
across the country are reframing dominant narratives that focus only on discourses of
corporate wealth and expansion or negative environmental impact, to insist that the humanity
and lived realities of Native people are also placed front and center when talking about the
issues surrounding the plans and construction of the pipeline. As opposed to viewing the oil
pipeline as an isolated, capitalist, environmental justice problem that we only care about
because “it affects us all,” Native lives matter, they remind us, period. Considering that
construction plans for the pipeline were redirected from areas that would primarily impact
White people to instead go through tribal lands shows us that “Native lives matter” is
something that should not have to be said, but needs to be underlined and reiterated. For
example, in a short video with over 1.6 million views
47
created by social justice oriented media
network Fusion, Native environmental activist Dallas Goldtooth holds back tears as he is being
interviewed from the campsite days after over 140 nonviolent protestors were attacked,
arrested, and charged with trespassing by militarized police in late October.
We are trying to protect land that was taken from us and now we are being seen as
trespassers on our land. Our people are tired and sick. Our people are done with
sacrificing our self-determination for the profits of billionaires. It’s infuriating to look at
hills that have our ancestors buried there - sacred ground, burial mounds carrying our
grandparents - and we’re told that we can’t walk there. That we can’t pray there. That
we can’t put our bodies on the line to protect for it. That pain runs deep. Where this
pipeline is proposed across the Missouri River is within the designated area of the 1851
Fort Laramie Treaty. That land was designated for our usage. Land that was stolen from
us by the United States government. Land that was sold to White farmers and ranchers
and then resold to multi-billion dollar corporation Energy Transfer Partners. It’s far
beyond ironic that we’re being persecuted for protecting our land that was stolen from
us…It hurts so deeply. That in the same place that our ancestors struggled for their lives,

47
On Fusion’s Facebook site, as of June 13, 2017.

26

we’re still struggling today…We’re still struggling for our lives here. We’re still struggling
for the future.
48

Through articulating and circulating stories that humanize and historicize the situation by
centering the lives and experiences of Native people, these activists are using their voices to
advocate for visibility and recognition, placing this battle at Standing Rock as just one front in
the long arc of resistance against five centuries of colonial violence and systemic, historic, and
contemporary erasure from public memory and discourse.
Like the shape that contemporary political action can take when we all have more
access to the means of creating, sharing, and engaging with media and images, in addition to
sharing personal narratives and experiences, many activists are also utilizing the familiarity of
popular culture references to further make their points. For example, Native blogger Adrienne
Keene
49
wrote about how the systematic erasure of the struggles of Native people are largely
invisible and unconscious to public discourse in part because of dominant stereotypes of Native
people run rampant and unchecked in societal representations, such as in books and Hollywood
westerns that feature “fearful settlers” and scary “savages” and like the problematic names and
mascots of multiple professional sports teams. These highly visible stereotypical
representations along with a dearth of more diverse historical and contemporary stories all
contribute to the erasure and invisibility of Native lives. To underline her point, Keene
juxtaposed two images of events that were happening at the same time: One of White baseball
fans in feather headdresses and red face, supporting the largely televised 2016 World Series
games between the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago Cubs, and the second, an image of

48
Trespassing on Your Own Land at Standing Rock.
49
Keene, “#NoDAPL.”

27

militarized police with tanks and weapons at Standing Rock camp grounds. She points to the
stark contrast between the popular imagination of what Native people are like compared with
what is happening on the ground, and concludes that it is no wonder Native and Indigenous
people are still seen and treated as dehumanized, wild savages whose lives, rituals, and sacred
spaces do not matter. In another timely pop cultural example, people actively took to Twitter,
Tumblr, and other social media outlets to sharply criticize White actress Hilary Duff and
boyfriend who dressed as a pilgrim and feather headdress-wearing Native American for a
Halloween party,
50
just one day after militarized police in riot gear, armed with assault rifles and
night sticks, struck and deployed tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers, and pepper spray on the multi-
generational peaceful protestors at Standing Rock. This celebrity example is yet another
instance of how year after year in the U.S., many Halloween costumes continue to be
symptomatic of deep ignorance, prejudice, and privilege, where some people have the luxury of
either not knowing or not caring that their appropriations incur symbolic violence on
marginalized groups.
People engaging with pop cultural examples and putting them in conversation with the
efforts of Standing Rock highlights a range of issues Native people face and illustrates the
pervasive hold that hegemonic, White-dominant ideologies have in our culture. However, these
examples also show that oppressive ideologies and actions are not going uncontested, nor
unchallenged. Many people are in many places are mobilizing in different ways to resist and
challenge these dominant forces, even in the face of months of escalating state-sanctioned
attempts at stifling DAPL resistance efforts such as repeated arrests of camp and tribal leaders

50
“Hilary Duff Issues Apology for ‘Offensive’ Halloween Costume, Says It Wasn’t ‘Thought
Through.’”

28

and activists, attacks from attack dogs and water cannons in freezing temperatures, the
systematic silencing of journalists, and minimal national news coverage of the multiple ways
thousands of people are speaking out and putting their bodies and lives on the line. An
essential part of this ongoing resistance includes the work of everyday people calling out these
injustices in person and virtually, helping to amplify the voices and histories of those on the
front lines and of people supporting their efforts from afar. For example, multi-sited stories of
resistance and resilience are being documented and circulated, such as videos and images of a
group of Oceti Sakowin (Sioux) youth and allies running the 2,000 miles from North Dakota to
Washington, D.C. to protest and advocate for their people
51
; Native youth and women planting
trees and corn at pipeline construction sites
52
; images and stories of Mayan elders from
Guatemala who traveled to Standing Rock to join in advocacy
53
; and widely spread, moving
videos of Haka performed by Māori people (often while standing in rivers, oceans, and other
bodies of water) in solidarity with and connecting the struggles of the Indigenous people of
New Zealand with those of Native Americans.
54
These people are showing up to resist, and their
stories are being circulated for the world to see.
Sharing vivid, lived examples of structural, systemic, representational problems and the
varied ways people are resisting against them, sharing lists of resources of multiple ways to
learn about or contribute to the effort, and importantly, sharing the words to articulate and
reframe the narrative to reflect the stories and experiences of silenced and marginalized lives,

51
“Native American Youth Run to Nation’s Capital from North Dakota for Rezpect Our Water
Campaign.”
52
“DAPL Timeline.”
53
“Mayan Elders from Guatemala Traveled to Standing Rock to Show Their Support for
#NoDAPL.”
54
“Haka in Solidarity for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.”

29

is how storytelling and counter-storytelling contributes to social change. Contributing to
reframing oppressive discourses and creating new stories to be valued is how we prevent
dominant White-centric narratives to be the only ones seen and heard, and effectively, valued.
For those participating in this work, it also develops and fosters voice, individual and collective
identity, and ongoing civic engagement. On December 4, 2016, as thousands of veterans from
around the country are flying to the camp site to stand with the water protectors and join the
front lines of resistance, the Obama Administration announced that the US Army Corps of
Engineers would be denied the easement to continue construction on the pipeline, and that
they will conduct an environmental impact study to explore other routes for the pipeline.
55
To
celebrate this temporary but significant victory, people have been circulating images and videos
of celebration and hope from the campsite, including moving interviews with the indigenous
youth who started the movement, official statements and testimonies from camp leaders, and
articles covering the latest updates. Those watching around the world are also joining in sharing
the good news. One image, for example, showed a picture of a partially edited news headline
with a note written by the poster, “there, I fixed it.” Where the original headline read,
“President Obama Stops Dakota Access Pipeline Construction,” this person crossed out
“President Obama” and replaced it with “Standing Rock Sioux tribe and Water Protectors”
(Stops Dakota Access Pipeline Construction).

Knowing that Your Voice Matters

In their work on counter-storytelling, critical race scholars Daniel Solórzano and Tara
Yosso describe the transformative power of being able to name, reflect on, and participate in

55
Savali, “#NoDAPL.”

30

co-constructing counter-narratives. This includes seeing oneself as a connected, capable and
valued participant in recognizing and fighting back against the normalized unequal structures,
ideologies, and systems that constrain us.
…racism is often well disguised in the rhetoric of shared ‘normative’ values and ‘neutral’
social scientific and educational principles and practices (Matsuda et al., 1993).
However, when the ideology of racism is examined and racist injuries are named,
victims of racism can find their voice. Furthermore, those injured by racism and other
forms of oppression discover they are not alone in their marginality. They become
empowered participants, hearing their own stories and the stories of others, listening to
how the arguments against them are framed and learning to make the arguments to
defend themselves.
56

The examples of Native and #NoDAPL activism show the potential of people utilizing their
political voices in “‘(giving) an account of themselves and of their place in the world’ in terms
that are not only personally meaningful but can also be heard and acted upon by others.”
57

Having the power to create and express your own narrative, to challenge limited and
stereotypical representations of your self or your group, to be aware of the conversational
frame you are being forced to work in, while also being able to articulate a new frame, in other
words – finding your voice and knowing that it matters
58
– this is where and how social and
political change begins to happens. Articulating a counter-narrative not only works in changing
cultural, popular imaginaries, but also strengthens self and collective identities, all of which lead
to people having the agency and ability to collectively chip away at structural, systemic
inequities. As media scholar Larry Gross succinctly summarizes:
Ultimately, the most effective form of resistance to the hegemony of the mainstream is
to speak for oneself, to create narratives and images that counter the accepted,
oppressive, or inaccurate ones. While many groups and interests are ignored or

56
Solórzano and Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology,” 27.
57
Shrestova and Jenkins, “From Voice to Influence: An Introduction.”
58
Couldry, Why Voice Matters, 1.

31

distorted in the media, not all have the same options for resistance. The opportunities
for opposition are greatest when there is a visible and organized group that can provide
solidarity and institutional support for the production and distribution of alternative
messages.
59

As they have always done, people are challenging this country’s ideals and systems to live up to
its promises. Communities are continuing to advocate for better and more just treatment and
representation, and they are using their voices and personal experiences, amplified by social
media tools, to do it. If it is true that these efforts and movements are best supported when
there is “a visible and organized group that can provide solidarity and institutional support for
the production and distribution of alternative messages,” what does this participation and
support look like in the context of organizing in the contemporary, digitally-connected U.S.
context?

Participatory Politics

Traditionally, equitable access and representation in the media and other dominant
cultural systems have been blocked from marginalized populations made up of people from
minority groups, including people of color and youth. Along with changing demographics and
lower barriers to cost and entry, in a time when digital interconnectivity and advances in
technology have changed the ways we communicate, engage with, and make sense of the
world around us, people are embracing participatory tools and networks that allow a wider
range of diverse voices to be heard and shared further and faster than was possible in
generations past. While these developments change how we all connect and communicate, we
also have the opportunity to hear more from people who previously may not have had the

59
Gross, Up from Invisibility, 19.

32

ability to be heard, due to access and structural issues, such as being blocked by traditional
systems and gatekeepers that can now be circumvented or avoided altogether as people find
other ways and forums in which to raise their voices.
In an effort to understand how U.S. youth are engaging with social media and political
engagement, researchers Cathy Cohen and Joseph Kahne,
60
in collaboration with The
MacArthur Foundation’s Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) research network, led one of the
first large-scale surveys of youth social media practices and political engagement, surveying
approximately 3,000 U.S. youth aged 15-25 about their relationship to participatory politics.
The “study defines participatory politics as interactive, peer-based acts through which
individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.
Importantly, these acts are not guided by deference to elites or formal institutions…(and) can:
• reach large audiences and mobilize networks, often online, on behalf of a cause;
• help shape agendas through dialogue with, and provide feedback to, political leaders
(on- and offline); and
• enable participants to exert greater agency through the circulation or forwarding of
political information (e.g., links) as well as through the production of original content,
such as a blog or letter to the editor”
61

Put another way by YPP media scholar Henry Jenkins, “participatory politics might be described
as that point where participatory culture meets political and civic participation, where political
change is promoted through social and cultural mechanisms rather than through established
political institutions, and where citizens see themselves as capable of expressing their political
concerns—often though the production and circulation of media.”
62
The YPP survey finds that
the majority of youth across racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. are accessing and connecting

60
Cohen et al., “Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action.”
61
Ibid., vi.
62
Jenkins et al., By Any Media Necessary, 2.

33

with information and each other online, and that 41% of young people have engaged in at least
one act of participatory politics
63
(such as “starting a new political group online, writing and
disseminating a blog post about a political issue, forwarding a funny political video to one’s
social network, or participating in a poetry slam”
64
), mirroring rates at which youth participate
in institutionally-based political activities (like “contributing to a political party, attending a
meeting or campaign event, wearing a campaign button, or signing a petition.”
65
) The study also
finds that unlike institutionally-based politics, engaging in participatory politics can give youth
“greater control, voice, and potentially influence over the issues that matter most in their
lives.”
66
These tools and practices offer youth more agency to communicate with their
immediate and extended networks and can serve as an avenue to further develop their political
identities, including reinforcing and showing the value of their individual and collective
contributions, and being able to explore their voices in different ways to influence the matters
they care about.
Writing about what activism and democratic struggle increasingly looks like in the 21
st

century, in By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism,
67
Henry Jenkins, Sangita
Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely M. Zimmerman explore
a range of innovative, participatory organizations, networks, and movements through which
youth have engaged politically, often by utilizing and remixing symbolic power to create and
circulate counter-narratives as they fight for social justice. Through interviews with hundreds of

63
Cohen et al., “Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action,” vii.
64
Ibid., vi.
65
Ibid., x.
66
Ibid., ix.
67
Jenkins et al., By Any Media Necessary.

34

youth activists from groups and networks like the DREAMer undocumented and immigrants
rights movement pushing for legislative reform in a hostile cultural context, or the networks of
American Muslim youth organizations focused on fostering diverse community- and civic
identities in a post-9/11, largely Islamaphobic world, the authors found that rather than only
focusing their energies on what some may think of as “traditional” political efforts, these youth
also asserted their voices through interactive, peer-based, social and cultural means, producing
and circulating information digitally to address social issues “by any media necessary.”
68

Whether through making connections and mobilizing via familiar pop culture narratives, or
fostering community and strength online through videos or memes reflecting identities,
affiliations, or personal interests, “many American youth are making calculated choices that
they may be more effective at bringing about change through educational or cultural
mechanisms than through electoral or institutional means and through a consensus rather than
partisan approach—addressing social problems on levels where voluntary actions can make a
difference.”
69
Even though these young activists seek to influence and change existing power
relations through “modes of political participation (that) are often enacted through informal,
noninstituionalized, nonhierarchical networks in and around the Internet,”
70
their activities
should not be dismissed for being frivolous, uninvested, or apolitical.
The studies on youth and participatory politics argue that these kinds of interactive,
peer-based expressive and symbolic online activities are political acts and should be recognized
as a form of civic and political engagement in and of themselves, and that they are also

68
Ibid.
69
Ibid., 9.
70
Brough and Shresthova, “Fandom Meets Activism,” 3.2.

35

important potential pathways that can lead to other kinds of engagement. Joseph Kahne, for
example, writes about the potential of connecting participatory politics with other forms of
institutional efforts:
There is no doubt that practices that amplify the voice of young people are a significant
thing, especially given the marginal status that so many young people have in relation to
mainstream institutions. Those institutions are places where young people generally
don’t have significant voice. Participatory politics can give them that voice. At the same
time, it’s key to realize that if youth are circulating ideas among their networks without
understanding how to move from voice to influence, they may well not achieve the
goals they value. In our work with youth organizations, digital platforms, and youth
themselves, we have to find ways to help youth connect to institutions act strategically
to have influence and to put pressure on the places – whether corporate or
governmental – to prompt the change youth want to see occur…Through participatory
politics, these new media provide a lot of powerful ways for young people to exert both
voice and influence. If we tap that opportunity and leverage that potential we can
address what is currently a major concern, which is that many young people are largely
disengaged from the political process, and we could increase their engagement quite
significantly.
71

If we are at all worried that the majority of U.S. youth are not engaged in any politics—
participatory, institutional, or otherwise—these newer forms of civic, political, and cultural
engagement represent “a substantial opportunity to reinvigorate both youth politics and
political life in general.”
72
As the grassroots expressions and networked organizing of political
movements like #NoDAPL, #BlackLivesMatter, Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street have
demonstrated, participatory politics are not only becoming more and more a part of everyday
communication for young people, but are also increasingly part of multigenerational
expressions of civic engagement and participation in social protest movements around the
country and world. The tools of networked communication and participatory expression are not

71
“Youth and Participatory Politics in a Digital Age: A Few Moments with Joseph Kahne and
Cathy Cohen.”
72
Cohen et al., “Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action,” x.

36

just limited to youth coming of age in the digital era, but are being embraced and utilized by
activists of all ages with the access and resources to these symbolic, connective, and expressive
avenues available in the contemporary digital and cultural context. Prioritizing understanding
and learning about these “core civic capacities, such as investigation, dialogue, circulation,
production, and mobilization is vitally important given the significance of these skills to
widespread and effective participation in democratic life.”
73

Citizenship and Networked Political Action

Over the past several decades, scholars of political and civic engagement have been
tracing how patterns of political participation are shifting in the U.S. and in other places around
the world, especially among younger cohorts, arguing that “defining political participation as
explicitly linked to legislative processes or traditional political institutions alone obscures the
role of culture in social and political change.” As political scientists and the aforementioned
research on participatory politics finds, people are making choices about where they feel their
actions will best make a difference, and that often means through avenues of social or cultural
expression as opposed to only through institutional politics.
However, as Cathy Cohen reminds us, engaging in “participatory politics is never meant
to displace a focus on institutional politics. We might think of it as a supplemental domain
where young people can take part in a dialogue about the issues that matter, think about
strategies of mobilization, and do some of that mobilizing collectively online. That said, we have

73
Kahne, Hodgin, and Eidman-Aadahl, “Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age,” 22.

37

to always recognize that there is important power that exists largely offline.”
74
Citing concerns
that “many people assume or worry that youth who are getting involved in participatory politics
may be…turning to these mechanisms for voice and neglect other important activities like
voting,”
75
Joseph Kahne explains, “What we found was quite the opposite. Those who were
engaging in participatory politics were twice as likely to report that they had voted in 2010 as
those who hadn’t engaged in participatory politics. We don’t get the sense that youth who
partake in participatory politics are neglecting more institutional pathways to influence.”
76
In
other words, their findings remind us that it is important to see these networked, political,
communication practices and creations as just one component of a person’s political self
expression and life. In the best of cases, the youth behind these socially mediated creations and
practices are also involved with less visibly apparent offline activities like researching interests
and talking about them with friends, voting and volunteering with campaigns, or doing the
unglamorous but vitally important day-to-day work of organizing concerted efforts at sustained
mobilization towards specific civic or political goals.
For example, as will be explored in Chapters 2 and 3, projects like the participant-
generated story archive The Microaggressions Project and the digital protest portraits from the
I, Too, Am Harvard campaign both gained notoriety and influence because of the powerful
messages circulated and spread online through social networks and platforms, but these
visually engaging aspects of their projects were just one portion of their work. The origins of
both of these projects came from student organizers that were already nested within existing

74
“Youth and Participatory Politics in a Digital Age: A Few Moments with Joseph Kahne and
Cathy Cohen.”
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid.

38

campus and local activist groups. These groups provided a space and structure to support their
members in developing themselves and one another to collaboratively address the impact of
microaggressions on the personal level, as well as working together to dismantle these
prevalent expressions of structural racism in systemic and institutional ways. As will be
discussed further in subsequent chapters, the student organizers of these campaigns used both
their existing activist networks and experiences as well as their amplified voices via
participatory politics to influence race and equality issues in a variety of institutional and
systemic contexts. It is not clear whether their efforts would have been taken as seriously or as
quickly if they had only pursued this work solely through institutional channels without raising
the cultural awareness that placed visible, public pressure on institutional leaders to pay
attention to and do something about these issues.
As these examples have shown, the ways and avenues through which people see
themselves as able to exert their voices and influence affects what they do and how they do it.
Media activism scholar Ethan Zuckerman also offers an example in his writings about the logic
behind people’s civic engagement, and the need to be more inclusive when thinking about
what “counts” as effective political participation: “Given a range of possible methods of civic
participation, questions of efficacy come to the fore. If I care about racial justice, should I work
to elect candidates from a particular political party, run for local office, participate in a march,
write an op-ed or a blog post? Given my skills, capabilities and time, am I likely to be effective in
bringing about the changes I wish to see through a given civic act?”
77
As his example
demonstrates, the way we understand citizenship - what it means to belong to a group,

77
Zuckerman, “Effective Civics,” 55.

39

community, or society - and civic and political participation - how we are supposed to act in
that group, community, or society - matters because it influences what we believe is possible
through our actions. The beliefs about the efficacy of our actions, and, importantly, which
actions will be effective towards which purposes, in turn influences our civic and political
behavior. In order to understand the choices people are making about their civic and political
engagements, we have to first examine the underlying models of citizenship and political
engagement that motivate contemporary networked communication and political action.

What’s “Good” Citizenship and the “Right” Way to Participate?

Given significant global, social, economic, cultural, and technological change in the last
several decades, political scientist W. Lance Bennett argues that we are in a period of “a broad,
cross-national generational shift in the postindustrial democracies”
78
(by which he means
countries such as the United States, Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.), where
patterns of political participation are not declining as some say, but rather are changing in
terms of focus and practice. There is a shift, he argues, from viewing citizenship as duty-based
like earlier or more traditional generations did, to what he describes as the “actualizing citizen”
model embraced especially by younger generations, who tend to favor more fluid, “personally
expressive or self-actualizing affiliations,”
79
and “loosely networked activism to address issues
that reflect personal values,”
80
as opposed to civic activities traditionally associated with dutiful
citizenship (such as voting, joining civic or campaign associations, or relying on traditional news
sources for information).

78
Bennett, Civic Life Online, 14.
79
Bennett, Wells, and Rank, “Young Citizens and Civic Learning,” 108.
80
Bennett, Civic Life Online, 11.

40

Table 1. The Changing Citizenry: The Traditional Civic Education Ideal of the Dutiful Citizen (DC)
versus the Emerging Youth Experience of Self-Actualizing Citizenship (AC)
81

Actualizing Citizen (AC) Dutiful Citizen (DC)
Diminished sense of government obligation –
higher sense of individual purpose
Obligation to participate in government
centered activities
Voting is less meaningful than other, more
personally defined acts such as consumerism,
community volunteering, or transnational
activism
Voting is the core democratic act
Mistrust of media and politicians is reinforced
by negative mass media environment
Becomes informed about issues and
government by following mass media
Favors loose networks of community action –
often established or sustained through
friendships and peer relations and thin social
ties maintained by interactive information
technologies
Joins civil society organizations and/or
expresses interests through parties that
typically employ one-way conventional
communication to mobilize supporters

Bennett contrasts the two models in the chart above, ultimately stating that more young
people today do not view citizenship in terms of duty and obligation because unlike the earlier
notions of “common commitment to participate at some level in public affairs (which) was
supported, indeed forged, within a group- and class-based civil society…the underlying sense of
citizenship has shifted in societies in which individuals are more responsible for defining their
own identities, using the various tools offered by social networks and communication media.
82

Similarly, in what he characterizes as a context in which a “growing chorus of scholars
laments the apparent decline of political participation in America, and the negative implications

81
Ibid., 14.
82
Ibid.

41

of this trend for American democracy,”
83
political scientist Russell Dalton offers similar
assurances to those of Bennett and others,
84
arguing that “dire claims about the political
disengagement of the American public are not supported by the evidence from…major
academic studies of political participation.”
85
Instead, unlike the narrative most often associated
with Robert Putnam’s infamous “bowling alone”
86
metaphor and notions about how “the
decline of groups has undermined civic engagement, or…weakened the connections that
people establish to each other and the lives of their communities,”
87
Dalton, Bennett, Zukin et
al, etc. contend that patterns of political participation are not drastically declining and dropping
off, but rather are shifting and expanding, where the “American public today is more politically
engaged in more different forms of political action.”
88

Contrasting what he conceptualizes as “duty-based” versus “engaged citizenship,”
Dalton argues that citizens are engaging in “new repertoires of political action”
89
that are more
personally expressive, networked, and participatory. He makes a convincing case, for example,
that only looking at participation in electoral politics, such as measuring voting behaviors,
misses the other important ways people are participating. In addition to showing up at the
ballots, people may seek multiple other ways to influence policy, because
Elections provide infrequent and fairly blunt tools of political influence. If one is
dissatisfied with the policies of the Bush (or Clinton) administration, waiting several
years to vote in the next election as a means of political participation seems like political

83
Dalton, “Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation,” 76.
84
Zukin et al., A New Engagement?
85
Dalton, “Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation,” 76.
86
Putnam, Bowling Alone.
87
Bennett, “The Uncivic Culture: Communication, Identity, and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics,”
742.
88
Dalton, “Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation,” 91.
89
Ibid., 92.

42

inaction. Instead, people seek more direct means of influencing policymakers, such as
working with public interest groups, direct contact, contentious political action, political
consumerism and similar methods.
90

Similarly, speaking again to the discourse of decline, if people’s trust in government is low as it
is for not just younger generations, but generally as it has been for the past several decades,
(with some scholars even arguing that while voting and advocacy for policy changes are
important, governmental institutions may not be the best place to look to for the kinds of
systemic changes we need),
91
then given the affordances of the networked, digital age in which
we live, we should be focusing on how best to utilize digital and social communication
technologies to help in these “alternative” participatory processes.
As this brief discussion of different models of citizenship and varying notions of whether
young people are socially and politically engaged or disengaged shows (for which there are
many other models and debates
92
), what constitutes “good citizenship” is socially constructed
and changes depending on time and context, and these contested definitions come with
hegemonic political power in terms of defining who participates and how. Some of these
frames for understanding good citizenship and the values and actions associated with them,
like Michael Schudson’s notion of the “informed citizen,” have powerful lasting ramifications
for how people understand and act on their citizenship. The informed citizen, for example,
harkens back to twentieth century conceptualizations of idealized citizenship and requires
people to be fully informed about an issue and carefully consider all options before deciding

90
Ibid., 85.
91
Bennett, “The Uncivic Culture: Communication, Identity, and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics,”
758.
92
Such as in Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne’s “Educating the ‘Good’ Citizen: Political
Choices and Pedagogical Goals,” or as outlined Lance Bennett’s Civic Life Online.

43

how to act on it politically. This, in contrast with what Schudson calls the “monitorial citizen,”
where “concerned citizens can notify others of a pressing issue, and citizens can become
informed on a subject collectively”
93
are two very different ideas of what constitutes “good”
citizenship, with implications about how good citizens should be participating in society.
This tension can be seen in Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Kjerstin Thorson’s article analyzing
citizenship frames, memes, and Kony2012, the 30 minute online movie created by American
non-profit organization Invisible Children, that was “designed to spread awareness of atrocities
committed by Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, to create pressure toward the goal of tracking
Kony down and bringing him to justice.”
94
The video also showed people using social media
(e.g., YouTube, Facebook, Skype, Twitter), promising “that the connection people forge through
social media ‘is changing the way the world works.’”
95
In their analysis, Kligler-Vilenchik and
Thorson show how Kony2012 creators and supporters were following a “networked citizen”
model for civic action, and contrasted it with memes created in response, which critiqued
Kony2012 based on notions and appropriate actions associated with “informed citizenship.” For
Kligler-Vilenchik and Thorson, similar to Bennett’s self-actualizing citizen and Schudson’s
monitorial citizen, for the networked citizen, there are specific ways a citizen is expected to
gather information about and take action in relation to a social issue. “A powerful way for the
networked citizen to act is to leverage voice through networked communication…In a
connected world…there are different ways to learn about a pressing issue, often rooted in

93
Kligler-Vilenchik and Thorson, “Good Citizenship as a Frame Contest,” 2002.
94
Ibid., 1994.
95
Ibid.

44

direct experience and personal connection.”
96
The way Kony2012 encouraged participants to
act civically was not through appealing directly to institutional politics, but to do something
individually within networks, in this case, circulating the video and helping to publicize the issue
through ones connections. The networked citizen model believes that these “many small acts
would aggregate to a large-scale influence—’one individual can make an impact.’ Moreover,
technology—a connector between people—can be leveraged to powerfully address social
issues.”
97

As the authors point out, the idea that people can make a difference by harnessing the
powers of technology and participating in this way is very empowering and likely contributed to
why Kony2012 spread as far and rapidly as it did. However, the critical response, as represented
in this study by the flood of mostly critical memes generated and circulated in response to
Kony2012, were attacking it for not following the “appropriate” actions associated with “good,”
informed citizenship. In addition to operating under differing citizenship frameworks, this
example also illustrates that just because youth and digital and social media are involved in a
political activity, it does not mean that the underlying understanding of citizenship is
automatically “monitorial,” “networked,” or “self-actualizing.”
As we can see from the ideas and examples outlined above, “the way young people
make sense of citizenship matters because what individuals imagine for and expect of their own
civic agency influences civic and political behavior.”
98
In the cases below, we can see how this

96
Ibid., 1999.
97
Ibid.
98
Thorson, “What Does It Mean to Be a Good Citizen?,” 71.

45

plays out in a few other contemporary examples, looking at what alternative forms of
networked political action can look like and do.

Not Doing Enough for Who?

In an article “in defense of ‘slacktivism,’”
99
Stephanie Vie analyses the Human Rights
Campaign (HRC) marriage equality logo and the prominent and rapid spread of the red equal
sign across social media sites in Spring 2013 as an example of digital activism, where
participation in circulating the logo or variants of it served as a show of support for
marginalized groups associated with the campaign, and contributed to drawing attention to and
raising awareness for equal rights for the LGBTQ community in the context of U.S. Supreme
Court cases on California’s same-sex marriage ban, Prop 8, and the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA). While Vie is careful to state that motivating factors to why people were circulating
the logo cannot be presumed – for example, people could have changed their profile pictures
because they were simply following the crowd by doing what their friends were doing – at the
very least, their actions contributed to the visibility and spread of the red equal sign meme. The
same can be said for the discourse that arose out of prominent LGBTQ rights supporters who
took issue with and refused to spread the red equal sign images because they disagreed with
the logo’s origins, in terms of the Human Rights Campaign’s history of discriminatory practices
towards transgender people and people of color. While many of the people in the latter group
did not circulate the red equal signs, the discourse surrounding their refusal to participate
contributed, at the very least, to increasing the visibility of the campaign and issues at hand, if
not also engaging people in discussing or participating in it.

99
Vie, “In Defense of ‘slacktivism.’”

46

Contrary to critics who view this kind of participatory political engagement as
“slacktivism”
100
that they argue may feel good, but requires no “real” sacrifice or commitment
and incurs no lasting effects, Vie argues that adopting the logo as a profile picture or posting it
on social media sites as a consciousness-raising show of support may seem like an insignificant,
low-risk gesture, but it is not. While it might be low stakes and easy engagement for some, it is
also not the case for a lot of people, many of whom likely encountered high risks in signaling
affiliation with the campaign’s values. And trying to measure it solely against traditional notions
of “change” misses the point. More importantly, these kinds of highly visible, participatory,
social media campaigns can have lasting effects on personal wellbeing and efficacy, and can
represent the beginnings or deepening of social and political engagement, which in turn can
lead to other or future political actions, such as signing a petition, protesting, or otherwise
advocating for systemic, institutional, representational, and/or governmental changes.
In Joel Penney’s work seeking to contribute to the understanding of “what motivates
citizens to participate in symbolic social media-based campaigns and how they themselves
understand their activities (i.e. as building and strengthening their own political identity, as
influencing their peers, as enhancing a sense of self-satisfaction, etc.),”
101
he also focused on the
red equal sign campaign as a case study, interviewing a subset of participants for their
perspectives and experiences. From this, he conceptualized a model beyond the binary of up
versus down the ladder of participation (e.g., empowering “civic culture” versus
disempowering, negligent “slacktivism”) and reframes the understanding of the relationship
between these kinds of symbolic, participatory actions on social media and more traditional

100
Ibid., 9.
101
Penney, “Social Media and Symbolic Action,” 56.

47

forms of political participation. Rejecting the ladder metaphor, he proposes another way of
thinking about these levels of participation and the connections between them.
According to this model, symbolic campaigns provide political organizations with
opportunities to expand their base beyond traditional members to include a broader
layer of supporters whose participation is purely media-based, while keeping in place
(i.e. not threatening to substitute for) other forms of participation that require higher
levels of commitment. In other words, committed activists remain committed despite
adding new forms of symbolic labor to their repertoire, while sympathetic citizens who
would not otherwise take on organizational commitments are brought into the circle of
participation by making microlevel contributions to aggregate projects of mediated
public advocacy.
102

In this model, whether you are a seasoned activist or someone new or minimally willing to
invest in the cause, participation through a social media campaign like circulation of the red
equal sign image does not take away from, but rather adds to the bigger picture of political
participation coming from many people, at varying levels, and in many arenas. This kind of
multi-level approach, with multiple places to engage and the acknowledgement and welcoming
of multiple kinds of participation from different kinds of people, is how social change ultimately
(slowly) takes place.
In addition to seeing the connections between this kind of political participation and
more traditional notions of it, Penney and Vie both show how participation in or being exposed
to the circulation of a campaign such as this can play a significant role in helping marginalized
people cope with day-to-day experiences of often unintentional, but impactful subtle
discriminatory put-downs that are known as microaggressions. The ways that this can help
combat the negative effects of microaggressions is that they serve as a kind of counter-
narrative, as alternative framings and protective barriers to common negative messages

102
Ibid., 64.

48

experienced in everyday representations and settings. Seeing a wave of red and pink equal
signs across your social media sites can be an incredibly moving and significant show of
acknowledgement and solidarity, both in individual and collective terms. This can be true
whether you identify with marriage equality or equal rights for LGBTQ communities or not.
Either way, it is influential to know, for example, that individual people in your social network
have these kinds of beliefs and support them, and on a larger scale made visible by the spread
of this campaign not just across social media, but also appropriated by corporate marketing
contexts,
103
it’s significant to know that there are large numbers of people outside of your
immediate circle that also support these values. And for the individual who identifies as part of
the community being advocated for, this kind of highly visible social movement can be deeply
meaningful.
…in a world where microaggressions of all kinds are very real, the virtual support shown
in one’s community through sharing images of goodwill and support can in fact make a
difference. Microaggressions — constant, continual experiences of subtle racism,
sexism, and heterosexism — have cumulative detrimental effects such as lowered self–
esteem, health, well–being, and access to opportunities…A young, closeted, gay man
who sees messages of support about gay rights splashed across his Facebook News Feed
on a regular basis might see them offer an intangible sense of acceptance and support.
A lesbian who lives in an area where homophobic slurs, graffiti, jokes, or other forms of
everyday violence are common might find solace in seeing her Facebook News Feed
filled with images celebrating and supporting gay rights. Virtual support, while
intangible, is still support…These kinds of digital activism over time can lead to more
substantive off–line action.
104

Circulating the image potentially signals participation in creating a supportive “environment,”
and also contributes to raising awareness about the issue, all of which has the potential to lead
participants and observers to do other things, like look up more information about the social

103
Vie, “In Defense of ‘slacktivism,’” 7.
104
Ibid., 9.

49

justice and equity issues involved, or petition and advocate for policy changes either
immediately, or later on. Not only does it by itself “count” as a civically engaged, political act,
but it also is significant that participation in this way signals that people feel their voices and
opinions are important and can be heard. As Peter Dahlgren writes, “the concept of civic
agency is premised on people being able see themselves as participants, that they find
engagement meaningful, and that they experience motivation via the interplay of reason and
passion.”
105
This has important implications for how we think of connecting these kinds of
actions with more traditional forms of public political engagement, what kinds of
circumstances, or “civic cultures”
106
need to be present to best encourage it, and also for how to
think about the role of media literacy in a context where newer forms of political participation
are prevalent.
The spaces of civic culture that provide communicative access to others for civic
encounters have traditionally been shaped in part by people’s face-to-face encounters,
and in part by the mass media. Today, the interactive media allow for many innovations
where citizens are “making space” for democracy, thereby extending and transforming
public spheres. The media matrix makes possible new kinds of civic practices, while at
the same time demanding new skills beyond of the traditional ones required for
citizenship, in particular, in the use of the media to identify specific issues for
engagement, and for making the connections and developing networks of issue
lattices.
107

One way to start thinking about these changes and possibilities in new kinds of civic actions is
to consider the role of specific forms of social and digital media.
In an article based on interviews with people involved in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
movement (which began in September 2011), Joel Penney and Caroline Dadas showed how

105
Dahlgren, Media and Political Engagement, 102.
106
Ibid., 103.
107
Ibid., 124.

50

Twitter was used as a central communication and mobilization tool vital to the protest,
ultimately helping to rapidly create and sustain a “geographically dispersed, networked
counterpublic that can articulate a critique of power outside of the parameters of mainstream
media.”
108
The authors identified a typology of seven ways in which the activists were using
Twitter to organize and mobilize online and in person, amplifying the reach and spread of
information: “facilitating face-to-face protests via advertisements and donation solicitations;
live reporting from face-to-face protests; forwarding news via links and retweets; expressing
personal opinions regarding the movement; engaging in discussion about the movement;
making personal connections with fellow activists; and facilitating online-based actions.”
109
The
affordances for different ways to be meaningful participants in the movement were created
and amplified in part by activists’ utilization of the structural features of platform.
Additionally, although there are constraints and limits to the controls activists can have
when utilizing a digital platform that is ultimately controlled by a corporation and not by the
activists themselves (including surveillance, censorship, or other issues and restrictions),
110

Penney and Dadas also show how the structural affordances of Twitter contributed to its utility
in participatory social movements such as this.
For protest movements such as OWS that adopt a non-hierarchical, horizontal structure
as a matter of political and philosophical principle, Twitter’s participatory and
networked structure of circulation seems to hold particular importance, as its very form
resonates with these broader organizational dynamics. This suggests that Twitter will
continue to be embraced by such horizontal protest movements as a central locus of
promotion, information-sharing, organizing, and community-building in years to
come.
111

108
Penney and Dadas, “(Re)Tweeting in the Service of Protest,” 88.
109
Ibid., 79.
110
Ibid., 86.
111
Ibid., 89.

51

As these cases of contemporary political action show us, notions of citizenship and the ways in
which we should and can participate politically are shifting from traditional notions of
citizenship to alternative forms of engaged, networked political action that are more and more
integrated in everyday digital practices and communication. As “the political sphere becomes
increasingly inscribed within the circuits of mediated discourse, persuasive mediated
communication can be understood as an increasingly material and instrumental form of
political participation.”
112
People participating in these kinds of campaigns should be able to
recognize what motivates them to join, what it means for them to spread the messages, what
kinds of changes they should expect to see by participating in which ways, and if they choose,
what other kinds of actions and collaborations are available to extend or deepen their
involvement. This kind of critical, self-reflective thinking, and the potential connections to other
ways of engaging in political action, can and should be built in, across the curriculum, in
schools, afterschool programs, libraries, and other kinds of learning spaces so that we can
continue to create good citizens. This includes recognizing differences in civic learning
paradigms that may be based on different models of citizenship, and figuring out ways to bridge
these conceptions so as “to work toward a well defined and accepted set of civic learning
practices that help…better address changing youth identities and that recognize online
environments as credible sites of learning”
113
and civic participation.
While the potential for social justice and education through developing media literacy
and civic engagement skills is great, there are also very real risks and dangers in our increasingly

112
Penney, “Social Media and Symbolic Action,” 54.
113
Bennett, Wells, and Rank, “Young Citizens and Civic Learning,” 12.

52

digitized, globalized world. Understandably, there is concern about unchecked
commercialization, unbridled information flows, and unfamiliar technologies, especially when it
comes to youth and their mediated social and technical practices. While it is important for us all
to be equipped with skills that will help make us more informed, engaged, active, participating
citizens (such as being able to critically read texts and ascertain the credibility of information
they are receiving), we have to avoid being bogged down by the “fault lines” of longstanding
media literacy debates,
114
and instead try and focus on the kinds of “new media literacies”
115
we
want to emphasize and help develop in participants of our increasingly digitally connected,
networked societies. These themes will be explored throughout this dissertation, but if we start
with the understanding that people are already actively engaging with media, information, and
each other in networked communities, and that part of being “media literate” means to also be
active creators, participators, and learners, then it makes sense to look at what activists are
already doing to make themselves seen and heard.

Scope of Dissertation and Research Questions

This dissertation centralizes the experiences and expressions of people who are
speaking back to racial microaggressions through participatory politics. I examine how the
creators and participants of three types of projects or campaigns (The Microaggressions
Project, #ITooAmHarvard, and satirical videos created by Buzzfeed, Fusion, MTV News and
others) are actively challenging and seeking to disrupt manifestations of everyday racism by
creating and circulating counter-narratives through networked, participatory platforms and

114
Hobbs, “The Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement”; Jenkins, “The Value of
Media Literacy Education in the 21st Century: A Conversation with Tessa Jolls.”
115
Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture.

53

communication practices. As outlined in the questions below, the focus of this dissertation is to
understand and learn from the expressive creations and participatory practices of these groups.
The projects and campaigns will also be explored for their pedagogical potential to serve as
examples that can be used by educators teaching about these topics and working to
incorporate the development of identity, media literacy, and civic engagement skills in youth.
The following research questions guide this work:
• Storytelling for Change - How are counter-narratives being created and circulated to
disrupt and challenge racial microaggressions, the everyday manifestations of
interpersonal and systemic racism and stereotyping in the U.S.? How are personal
stories and experiences being mobilized to advocate for systemic change? How are
participants articulating and negotiating their racial and intersecting identities, and
challenging social norms through these practices? What kinds of counter-narratives are
created and how do they point out and reframe racial microaggressions?
• Impact on Participants - How does creating or participating in mediated campaigns or
creations that specifically address racial microaggressions impact those who are creating
and participating in them? What are the potential benefits, limitations, and risks of
participating in these practices?
• Communication and Form - What do different expressive formats (words, videos,
images) and media platforms afford participants? What practices and tools are used to
mobilize and connect with social networks and spread information? Why were they
chosen? Do some work better for some messages or purposes than others?

54

• Pedagogy - How can these campaigns and creations potentially be used to teach, so that
they can help others cope with or increase visibility and raise awareness of the
frequency and impact of microaggressions? Considering that the burden to identify and
explain them usually falls on the receiver, what are the potential benefits of using these
media examples to teach about microaggressions?
The next section outlines my epistemological and methodological approach before describing
the case studies and the data collection and analysis for each project and campaign.

Methodology and Methods

In order to understand the motivations and experiences of people creating and
participating in these storytelling and resistance practices against microaggressions, I analyzed
the visual culture of the online creations and conducted interviews with those who created and
participated in them. Analysis of the visual culture of the campaigns and projects included
textual analysis of the media (e.g., words/text, images, videos), and analysis of the project or
campaign’s use of platforms and communication practices (e.g., how and why Tumblr is used).
Interviews were semi-structured, in-person, on the phone, or video call interviews with project
creators. The kinds of questions asked explored what motivated them to create the campaign
or project, why they chose the format and circulation methods they chose, who the imagined
audience or community is, what the creation means to them, and what they think or hope their
campaign and projects does for others. Each interview was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed.
Discourse about these projects and campaigns, in terms of news articles, blogs, and video
interviews, were also collected and reviewed for contextualizing information.

55

Guided by ethnographic and qualitative research epistemologies, I familiarized myself
with the online campaigns and projects, explored the data for emergent themes for
abstraction, and took into account the embodied experience and subject position of myself as a
female-identified, able-bodied, middle class, heterosexual, East Asian American researcher.
While I am intimately familiar with both what experiencing and perpetrating microaggressions
is like, as well as being committed to finding ways to help people cope with and navigate them,
I do not and cannot know what all kinds of microaggressions are like for people who have
different embodied experiences than I do. This is one of the reasons why it was important for
me, when possible, to interview and speak with the creators and participants of these
campaigns and projects about their motivations and experiences for participation, as opposed
to only doing an analysis of the mediated creations themselves. Following from the
methodological practices of feminist and critical race theorists, I aim to honor and highlight the
voices and lived experiences of the creators and participants of these projects, valuing their
experiential knowledge as a key component of this research project.

Chapter Overviews and Data Collection and Analysis

The following is an overview of the dissertation, including short descriptions of the
projects and campaigns that make up the case studies and specifics on data collection and
analysis for each chapter. The case study chapters are grouped by the artistic form and
participatory practices used to tell their stories - words, photos/images, and videos. Although
each project mobilizes multiple communication avenues and forms of storytelling, the chapters
are organized around one main expressive form from each case study.

56

Chapter 1: Introduction, Framing, and Key Concepts

The first chapter of this dissertation lays the theoretical and conceptual framework for
the chapters that follow. Key concepts, such as racial microaggressions and resistance through
counter-narrative and participatory politics are defined and placed in larger social, historical,
and contemporary conversations about cultural participation and political resistance. This
chapter includes the research questions and themes that guide this study, such as how stories
are being mobilized for change, the impact that participation in these campaigns or projects has
on participants, the affordances of different kinds of communication and forms, and the
pedagogical potential of these projects and practices. Chapter 1 also includes brief descriptions
of the featured case studies, and the data collection and analysis methods used in each case.

Chapter 2: Writing into Existence: Participatory Storytelling and The Microaggressions Project

This chapter is about utilizing written words and storytelling in online participatory
spaces to articulate and share diverse, lived, and contextualized microaggression experiences.
The case study for this section is The Microaggressions Project,
116
a website that invites
contributions from the public about their experiences with microaggressions, or, as their tagline
states, “power, privilege, and everyday life.” Founded in the U.S. in 2010, the project features
thousands of published microaggression submissions, has over 10,000 likes on Facebook, over
20,000 followers on Tumblr, and has been featured in news articles about microaggressions in
outlets such as The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Racialicious, Scientific
American Blog Network, The Tavis Smiley Show, etc. By naming and making microaggressions
seen and heard, the project seeks “to make visible the ways in which social difference is

116
“The Microaggressions Project.”

57

produced and policed in everyday life,”
117
connecting everyday interactions to larger systems of
“racism, transphobia, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, ablism, (and) ethnic
nationalism that is sometimes seen and sometimes just under the surface in people’s language
and actions.”
118
For the project creators, they hope the project can help people start to be able
to recognize, articulate, and navigate these kinds of everyday manifestations, which they see as
a critical step in being able to address these multifaceted issues.
For this chapter, I researched The Microaggressions Project and familiarized myself with
news articles, previous interviews, and other features before conducting a semi-structured
interview with co-founder Vivian Lu in 2016. We have also continued to exchange emails about
the project, some of which are cited in Chapter 2. Since 2015, I have actively followed updates
on their multiple media pages (Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter) and read through the 1,500+
posts tagged in the “race” category from the primary archival site on Tumblr. In order to
facilitate a more complex analysis of these racial microaggression stories, I also conducted an
informal content analysis using qualitative research software, Dedoose. Using a subset of
approximately 300 of the 1,500 “race” stories, I created a coding dictionary that included
descriptors and codes to capture relevant identity features (such as race, ethnicity, nationality,
immigration status, religion, gender, sexuality) of both the storytellers and the featured people
in the stories, and coding schemes for types and themes of microaggressions that came through
in the stories (such as foreignness and belonging, ascriptions of intelligence, racist humor, and
expressions of frustration, shock, humiliation, anger, sadness, and defiance). Select stories from
these analyses are used to highlight the themes that emerged.

117
Ibid.
118
Ibid.

58

Chapter 3: Making Microaggressions Visible: Digital Protest Portraits and the #ITooAmHarvard
Campaign

This chapter is about the creation and circulation of images through online, participatory
practices to increase visibility and knowledge about microaggressions and their effects.
119
The
case study for this chapter is the photo project from the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign, which
launched March 1, 2014 and features 61 digital protest portraits of over 50 Black and mixed
race Harvard College students holding up dry-erase boards with handwritten examples of racial
microaggressions experienced at Harvard. With the campaign axiom #itooamharvard printed
boldly next to their faces, the portraits touch on a range of issues underlying and structuring
the everyday manifestations of racism in the U.S. that the images point out, including postracial
ideologies of colorblindness, tokenism, assumptions of lack of intelligence or criminality, the
myth of meritocracy, devalued and dismissed perspectives, and problematic stereotypical
exchanges. Through the creation and networked circulation of these campaign images via
Tumblr, the project used a combination of visual cues - portraiture, a social media hashtag, and
the words on the message boards - to physically embody and show what microaggressions look
and sound like, while also showing project participants “speaking back” to these experiences.
The photo campaign, which started in connection to a play by the same name, spread across
the Internet quickly and widely (now at over 598,000 views),
120
inspiring students from dozens
of other campuses around the country and world to create and circulate their own locally-
situated photo campaigns. The I, Too, Am Harvard project was featured in several news outlets

119
Bean, I, Too, Am Harvard.
120
As of June 13, 2017.

59

and led to further local and national organizing and coalition building with project creators and
other groups advocating for similar social justice goals.
Data collection and analysis for this case study began in 2014. I analyzed the
composition of and coded the 61 campaign images for emergent themes, including the kinds of
racial microaggressions featured on the message boards, and the corresponding expressions
and identifying features of the campaign participants holding up the signs. Although I reached
out to the group of campaign creators several times over the course of two years and through
various avenues of communication (e.g., email, social media), I was unable to speak with
anyone from the campaign. The information and quotes from project creators and participants
in Chapter 3 are from researching publicly accessible text, audio, or video recorded interviews
they did with press (such as video interviews with the New York Times, radio interviews with
The Tavis Smiley Show, and a recorded #AftertheHashtag - Race on College Campuses Google
Hangout moderated by Colorlines). The campaign video introducing the project and the videos
posted on YouTube of the I, Too Am Harvard play were also analyzed and referenced. In
addition to news articles about the project, relevant articles about Harvard’s campus climate,
and previous interviews the campaign creators gave, I also reviewed the news and information
about other related projects or organizations (such as conferences and collaborations that
contributed to or came out of the project) for contextualizing information.

Chapter 4: Seeing it in Action: Creating, Performing, and Circulating Satirical Videos about
Microaggressions

This chapter is about the creative production and circulation of video recorded satirical
skits or performances about microaggressions, and their educational, civic, and political

60

potential. Unlike the other chapters that focus on grassroots participatory projects or
campaigns, the cases for this chapter are a selection of videos about racial microaggressions
created in professional or commercial contexts, such as by internet-based news and
entertainment organizations like BuzzFeed, Fusion Comedy, and MTV News. Published online
between 2013-2016, the videos have from 60,000 to over 12 million views
121
each and all use
humor and satire in slightly different ways to call out and educate about racial
microaggressions. The BuzzFeed videos “If Black People Said the Stuff White People Say,” “If
Latinos Said the Stuff White People Say,” and “If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say,”
satirically address microaggressions commonly perpetrated against specific races and
specifically call out White perpetrators in their videos. Another group of videos, including MTV
News creations “Where are you REALLY from???” and “You CAN’T Sound White!,” and
filmmaker Ken Tanaka’s “What Kind of Asian Are You?” comedically address specific verbal
manifestations of racial microaggressions, as suggested by the video titles. And finally, Fusion
Comedy created and circulated an animated video in 2016 with a humorous and educational
aim for teaching about microaggressions, in “How microaggressions are like mosquito bites,”
touching on both their layered, cumulative effects and how they are connected to larger
systems of oppression and privilege.
In terms of data collection and analysis for this chapter, I saved, watched, and
transcribed each video for analysis, and reviewed relevant information about the creations,
including video and creator descriptions, likes or dislikes, view counts, and comments from
viewers. In January-February 2016, I researched and conducted semi-structured in-person,

121
As of June 13, 2017.

61

video call, or email interviews with a representative producer, writer, or actor involved in
creating each of the aforementioned videos. This includes actor-writer-comedians Rekha
Shankar, Jenny Yang, and Stella Choe (for the MTV News, BuzzFeed, and Ken Tanaka videos) as
well as producers Abe-Forman-Greenwald and Andrew Kornhaber (for the BuzzFeed, MTV
News, and Fusion Comedy videos). Themes from our conversations about their motivations,
intentions, and experiences participating in the making and circulating of these humorous
videos were examined and compared to consider the educational and civic potential of their
media-making.

Chapter 5: Conclusion

The concluding chapter pulls together the main themes of analysis and findings across
the case studies, and situates them in an argument in support of critical pedagogy, media
literacy, and teaching participatory politics as a civic and educational tool. This includes
reviewing the affordances of different types of mediated, participatory forms of communication
for talking about microaggressions, the risks and benefits to participants and creators of
projects such as the ones featured in this dissertation, the potential pedagogical value of using
these creations as microaggression teaching and learning tools, limitations of the study, and
potential directions for future research.

62

Chapter 2: Writing into Existence:
Participatory Storytelling and The Microaggressions Project

“Little blacks girls don’t grow up to make movies. They grow up to have babies and go to
jail.”

- My third grade teacher to me when I told my peers I wanted to be a film director.
Made me feel hopeless, sad, shattered, and broken.

In the story above, a woman recalls a painful memory of when her third grade teacher
told her that her goals of becoming a filmmaker were unrealistic and unattainable because
people like her, “little black girls,” could only have a future of reproduction and incarceration.
Although the story is short, we are able to immediately get a sense of the experience the
storyteller is describing. We see the teacher’s deeply problematic sexist, classist, racist
statements, and are given enough details to understand that this remembered exchange is
happening when the storyteller was young, in the context of an elementary school, and
between a person of authority and a child. The storyteller also shares how the humiliating and
invalidating comments made her feel “hopeless, sad, shattered, and broken,” and we
understand that this memory and these feelings have stayed with her for years, since she is still
thinking about and sharing them today. And finally, in reading her story, we might also connect
her individual experience to the societal issues that are so glaringly reflected in the story, such
as the power of early socialization and deeply biased tracking that happens in schools along
multiple axes of identity, or the importance of visible and equitable representation for people
of color and other marginalized populations. The story asks us to take seriously the very real
consequences microaggressions and the stereotypes and ideologies that fuel them can have on
people from a very young age.

63

This story, and many others like it, is from The Microaggressions Project, a publicly-
accessible Tumblr blog made up of thousands of people’s personal experiences with
microaggressions, written and submitted in English by people of all ages from the U.S. and
around the world. Founded in 2010, the web archive was created by Vivian Lu and David Zhou,
two undergraduate student activists at Columbia University who wanted to underline that
although microaggressions may seem small and insignificant, they do in fact matter, are deeply
impactful, and are everyday manifestations of marginalization connected to larger historical,
societal, and structural injustices.
The site’s bolded tagline reads, “Power, Privilege, and Everyday Life,” speaking to the
project’s goal to make visible the ways in which social difference is produced and policed in
everyday life through microaggressions.
122
At the time the project was created, the term
“microaggression” was largely only referenced and articulated in academic circles, and part of
the goal of their project was to name these experiences and show how these subtle instances
of marginalization manifested casually in our daily interactions with one another. The other
goal of the project was to show how and why they matter. By providing “a visual representation
of the everyday of ‘microaggressions,’”
123
the project illustrates the impact of microaggressions
through the collection of stories displayed on the Tumblr site, showing the range of what
microaggressions sound and look like in the everyday, and also capturing and illustrating their
unseen cumulative and detrimental effects.

122
“About The Microaggressions Project.”
123
Ibid.

64

Born out of frustration with having to defend the validity of experiencing a lifetime of
microaggressions and prompted by a contentious campus incident, co-founder Vivian Lu
describes how the project started:
David and I ranted to each other during an otherwise lethargic class about
microaggressive experiences from our lives. Eventually we started a meticulous record
of microaggressions that have happened or are happening to us. This was somewhat in
response to an incident on campus at the time where a student government party
running for office had plastered campus with flyers reading, “Two Asian Girls at the
same time,” which really upset some of our friends who saw that it evoked
pornographic fetishization of Asian women and lesbians, while others completely
denied that it was inappropriate in any way…

This was our middle ground and answer of sorts, where we wanted to show that some
of our friends’ anger was coming from a lifetime of similar microaggressions that relate
to larger histories and systemic injustice. We began with incidents that we remembered
from our own lives where gender, race (we are both Asian American), class, and
sexuality hierarchies were enforced by people around us, beginning with elementary
school teachers, family, and peers. Originally entitled “Notes on Everyday Life,” this
document eventually became the first posts of our blog when we decided to share it
online and ask our peers for their experiences. While we had the idea during college, we
brought the idea to life several months later when we had time to look for the online
platforms and services that could facilitate our project. Once we had it up, we emailed
about 40 friends, and the site took off from there with the help of social networks.
124

In her description of the origins of the project, Vivian describes how she and David
utilized social media and networked communication tools to first connect with each other
about their frustrating experiences, and then to connect and share with their friends and
extended networks. As described in Chapter 1, these kinds of in-person and online actions are
an example of what contemporary civic and political engagement increasingly looks like today,
where people see themselves as having the means and agency to express their political
concerns through utilizing social and cultural mechanisms to affect change, often through

124
“Where Is Your Line?”

65

producing and circulating media.
125
Using social networks and digital tools, The
Microaggressions Project speaks back to those who would challenge or dismiss experiences
with microaggressions by inviting, featuring, and circulating the voices of thousands of people
sharing their stories of everyday marginalization and discrimination.

Visibility, Spread, and Impact

Like with all social media based efforts, capturing the reach and impact of the project is
complicated, especially when trying to measure something like the extent of influence on
general knowledge and public discourse about microaggressions. Looking at the project within
its social and historical context tells a story about why this project took off when it did, and how
far it reached.
Contextualizing the project in the time period following the 2008 election of Barack
Obama, where postracial and colorblind discourse was particularly high in the United States
due in part to the election of America’s first Black president, co-founder Vivian Lu says that she
is most proud of the role the project played in helping the term “microaggression” move
beyond the academy and gain entry and visibility in popular discourse. She cites Google Trends
analyses that showed a dramatic increase in the usage of the terms “microaggression” and
“microaggressions” starting right around the founding of their site, in 2010.
126
When they first
started the site, Lu said that people using the term still had to spend a lot of time defining it,
and “the only sites that used to come up when googling ‘microaggressions’ were academic

125
Jenkins et al., By Any Media Necessary.
126
Lu, “Interview Follow-up Materials.”

66

psychology websites.”
127
Contrasted with 2016, a Google search on the term “microaggression”
or “microaggressions” shows The Microaggressions Project Tumblr site and a Buzzfeed article
that features the project as, alternatively, the third and first results that shows up from the
search. Vivian attributes much of the widespread popularity of the site to the fact that people
in the U.S. were ripened and ready for that conversation, looking for ways to articulate the
many ways that race and racism still mattered despite the historic election of America’s first
Black president and the prominent narrative that was interested in declaring racism to be
“over” in America. The rise of this project was situated in this U.S. context, which can be
thought of as taking place in the height of dominant postracial fervor, and a few short years
before the national public conversation shifted to the powerful movements that are
highlighting and fighting against the ongoing systemic brutalization, criminalization, and
violence on Black lives.
In terms of the project’s visibility, as of March 2014,
128
The Microaggressions Project has
had over 2.5 million page views, 1.3 million visits, over half a million unique visitors, and with 32
countries around the world having at least 1,000 visits.
129
The project has over 25,000 social
media followers across the project’s social media platforms - Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter -
and have been highlighted in various traditional, pop cultural, and activist news outlets
including KCRW, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Feministing, Racialicious,

127
Lu, Interview with Vivian Lu.
128
These analytics were collected for the creators’ interview with one of the news outlets in
2014. Although they were not able to provide more current information, the numbers can only
be higher today.
129
Lu, “Interview Follow-up Materials.”

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New Hampshire Public Radio, and the aforementioned Buzzfeed article that has received over
2.3 million views.
130

The Microaggressions Project also inspired people to create their own localized sites.
Student organizers and college and university diversity and multicultural affairs administrators
contacted the founders either asking for permission to replicate the format of the project’s
Tumblr or Facebook site, or simply wanting to let them know that The Microaggressions Project
had inspired them to action in their own schools and communities. People from colleges and
universities that started their own participatory, locally-situated microaggressions site include
Brown, McGill, Ohio State University, New College Florida, Washington University, Georgetown
University, Smith College, Oberlin College, UPenn, Dartmouth, Yale, University of San Francisco,
Bowdoin College, Carelton College, and Stanford University, to name a few.
As with other activist campaigns and projects highlighted in this dissertation, the online
component is just one part of the project that corresponds with simultaneous offline activities.
When the site first took off, there was high demand from people who wanted to take what they
were seeing and learning from the shared stories and apply it to their own work. In addition to
the media requests and localized school sites that increased visibility of the project, Vivian and
David also received an overwhelming number of requests for trainings and workshop
facilitations, presentations, and education materials. These requests came from a range of
people seeking applied resources on microaggressions, including from social workers,
psychologists, clergy and religious leaders, legal advocates, researchers, college residential life

130
Ibid.

68

professionals, college diversity affairs administrators, student services, and deans and faculty
from colleges and universities.
131

Although they were energized by the fact that so many people saw the importance of
what they were aiming to do, they did not have the capacity to meet these numerous demands,
as Vivian put it, “by any means.” At the time, they had both graduated and begun working full
time, and it was still just the two of them managing the site. They had suddenly been thrust
into the spotlight as prominent, public representatives of microaggressions work, and had to
quickly learn to navigate the expectations and responsibilities of this new identity. Although
they considered trying to expand their project in that moment that there was so much demand
for education, they ultimately had to decline the majority of requests. Their rationale was that
most of these institutions would have other systematized structures, people, and resources
they could draw on to develop the trainings and materials they were looking for, and did not
need them specifically per se. The groups they did end up working with were high school or
college student groups who invited them to speak or run workshops at meetings or PoC-
focused academic conferences. Along with two friends, these workshops they created and
facilitated were largely modeled after the student activism group the founders and friends were
all involved in as undergraduates at Columbia University. The Microaggressions Project team
would facilitate various activities and discussions that got participants to voice and think about
everyone’s different intersectional identities and what it meant in terms of how they moved
through the world, as well as what they could do as aware and active change agents. The team

131
Lu, Interview with Vivian Lu.

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also participated in contributing to several academic textbook and book projects that included
microaggression examples from their site or their project as a whole for pedagogical purposes.
As these examples about the spread and reach of the project have shown, the creation
and circulation of The Microaggressions Project was inspiring and motivating for many people.
The next section explores how the structure and form of the project encourages compelling
individual and group storytelling, amplifies participant voices, and makes an easily accessible
online space for all to bear witness to these experiences.

On Storytelling

The Microaggressions Project grips our attention because it is made up of succinct, rich,
personal stories of pain and collective resilience. Literally centralizing the voices of thousands of
marginalized people and their lived experiences, the project shows how people are resilient in
the face of persistent everyday marginalization along multiple layered, intersectional aspects of
identity, including their racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual orientation, national, and religious
identities. Through shared stories that are easily seen and circulated online through their
Tumblr site and other social media and networked communication platforms, the project shows
diverse voices coming together to collectively struggle for acknowledgment and respect.
In the CRT literature, these kinds of stories are referred to as counter-stories. Counter-
stories “show the complex, varied and persistent nature of racism on the lived experiences of
people of color,”
132
and can be used by marginalized people in “two basic ways: first, as a means
of psychic self-preservation; and, second, as means of lessening their own sub-ordination.” By
contributing their stories to this archive, the storytellers are sharing their lived experiences of

132
Rolón-Dow, “Race(ing) Stories,” 161.

70

everyday marginalization and modeling one example of how people are taking action through
digitally connected networks to “struggle for social, political, and cultural survival.”
133
By
describing and circulating the invalidating, humiliating, and frustrating microaggressions they
have experienced, “there is potential for healing as individuals find solace in hearing stories of
others and find similarities between the stories they hear and their own situations.”
134
These
communal bonds help relieve the psychic stress of feeling isolated or helpless with their
experiences, and are the kinds of “community bonds needed for resistance (to) be nurtured.”
135

Marginalized people can learn different ways to articulate and wield the power of their
own experiences by sharing and listening to each other’s stories. Bolstered by knowing there is
a community of people who have similar experiences, they can continue identifying and
speaking back to unjust and problematic dominant narratives, interactions, and systems, and
continue to build up their “arsenal of responses”
136
as they navigate these everyday encounters.

On Writing

As humans, we know that storytelling takes many forms. Stories can be spoken and
heard, drawn or captured in still pictures or moving images, sung and performed, and written
and read. The stories that make up The Microaggressions Project are captured visually in
textual form. Echoing the potential liberatory ways that counter-stories can help heal and
nurture empowered active social change agents, we know that writing is often used as a

133
Ibid.
134
Ibid.
135
Ibid.
136
Harmon, “Daniel Solórzano: Naming the Pain of Microaggressions.”

71

pedagogical, healing, and therapeutic tool.
137
Like other artistic expressions, writing is a
powerful way to release and express internal struggles, deep emotions, and the roots and
triggers of anxiety, stress, trauma, and other illnesses, many of which are routinely experienced
by people with marginalized identities. Through writing, we can clarify and refine our thoughts,
and also examine, reflect, and find meaning in our histories and experiences.
138

The healing and expressive dimensions of writing can be solely for the person writing,
such as journaling, or it can be used to communicate to a specific or generalized larger
audience. Given the affordances of digital, networked communication and social media tools,
our stories can reach beyond those in our immediate communities and speak to many others
we do not and may not ever have personal relationships with. Given that this kind of deeply
personal storytelling carries with it risks of further discrimination and dismissal of the subtle,
invalidating experiences featured in The Microaggressions Project, the founders of the project
structured participation in the site to be anonymous. They did this because they wanted to
protect the storytellers from harm or potential retribution for sharing their stories, and because
the goal of the project was not about singling out specific people, but rather to have a
collection of examples that could be seen up close and from a bit of a distance, as a whole, to
speak to these issues.
139

Although they did not ask for nor include specific identifying information of the
storytellers or the perpetrators of microaggressions, they did ask for contributors to include
relevant contextual information so that their stories could be situated and more fully intelligible

137
Murray, “Writing to Heal.”
138
“Why Writing Matters.”
139
Lu, Interview with Vivian Lu.

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by people reading them. These written stories allow us details that set the scene - we are able
to get a sense of the environmental context, the characters involved, what was said or done,
and the issues at hand. The range of stories represented in the project also lets us see that the
more personal our stories are, the more universally relatable they are as well. Before moving
on to how the stories in the project help illuminate the hidden effects of microaggressions, the
next section briefly examines some of the affordances of the written form.

Context Matters: Setting the Scene

While at the laundromat, a white man and white woman are having a conversation
about immigration. The white man turns to me and asks me where I am from. I say,
“from the United States.” He says, “No, where are you really from.” I concede and
respond “Africa.” He then asks where in Africa I’m from. As a descendant of slaves I
don’t know where, so I say “I don’t know.” The white man shakes his head
disapprovingly then says, “SOMEONE DOESN’T KNOW THEIR HISTORY.”

Although some microaggressions are easily decipherable based only on the face value of
what was said or done (e.g., “you don’t sound black, you sound smart”), one of the main
affordances of a word-based archive is that participants can provide key pieces of contextual
information about their microaggressive incident that helps readers situate and further
understand the impact of their experiences. In the story above, for example, if the whole entry
only consisted of the statement, “Someone doesn’t know their history,” we as readers may be
able to imagine a scenario in which this statement would be problematic, but it would not be
the same as knowing the rest of the salient details of the situation. In addition to getting a
sense of the casual “everydayness” of the encounter at the laundromat, the White man’s
shaming comment is more jarringly understood within the context of the history and lasting
impact of slavery in the United States. Although in the U.S., slavery began 400 years ago and

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legally ended 150 years ago, the racist legacies and ideologies that fueled it continue to have
deeply detrimental effects in the current day, manifesting in systems of mass incarceration,
police violence, and ongoing segregation to name a few. When we read this person’s story, we
get crucial contextual information that underlines the jarring impact of the White man’s line of
questioning and commentary about marked, perceived foreignness, nationality, and belonging
because the storyteller gives us details about her/his background as a Black descendant of
slaves from the U.S., and we as readers ostensibly have at least some working knowledge of
America’s history with the slave trade. In reading about this experience, we may also link this
person’s individual story not just with historic, but also contemporary forms of institutionalized
and systemic racial injustices that continue to plague Black and Brown people in the U.S. today.
Contextual information like the details provided in the example above helps us
understand and take on the situated perspective of the storyteller experiencing the
microaggression. It also connects these individual experiences with larger systemic patterns of
power. Depending on what is notable or relevant to each situation, this kind of information that
comes through in the stories includes details such as descriptions of geographic or institutional
settings in which the microaggression took place, social, historical, or geopolitical context,
information about the identities of the people involved, and descriptions about the relational
power dynamics behind the interactions. Context matters, and the act of writing offers a way to
provide details that help frame and situate experiences with microaggressions.
While the beauty of photo- and video-based projects like the I, Too, Am Harvard
campaign (Chapter 3) and the satirical videos created to address microaggressions (Chapter 4)
give an immediate embodied visual representation of microaggressions, the wall of stories from

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The Microaggressions Project website are primarily disembodied written descriptions. These
stories prompt readers to visualize the “characters” and imagine how the situation is playing
out in their own heads, much like how reading a story in a book sparks a different imaginative
experience than watching the same story as a movie. Individually, the flexibility of the format of
each submission allows for each submitter to offer as much or as little contextual information
as they deem relevant and important for the telling of their story, giving them the leeway to
describe what happened, where, and who was involved. Taken together as a collection of
stories, the wall of experiences displayed via The Microaggressions Project website shows both
the context specific to individual stories, as well as a range of settings, people, and situations
where microaggressions occur.

Where? By Who? Showing a Range of Settings and People

Conceptually, one of the problems with microaggressions is that because they are the
everyday subtle manifestations of deeper rooted, systemic issues, they can and do happen any-
and everywhere. This unpredictable pervasiveness and inability to pinpoint a physical place to
say “microaggressions always happen here,” and similarly, the inability to point to a consistent
“villain” - as in “microaggressions are always perpetrated by X kind of person” - in addition to
their fleeting, subtle, and multifaceted nature is part of what makes them frustrating to
understand and frustrating to try and address. Together with the fact that they can take many
forms, it is almost easy to understand why the term is often dismissed for its expansiveness.
However, the very power of the term comes from its ability to encompass and name all of those
fleeting, layered, subtle comments, and to identify that their impact comes from their
repetitive and cumulative effects.

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This dismissal of microaggressions, that they are “just jokes” or that people are “too
sensitive” or “taking things too seriously” when offended by them, and the treating of
microaggressions as individual momentary acts as opposed to understanding them in a context
of a lifetime of similar experiences, is what the founders of The Microaggressions Project were
trying to address with their project. They did this by purposefully choosing a platform (Tumblr)
and format (participant-submitted, digitally written stories) that would allow them to display a
broad range of perspectives beyond just their own plentiful experiences with microaggressions.
The participatory dimensions of the project, including the relative ease with which people can
contribute and share their stories, results in a public archive that shows various places and
people between which microaggressions can and do occur.
The Microaggressions Project not only makes tangible this range of settings and
scenarios in which everyday microaggressions take place, but also forces you to see them
collectively. Featuring these diverse stories helps reinforce the idea that microaggressions are
repetitive and pervasive and that this incessant and cumulative experiencing of them is why
they are indeed impactful regardless of their “small” size. Participants of the project described
in detail interactions that occur, for example, at home, at work, in elementary, middle, high
school, and college classrooms and campuses, walking on the street in their neighborhood,
riding buses, subways, and planes, working or shopping at grocery stores, during transactions at
the post office, bank, bookstore, and hospital, during dinner on a date, or while visiting with
friends and relatives. Although the site is limited to submissions that are in English, participants
from all over the world submitted stories about microaggressions that happened to them,
sometimes specifying cities and/or countries in which these incidences occurred, like Chicago,

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IL and Nashville, TN in the U.S., and Sydney, Australia, Toronto, Canada, London, England, or
China, Denmark, and South America. Seeing this geographic and situational diversity gives
contributors and viewers who frequently experience microaggressions a sense of community
that there are a group of people who have had similar experiences and similar reactions to
those experiences. For people who do not frequently experience microaggressions, the site
gives an endless scroll of examples of what they look and sound like in a variety of settings.
Regardless of whether you experience microaggressions frequently or not, reading through
even a small subset of stories on the site gives you a glimpse into how microaggressions take
shape along multiple axes and combinations of identity, forcing you to think of these instances
in relation to each other. This connective thinking can lead to questioning the postracial
ideologies that racism only manifests as direct, intentionally malicious, individual acts, and
reinforces the idea that these everyday slights do matter.
As a result of so many different people from different places sharing their everyday
experiences out interacting in the world, the web archive also shows a range of people and
relationships that these interactions can happen between. The submissions describe
microaggressions perpetrated by people who occupy all levels of each domain in life, for
example, depending on your relative position in a work setting, microaggressions are
perpetrated by bosses, managers, coworkers, clients, customers, and/or service workers or
recipients. Similarly, in schools, they are perpetrated by classmates, schoolmates, teachers,
professors, students, and school administrators. In neighborhood and community spaces,
friends, romantic partners, kids, and family are all implicated, as are we ourselves also not free
of committing and perpetrating microaggressions. Dominant ideologies are pervasive and

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lasting because they are upheld not through coercive force, but through everyone’s willing or
unconscious participation in maintaining the status quo.
140
The project’s display of a wide range
of people who perpetrate and receive microaggressions as well as the diverse contexts and
various relational and power dynamics that these instances happen between makes it so that
we can see larger systemic patterns across identity lines, and also more easily find stories we
can personally identify with.
Although The Microaggressions Project highlights all kinds of microaggressions,
including primarily racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual orientation, religious, and nationality-
based microaggressions, the focus of this chapter is on the over 1,500 microaggressions tagged
in the project as having to do specifically with “race,” with the understanding that all of these
interactions are layered and intersectional. As Solórzano and Yosso write about in their
research on the potential healing and liberatory power of counter-narratives, the depth and
range of diverse stories like those collected in this archive can serve as “a tool for exposing,
analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege. Counter-stories can
shatter complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on race, and further the struggle for
racial reform.”
141

Validating It is Pervasive, It Matters, and It Adds Up

One of the primary goals of The Microaggressions Project is to speak back to those who
dismiss these everyday experiences by showing that microaggressions are impactful because
they can silence, exclude, and oppress people over time, and that this matters because they

140
Gramsci, “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State.”
141
Solórzano and Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology,” 32.

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relate to larger systemic patterns that have tangible consequences for marginalized people. The
project seeks to do this by creating “a visual representation of the everyday of
microaggressions,” through the wall of stories that make up the Tumblr archive. Like the images
from the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign, capturing microaggressions in text and visually
displaying them on a website individually and as a collective allows what are otherwise fleeting
moments to be tangibly seen, “heard,” and easily circulated digitally. Unlike the image-based
campaigns however, the strengths of this text-based project are that the written stories also
allow for contributors to use language and stories to describe invisible internal processes (i.e.,
what goes through someone’s mind) and relevant contextual details that help readers further
understand each situation.
The parameters of the project and structure of participation also make it so that we are
able to see patterns in a wide range of different forms microaggressions can take. The project is
made up of submissions from people who occupy diverse identities, privileges, and geo-
political, social, historical, and cultural contexts. Unlike other projects that focus on one or two
locally-situated stories that generalize out to universal experiences, the structure of The
Microaggressions Project intentionally starts with a much broader and intersectional display of
diverse voices and stories to be engaged with, providing multiple opportunities to learn from
new and familiar experiences.
The following sections use examples from the site to show how the project’s digital
archive and text-based format tangibly captures and allows for descriptive expression of the
psychic impact of experiencing microaggressions both in the moment that they occur as well as
illustrating their lingering and cumulative effects. The diverse stories also show the

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“everydayness” of microaggressions, capturing their ubiquity and intersectional depth and
breadth, as well as a corresponding range of responses people have when faced with these
commonly-experienced slights. The Microaggressions Project, in other words, is made up of
individual voices and stories that collectively say, yes, microaggressions matter, they are
pervasive, and they do add up.

What’s It Like? The Emotional Impact in the Moment

The impact of microaggressions can be thought of in two separate but related parts: the
immediate reaction in the moment that the assault happens, and the lasting impact after the
fact. The stories that address the “What does it feel like in the moment?” question illustrate a
wide range and combination of emotional responses when faced with these everyday
interactions, such as shock, anger, sadness, humiliation, exasperation, and/or disbelief. Patterns
emerged from analysis of the stories that demonstrated how microaggressions silence and
marginalize along racial and intersectional lines.

Shock and Silence

A common theme across the stories was people feeling shocked, stunned, paralyzed, or
momentarily caught-off-guard by the layered or blatant offensive or problematicness of their
encounter. For example, this doctoral student describes an incident that happened at a high
school he was visiting as a supervisor of teachers-in-training:
I'm a doctoral student in psychology and supervisor of student teachers. Today I was
conducting an observation at a high school in a small town in Western Michigan. I
introduced myself to the master teacher, a 50 something White woman, and she
directed me to sit at the front of the class.

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Her:: Class, we have a visitor today who is observing our student teacher. Please
welcome Mr...oh I forgot your last name.

Me:: It's Barajas

Her:: Ahh, that's why I forgot. Class, he said Smith, right?. Please welcome Mr. Smith.
(Class erupts in laughter)

Me:: Stunned silence.

Mr. Barajas’ professional authority was diminished within seconds through a “joke” which
asserted White dominance and normalcy, erasing and making his identity “other” and
something to be laughed at.
In this other exchange that also happened in a classroom, a young woman describes
feelings of shocked silence and oppression from experiencing a microaggression as a bystander,
both for the person the microaggression was directed at, and also because she shares racial and
gender commonalities with the target of the microaggression:
A girl in my class states that she is dyscalculic, which is the number equivalent of
dyslexia. White guy says, “"Oh, you just want to prove that you don’t fit the stereotype.
Why would you be so negative about yourself like that, it’s not cool to act dumb just
because you don’t want to be stereotyped.”

The girl was of East Asian descent. As a girl of East Asian descent, I also felt shocked,
speechless, marginalised and trampled on.

In his self-righteous expression of disapproval about the target of the microaggression’s alleged
disdain for herself because she is “acting dumb” to not fit a stereotype, he is actually
reinforcing the stereotype he is critiquing her for. Notably, this story was also told from the
perspective of someone who was witnessing but was not the primary target of this
microaggression, showing that microaggressions also affect bystanders when they are

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perpetrated, not just the primary targets.
142
Although she was not the direct target, the
storyteller identified with the target’s East Asian femaleness, and described feeling “shocked,
speechless, marginalized and trampled on.”
This theme of being not just shocked, but shocked into silence was a recurrent theme
across the entries, with many participants directly expressing frustration, sadness,
embarrassment, or anger about the situation. For example, this person’s recounting of an
experience shows their momentarily stunned silence, and also directly tells us how they felt
about the racist, classist “joke”:
Him:: Hey what are you?

Me:: If you mean what nationality I am, I'm Mexican

Him:: There's nothing wrong with that, as long as your parents aren't gardeners

Me::

Him:: I'm just kidding......You're sensitive about race!

I was pissed off.

The blank space in the conversation effectively communicates the storyteller’s shocked and
offended reaction, which is further emphasized by the next thing the perpetrator says, that he
was just joking. This example also shows another thing that frequently happens with
microaggressions - it’s not just the target’s identity that is challenged or humiliated with the
statement, but it is also the validity of the experiential reality of the person that is put in
question. The perpetrator in this story was saying he was “just kidding” about his racist, classist
comment, and accused the target of the microaggression of being too “sensitive about race.”

142
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research,”
12.

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The anger and offense taken at the damaging comment was attributed by the perpetrator as
the fault of the target of the microaggression. This double invalidation - of identity and of the
person’s reaction in the moment - is another harmful theme that emerged from the stories in
the collection.

“You’re Overreacting”

Having your lived experiences dismissed as an overreaction to a seemingly small,
moment-bound comment is part of the damaging and silencing function of microaggressions
that are not seen for their repetitive, cumulative impacts. The examples above have
demonstrated how dismissal or invalidation of a person’s feelings from a microaggressive
experience can come from strangers or acquaintances, but significantly, they also frequently
come from those that are close to you, such as friends, family, and romantic partners. The
Microaggressions Project stories also show how these interactions are oftentimes the most
difficult to deal with, increasing feelings of frustration and of being alone. For example, this
woman describes her frustration with a microaggressive experience:
I’m at a party with my white boyfriend. His friend says to him:
“Wow, it’s so great you’re dating an ETHNIC girl. How did you pull that off?”

Worst part: I tell my boyfriend that the comment upset me. He doesn’t understand why
because his friend is just “always” like that and I SHOULDN’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY.

In the story above, the White boyfriend ends up dismissing the upset feelings of his “ethnic”
girlfriend, blaming her for being too sensitive. He excuses his friend’s behavior because those
kinds of objectifying and exoticizing comments are to be expected because they are just part of
his friend’s personality. The responsibility does not fall on the boyfriend or the friend to address
the behavior or the ideologies that are at the root of the behavior, but instead, fall on the

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woman of color to steel herself from these comments that will persist because he’s just “always
like that.” In effect, he is telling her not only that he believes the comment was not a big deal,
but also that it is her fault for feeling upset and that she should just learn to get over it.
In this other example, another White boyfriend gets angry when his partner does not
comply with his racist fantasies:
My white (ex)boyfriend wanted me to roleplay as a slave and he would be the
“Plantation Owner.” When I made it clear I wasn’t doing that, he became angry and
said, “Your social justice shit is ruining our sex life!"

Although this particular story represents a plethora of intertwined issues, and does not
specifically articulate the emotional response of the person telling the story, it is a glaring
example of how the anger and tension that results from microaggressions are often blamed not
on the problematic ideologies of the perpetrator, but rather on the emotional reaction of the
person being targeted.
These kinds of difficult conversations don’t just happen with romantic or intimate
partners, but they are also prevalent in interactions with family. In this last example, a White
father’s response to his child communicates that she or he should relate to racial slurs slung by
White peers as everyday teasing and communication between kids:
“They probably just had a crush on you." What my white father said when I told him two
white students called me the n-word on the bus.

The story does not identify the racial or ethnic identity of the child, though it does mark the
father and students as White, which likely indicate that the storyteller is a PoC, but this
ultimately does not matter. Whatever the racial or ethnic makeup of the child, the White father
was telling her or him to brush off the n-word taunts from the White students on the bus.
Whether or not he meant to, he is excusing the kids’ behavior and use of the word, saying his

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child should learn to accept this kind of assault as a sign of affection and indication that
someone likes them. Although this is a short entry, the storyteller started the story with the
father’s response to the incident on the bus, effectively showing both the struggle with dealing
with being called the n-word by peers, and also highlighting her/his father’s inadequate
response to the pain of the situation.

Invalidation and Not Belonging

As the examples above have shown, microaggressions can quickly and unexpectedly
make people feel alone and isolated in their bodies and experiences. These feelings are also
clearly illustrated by another recurring theme that came up in many of the stories, about
microaggressions that questioned and challenged people’s belonging, whether it was about
perceived foreignness and national belonging, or about not belonging in a particular space or
place. For example, this person describes being racially profiled in a U.S. retail store:
A security guard approaches me at an upscale shopping district. I am the only black
person sitting in the waiting area. I am waiting for a friend and have been sitting for two
minutes. The security guard ignores the throng of people around me comes to me and
asks “What is your business here?”

I am 31 & in Chicago & it made me feel like I was…nothing.

This experience not only made the storyteller feel like he or she did not belong in the upscale
store, but was also deeply invalidating. Being singled out as the one Black person who in the
suspicious eyes of the guard had to be there for a deviant or no good reason, made him or her
feel completely devalued and degraded, like “nothing.”
This signaling of not belonging in a place also frequently manifests through interactions
communicating who is included and not included in national boundaries. For example, this

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South African Australian person communicates frustration about the frequency with which
people try to challenge her/his racial and national identities:
This conversation (almost weekly)::

"So where are you from?"

"I was born in South Africa but I'm an Australian citizen now."

"Oh, are you sure? You look Tamil or something."

YES, I am actually sure of where I'm from and where I am now. Makes me feel like I
don't belong. I hope my kids don't have to go through the same thing, being born here.

She/he describes the incessant frequency of the exchanges, how frustrating the experiences
are, and how she/he hopes their Australian-born children will not go through similar persistent
questioning about whether or not they belong in their home country.
In story after story, these people’s experiences illustrate that the incipient pervasiveness
about microaggressions is that they can and do happen anywhere, like for this Canadian citizen,
while returning home from work:
"Go back to Japan!" Random slur by some white teenagers as I walked home from work.
I was born in Canada, raised in Canada, but my parents just happen to be Vietnamese.
Made me feel pretty shocked & angry.

Or, for this person, who had to sit next to this fellow passenger on a plane:

Guy next to me on plane: So, where are you from?
Me: Florida
Guy: No, like, where are you FROM?
Me: Um, I was born in New York…
Guy: But, what about…(He pulls the corners of his eyes back in an effort to look Asian)

Although these last three examples were all situated in different countries that pride
themselves on their “diversity” - Australia, Canada, and the U.S. - the interactions all

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communicated that people of color were viewed as perpetual foreigners who do not belong
there no matter what their countries of origin.
Aside from this treatment from strangers, the stories also show how microaggressions
also painfully occurs between friends and people you know or see or work with on a daily basis.
This person describes their shock and frustration with being associated with being not “from”
here by a longtime friend:
I’m talking to someone I’ve known for about 7 years about what my plans are after
graduation. I tell him I’m not sure what I’ll do between schools. He says, “Do you think
you’ll go back to India?”

I was born in Michigan. Made me feel disbelief. bewilderment. outrage. It perpetuates
my continual and pervasive feeling of never quite belonging anywhere.

In their conversation, this storyteller’s friend inadvertently triggered and reinforced deep
feelings of being seen as a foreigner in one’s own land, perpetuating for them a continued
sense of not belonging in both the country she/he grew up in, nor the country where people
thinks she/he belongs.
Similarly, in this story about a conversation at work, this coworker’s hegemonic, White-
centric notions of immigration, economy, and who counts as a “real” American are glaringly
evident in their casual exchange:
White coworker: You’re really good at this job but I gotta admit it still bothers me when
people like you come to this country and take jobs from real Americans.
Me: Where do you think I’m from?
Coworker: I don’t know what you are, but I know you’re something. What are you?
Me: Native American
Coworker: Oh…then I guess you didn’t come here, huh?

At work. Made me feel stunned, angry, hurt.

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This blatant display of oppressive White privilege is hard to stomach, and even more so when
thinking about the prevalence of the ideologies that undergird it. The storyteller shares that
he/she was at work, and felt stunned, angry, and hurt at the encounter that clearly
communicated this White coworker saw people of color as threatening, foreign leeches taking
jobs and resources from “real” Americans.

It’s Not Just White People

The diversity of the stories from the web archive also show us that while a lot of racial
microaggressions in places like the United States are perpetrated by the dominant majority,
racial microaggressions are not only perpetrated by White people. We are all in systems that
socializes us to understand and maintain racial (gendered, etc.) hierarchies. While our actions
and behaviors have different consequences because we do not occupy the same social
positions and therefore do not have access to the same social privileges, hegemonic notions of
who belongs or not in a given place, for example, are maintained by all kinds of people that are
part of that dominant, reinforcing system. For example, this story shows the anger and
humiliation at always being singled out in a Korean karaoke bar because of his/her Blackness:
"Can I check your bag?" The Korean owner of a noraebang I visit often with my friends.
Customers sometimes sneak in alcohol. He always only checks ME. I’m African
American, all my friends are Korean. Makes me feel like a criminal. It ruins my mood for
about an hour every time.

This story shows us microaggressions can be perpetrated by those who are not of the dominant
majority in a society, and also gives us an indication that this same presumption of criminality
based on the storyteller’s race happens repeatedly at this place that is frequently attended with

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friends. The storyteller also shares that these repeated encounters makes him/her feel racially
persecuted and always have lasting negative effects beyond the moment that they happen.
You also get a sense of repeated and lasting negative effects when people recount their
stories from their youth. In this example, a Filipino woman shares what it was like to grow up in
a predominantly West Indian neighborhood:
At about 8 years old I was bickering with a boy and he said, “WHY DON’T YOU MAKE ME
SOME CHICKEN FRIED RICE, CHINITA?” I am an ostracized Filipina who grew up in a
predominantly West Indian neighborhood, having to strip myself of my ethnicity and
can only be identified by a stereotypical and ignorant title as “chinita.” I turn 21 next
month and my neighbors still call me “Chinita." 1998, in a school yard. Makes me feel
marginalized, offended, disrespected.

In her story, she connects an experience she remembers from the playground as an 8 year old
with her ongoing everyday realities with her neighbors as a young adult almost 15 years later.
In this other example, a South American woman describes an incident that happened
when she was a teenager:
I’m walking to the entrance of a store when a car comes speeding my way, almost
hitting me. The driver opens the door and screams, “THIS AIN’T YOUR COUNTRY,
BITCH!" I was 14 years old, an Ecuadorian teenager actually born in the USA. The driver
was an African American woman.

In addition to being examples of microaggressions perpetrated by those who are not of the
dominant majority, these stories are also examples of microaggressions that cannot be
described as unintentionally perpetrated. It’s true that many microaggressions are not intended
as harmful slights, but there are also many that are specifically targeted at individuals, in this
case, because of their race. These examples serve as reminders that we are all socialized to
learn dominant social hierarchies, and we all contribute to reinforcing and perpetuating them
unless we actively learn to see, challenge, and resist them.

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It’s Not Just About Race

Just as how racial microaggressions are not only perpetrated by the dominant racial
majority in a society, they are also not only one-dimensional and focused solely on race. The
stories in the archive also show how microaggressions are layered invalidations, meaning they
often target not just a person’s racial identity, but the intersection of their race, class, gender,
sexual orientation, ability, religion, and other aspects of their identities. For example, this
exchange shows a racial and class-based microaggression based on presumptions about skin
color as racial and class markers:
"That could be more affordable for you." Sales woman pointing at the clearance rack to
my darker-skinned Mexican friend, while my other light-skinned Mexican friend was
pointed to the regular/more expensive section.

Similarly, this other story also illustrates intertwined classism and racism through a thinly-veiled
offensive and ignorant discussion about languages:
“I feel like Spanish…is a poor people language. I’m more into Chinese.”

A white coworker discussing languages with me (a PoC of black, carib-indian and
portuguese descent) during our break. Made me irritated. Disgusted.

Through their succinct recounting of these experiences, both of these storytellers were able to
describe in their entries the relevant intersectional and contextual information of the situation
and the identities of the people involved. The latter also shared his/her frustration and disgust
with the coworker’s offensive comments.
As some of the previous examples have touched on, microaggressions are also pervasive
amongst romantic and intimate partners. In this story, an Asian American gay man talks about
his struggles chatting online with a White American gay man whose stereotyping makes him
feel oppressed and marginalized because of his racial and gender identity:

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I am chatting on Facebook with a romantic interest. I am an Asian American gay male,
22. He is a white American gay male, 23. Everything is going fine until he says that he
prefers dating Asian men because he doesn’t like “manly” men. While I don’t identify as
“manly,” I feel angry and hurt that he felt it was okay to casually generalize about and
define a whole group of people for them. Later, he repeatedly refers to an ex as his
“Chinese boyfriend,” rather than by any other feature or by the person’s name. I am of
Chinese descent; his language makes me feel interchangeable, collectible, fetishized.

In his story, he gives multiple examples of how this conversation made him feel like a tokenized,
stereotyped fetish. Similarly, this other entry is about a conversation a mixed-race woman had
with a heterosexual White male friend talking about his “preferences”:
A friend says that a pretty girl who cosplays combines his two favorite “things”: red
hair…and Asians. I don’t know what is worse; that he values women by how close they
fit some objectified version of what an Asian woman is, or that he thinks being Asian is a
“thing” like dying one’s hair red, and that both are there for his physical enjoyment.
Women of color are not some freaking category for porn. Why can’t men just talk about
us like we’re PEOPLE? I’m a mixed-race girl talking to white, straight, male friend.

Articulated and made visible through her writing, we can see the storyteller’s frustrated
internal processing of her friend’s exotification and objectification of women of color.
Ideologies about race and racism are central organizing concepts that govern how we
live in countries like the United States, but Islamaphobia, which combines discrimination based
on race, religion, gender, and prejudices about people from multiple continents, countries, and
regions, is a related and powerful marginalizing force that deeply impacts people in the U.S. and
all over the world. Many of the examples from the archive also shed light on these kinds of
interactions, for example, this conversation between a client and hairdresser:
Person cutting my hair:: So are you seeing anyone?

Me:: Not since things ended with my last boyfriend. It was complicated, he was from
Afghanistan...

Person cutting my hair:: And he was a terrorist?

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I was going to say that a close family member had died in a bombing and he had to go
back to Kabul. But I guess terrorist works?

Similarly, this Arab-American woman describes the kinds of conflated, gendered, discriminatory
statements she deals with when she discusses national and international affairs:
When I argue about international affairs or critique US policy, it’s often met with a “you
know, if you went back to Pakistan or wherever you’re from, you wouldn’t even have
the right to complain.” I’m an Arab-American woman. I was born in the States. I shake
my head and point out that US intervention leads to repressive regimes in the Middle
East.

And this woman describes one example of the kind of discrimination and ostracism Arab and
Muslim people faced after the events of September 11, reflecting on what happened in her Girl
Scouts group:
“She had a right to feel scared of you. How could a person not be scared of Arabs after
9/11?” A friend’s response to how my Girl Scouts troop leader blatantly alienated me
after 9/11. It made me feel even more alienated. What bothered me most was that
several others amongst our friends immediately agreed with her, as if I weren’t a person
but a representation of a really “scary” ethnic group.

This other woman describes the difficulty of talking about these commonly conflated regional,
national, and religious gendered identities
Me:: Not all Muslims are from the Middle East. I'm a Muslim from the Caribbean and
I've worn a bikini on the beach. Just because I don't wear hijab or speak Arabic doesn't
mean I'm not a Muslim.

White man:: Yeah, but you're not a real Muslim.

White woman:: I haven't studied the Middle East or anything, but I totally get what he's
saying.

- Undergraduate women's lit course in response to stereotypical presentation of Muslim
characters. Made me feel shocked and frustrated. denied. angry.

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In addition to sharing her humiliation and outrage, she also describes feeling silenced, “denied,”
and invalidated about these White classmates’ ignorant comments during a class conversation
about stereotypical Muslim representation.
The examples in this section show how racial microaggressions are layered assaults and
often have to be understood as combinations of multiple aspects of identity, such as gender,
sexual orientation, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and class identities. So far, I’ve discussed the
many emotions and themes that emerged from people’s stories about their reactions when the
microaggression they experienced happened. Through their words, contributors to The
Microaggressions Project have made visible their shock, anger, frustration, sadness,
exasperation, and humiliation as people have told and showed them over and over that they
are unwelcome, that they do not belong, and that their diverse voices and identities do not
matter. These stressors at the moment of attack, however, are just one part of why
microaggressions are so impactful. The stories from the archive also show the other incipiently
damaging aspect of microaggressions - their lasting, cumulative effects after the moments have
come and gone.

The Aftermath: Lasting Effects

Not only do microaggressions themselves have immediate negative emotional impacts
on people in the moments that they occur, there is often lasting detrimental impact after the
fact as well. The stories that make up The Microaggressions Project archive illustrate that it’s
not just the cuts made when they happen, it is also about the impact of lasting scars.

Haunted by the “Good” Response

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One of the most stressful aspects of being on the receiving end of microaggressions is
the rapid mental gymnastics one goes through trying to figure out some sort of appropriate or
adequate response. Because the moments are fleeting and often unintentionally offensive, and
because context determines the level of shock experienced and/or risk and consequences
involved in terms of calling out the perpetrator, there is often no “right” or “good” way to deal
with each instance. You may assess the situation and determine that it is not safe to challenge
the perpetrator (e.g., either physically dangerous, or because you might lose your job), because
it is socially undesirable (e.g., you want to keep the peace at a gathering at your friend’s house),
or because it is simply not worth the stress and effort to engage tirelessly in a confrontational
discussion about why whatever was said or done was problematic (e.g., you just want to move
on from the grocery store and go about your day). Whether you act or not, say something
challenging, confrontational, educational, polite, or not, much mental energy is often expended
during the moment of the microaggression as well as for a long time afterwards, thinking about
what was and should have been said or done. The stress is also compounded if the same
microaggression, or same genre of microaggression, occurs over and over again, causing people
to alter their behavior in stressful anticipation of future microaggressions.
But how do you communicate that these “little” slights matter, since so much of the
suffering happens invisibly, in one’s head? Unlike visually expressive still images or humorous
video skits that artfully capture and show what microaggressions look like when they happen,
the format of written storytelling offers the opportunity to describe, in detail, what otherwise
cannot be seen unless it is explicitly articulated: the thoughts and emotions that govern the

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experiencing of a microaggression, and the stories and narratives we use to make sense of our
own experiences.
In “What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism,”
143
writer and
editor Nicole Chung demonstrates the expressive power of written storytelling by vividly
detailing the depth and range of feelings that ran through her mind when struck with a racial
microaggression at a holiday dinner with family and friends. An excerpt from her story about
the lasting frustration and pain of not having a “good” response is bolded, highlighted, and
placed prominently on The Microaggressions Project site, with a short description and link to
the powerful essay. Tagged on the site as “meta” commentary on microaggressions, reader’s
engagement with the article is visible through thousands of likes, shares, and comments via The
Microaggressions Project and The Toast, the original daily literary blog where it was posted. In
this compelling reflection, the author artfully describes and makes visible the internal battles
taking place as she experiences and tries to process the marginalizing encounter that happened
the day after Christmas at her in-laws’ dinner table. While passing around heaping dishes of
food, the conversation between the mixed group of fourteen turned to television, and then to
Fresh Off the Boat, the first primetime sitcom featuring an Asian American family in over 20
years, which had premiered earlier that year. The one person at the table who was new to her
then turned to Nicole and asked, “Do people ever tell you that you look just like everyone on
that show?”
This question strikes me as so bizarre, so beside the point, that at first I think I’ve
misheard. “Excuse me?” I wait for her to clarify, change course.

She repeats her question. She appears to be perfectly serious: “You must get this a lot,”

143
Chung, “What Goes Through Your Mind.”

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she adds, when I don’t immediately respond.

Oh? Oh. Yes, people often tell me that I look just like everyone on a television show,
even though most of them aren’t women. Or my age. Sure. That happens all the time.

Every Asian American has fielded some variation on “all look the same.” As racial
microaggressions go, it’s common as dirt. I know I should be able to come up with
an answer, something brisk and witty, and bury this moment in the same place where I
keep all such awkward memories. But for some reason, my brain just won’t cooperate.
My face is burning, my heart pounding too loudly, and it’s painful to even consider
making eye contact with anyone at the table.

I know I embarrass too easily. But I assumed I was safe here among family and friends,
which makes it all the more unpleasant and jarring to be reminded of my difference as
this woman perceives it. I’m upset with her for shattering my comfortable, happy
holiday feelings; for bringing my race to the forefront when I had assumed it
was irrelevant on this night, in this company. I’m upset with her for forcing my
relatives and my spouse and my kids to witness this, even if they have not all registered
my humiliation. Her slight was likely unintentional, not a deliberate means of putting me
in my place — but she’s a stranger to me, so I can’t know for sure. Maybe I’ve
unwittingly offended her, and some part of her wants to take me down a notch or two.

She spoke during a lull in the conversation. I know that everyone heard. If
anybody wanted to step in, make a joke to lighten the moment, or even just say “um,
she doesn’t look like anyone on that show,” now would be the time. My husband — the
only ally I am absolutely sure of at this table — is two seats away, and since I refuse to
look up there’s no chance of reading his expression. His silence is the one that hurts a
bit, if I’m honest. But this is his family, these are his friends, and anyway it’s only been a
split-second since the words left the woman’s mouth and no doubt he’s running through
the same agonizing, silent calculus I am, trying to think of what in the world he could say
that would acknowledge the offensiveness of her comment without ruining the party. I
assume my in-laws and friends are in the same boat, waiting to defuse the situation,
perhaps change the subject if I say something ill-advised. Or maybe — as unlikely as it
seems — they haven’t even noticed the awkwardness? Is it possible that no one has
noticed but me?

I begin rifling through possible responses. Any one of them could get the job
done: Sure I get that a lot, but only from racist people who think all Asians look the
same! or That’s funny, has anyone ever told you that you look just like everyone on
practically every other TV show? or even the brutally direct Why on earth would
you say something like that? For one wild second I allow myself to imagine speaking
freely, with no attempt at self-deprecation or careful diplomacy.

And then I fast-forward through the rest of the exchange, imagining where it would go

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from there. Any satisfaction I felt would no doubt dissipate in the face of my
questioner’s shock and anger. Our friends and family would feel obligated to jump
in and mediate. I’m uncomfortable right now, sure — terribly so — but does that mean I
have the right to make everyone else uncomfortable, too? Do I really want to force all
the people at this table to choose sides in the ultimately unwinnable “was or wasn’t it
racist” debate?
144

Through her writing, the excerpt above shows Nicole simultaneously processing and narrating
the situation as it unfolded, sharing the range of emotions that rapidly went through her mind
as she tried to figure out what to do. What was meant by the casually racist comment? Who
else at the table had heard? What are the many costs associated with escalating the situation
into a lesson for the ignorant question-asker? She describes what it feels like to suddenly be
caught off guard among people and a space that was supposed to be safe, showing the
difficulty of wrangling rapidly firing, evolving emotions - confusion, shock, humiliation, hurt,
shame, anger, worry, defiance, resignation - and later in the essay, what it feels like to choose
to swallow her own pain in order to keep the relative peace at the family holiday dinner.
Through her words, we feel the autonomic fight or flight stress response coursing through her
body as she struggled to process and contain her reactions as she went through the “agonizing,
silent calculus” of weighing and dismissing potential responses that could either call the
perpetrator out, or let it pass unprovoked: her inability to look up from her plate, her flushed,
humiliated face, a pounding heart, the faint roaring in her ears, her eventual shaky, nervous
laugh and response, and the intense whispered debrief with her partner later in the evening.
She showed her thinking about the witnesses at the table - her husband, her children,
her husband’s family and friends - as she tries to answer the unwinnable question of What is
the “best” thing to do? Whose well-being is most important at this moment? Why isn’t anyone

144
Ibid.

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else doing anything? Am I the only one who heard that? Who’s responsibility is it to say
something for me, and for all people marginalized like this? What is the right thing to say? Is it
worth it to say anything at all? She goes on to show how the answers to these questions reflect
pressures PoC face to remain “civil” in these kinds of situations because the inevitable
discomfort that follows will be perceived as the PoC’s fault, describing how frustrating it is that
frequent targets of microaggressions are expected to constantly subsume their own feelings in
order to uphold the comfort of others when they are the ones who have been attacked.
The social pressure on people of color to keep the peace, not get mad, just make sure
everyone keeps having a nice time — even when we hear these remarks in public, at our
workplaces and schools, in our own homes and from our friends’ mouths — can be
overwhelming, bearing down on us in so many situations we do not see coming and
therefore cannot avoid. What does our dignity matter, what do our feelings amount to,
when we could embarrass white people we care about? When our white relatives or
friends or colleagues might experience a moment’s discomfort, anxiety, or guilt?…Even
if our options aren’t stellar when we’re hit with “casual” racism in a space we once
thought safe, we can and do make some sort of choice every time — to inform or
ignore, challenge or absolve. The down side to every option on the table, for the person
of color facing that decision, is that the fallout is then perceived as our responsibility.
When did the party stop being fun for everyone? When we got mouthy. There is no real
way for us to win, whether we cling to some notion of “the high road” or attempt to call
out the racism we experience in order to sleep better that night.
145

Her reflection and awareness of the frustrating constraints around responses to these everyday
manifestations of racism comes through again at the end of the essay, where she reflects on
how much this incident and her response to it in the moment continues to haunt her, criticizing
herself for a missed opportunity to stand up not only for herself and her people, but for “every
people reduced to a monolith.”
146

When I think about the relative size and scope of microaggressions, I can’t help but feel
ashamed of my inadequate responses. If these are just small offenses, not meant to

145
Ibid.
146
Ibid.

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wound, why can’t I ever manage to shut them down effectively, ensure they aren’t
wielded again and again against others?
147

Through Nicole’s writing, we get a sense of the lingering shame, frustration, and regret at her
response to this situation and to other microaggressions, including the feeling that she did not
do enough to stand up for herself and that she failed in preventing this from happening again to
someone else. She continues to feel these feelings even as she acknowledges and lays out the
structural and systemic factors that contribute to her limited ability to respond in a more
“satisfactory” way. And she artfully finishes her story by reiterating and reflexively showing how
these kinds of subtle, everyday occurrences continue to have lasting effects for the targets of
microaggressions, making readers of her story acknowledge that the essay they are reading
shows she is still “replaying the words over and over in my mind, second-guessing my bearing
and my behavior, wondering if I’d done the right thing.” “At the end of the night,” she
concludes, “I’m certain I was the only person still thinking about that moment over
dinner…(and) as far as I know, I am still the only one who feels anything about it at all.”
148

Like this featured and linked longer story about the holiday family dinner, participant
stories shared on The Microaggressions Project site, while much shorter, also describe in-the-
moment and lasting frustrations people experience when encountering microaggressions. In
their contributions, people describe the emotions that they contend with in the moment - such
as shock, embarrassment, humiliation, anger, sadness, isolation, exasperation, and shame - as
well as the lasting mix of regret, frustration, pride, and/or disappointment they feel when

147
Ibid.
148
Ibid.

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reflecting back on their responses. These stories, in other words, show the short and long-term
psychic toll microaggressions take, and also illustrates their cumulative effects.
While some contributors only shared what was said or done to them, or only described
being too caught off guard, shocked, offended, angered, or humiliated to say anything, others
showed that they did find words to respond in the moment. Like the holiday party essay,
people used their submission to describe and articulate their frustration with what they felt was
an inadequate response to their experienced microaggression. They wrote about wishing they
had not responded as they did, wishing they had more energy to teach or resist in the moment,
or wishing the circumstances of the situation allowed for them to have a different reaction. For
example, this person describes a situation walking through a college campus, describing
frustration and disappointment with themselves, with the microaggressor, with people who
dismiss these experiences, and with the social, cultural, and historical context that puts them in
this situation:
While walking to class at my university, a white male student jogs up to my friend and
me and starts talking.

Him:: Hi! You have a beautiful smile. Are you Korean? Annyeong haseyo!

Me:: No, I'm Chinese American. Sorry, we have to get to class.

Him:: Oh!

He proceeds to direct, "Ni hao ma," to my Korean American friend walking beside me.

I'm disappointed:: In myself for responding to these situations politely without
addressing the issue. At other people for waving these concerns away when I do speak.
That I'm asked these questions at a liberal university campus. That some people believe
my national and cultural identity are synonymous with my race. That some people
believe that all people of similar skin color are interchangeable.

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The brief reflection included in this entry also alludes to this being a repeated occurrence - the
person is disappointed in themselves for apologizing to the assailant for his microaggression,
and for her cordial response that did not address the offense. Her words show that this is not
an isolated incident, but that there are multiple similar situations that occur and build up. This
constant negotiation with the self about when to make each microaggression a “teachable
moment” versus letting it go unacknowledged, unexamined, or uninterrogated and therefore
potentially letting it be repeated again to the self or others, is an ongoing struggle that is
highlighted both with this short example and in the holiday dinner party story. Through the
participatory and communicative structure of The Microaggressions Project, where contributors
are encouraged to publically reflect on and share their stories, we are able to see the normally
hidden internal dialogues that show the lasting effects of having to constantly negotiate how
one responds to these incessant, damaging everyday experiences.
In both of the stories above, the narrators mention their frustration with having to be
polite. This theme of automatically or begrudgingly performing polite or socially acceptable
responses in the face of microaggressions was also mentioned in multiple submissions featured
on the site. In this next example, a person I am presuming to be female struggled with having to
stifle her anger about an intended compliment laced with mixed race and Asian female
exoticization because she was interacting with a customer at work:
Customer:: I have to ask you, where are you from? Because you're so beautiful.

Me:: My parents are from Sri Lanka and my mother is half Chinese.

Customer:: That's why you're such an exotic beauty!

Me:: Thank you!

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I had to be nice to her because she was customer but inside I was seething.

Like others who automatically or forcibly choose this route of response, she had to subsume
her own emotions in the moment to prioritize the well being of the person causing her offense.
What was intended as a compliment was reinforcing stereotypical racial and gendered notions
of being perceived as a marked, foreign, “other,” and she politely thanked the customer for the
comment even though she was angry about it. The context of this exchange is not outlined any
more explicitly than stating that the person committing the microaggression was a customer,
indicating that the storyteller was at work and therefore implying that her professionalism
would be challenged or her job placed in jeopardy if she had responded in a way that reflected
her true feelings at the time.
Similarly, this other storyteller also shares what he or she said at the time versus what
he/she really wanted to say instead:
Customer:: If more black people were like you the world would be a better place.

Black me:: Have a nice day.

What I wanted to say:: If fewer people were as ignorant as you, people who look like me
would have better lives. I was 18. (He was in his 40s or 50s.) when: spring 1998, working
at Barnes & Noble in Louisiana.

These stories shows how part of these PoC storytellers’ jobs includes the invisible labor of
having to swallow these kinds of marginalizing “compliments” to maintain the status quo and to
demonstrate that they are “good” workers. In addition to demonstrating the self denial and
silencing that sometimes has to occur in order to preserve one’s job, this last example was also
yet another story demonstrating the lasting impact of these kinds of experiences for

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marginalized people. The incident happened in 1998, when the storyteller was 18 years old, but
was being told through this forum almost two decades later.
In addition to coded comments about a person’s physical appearance, another common
way people communicate perceived foreignness is through commentary about language
abilities. In this next example, an Asian woman describes what she wanted to say but couldn’t
to the White boy complimenting her on her language skills:
“You speak English so well,” said the helpful white boy at the science fair.

“It’s my fucking first language,” I wanted to say. (Except I was representing my
institution and couldn’t.)

I live in a country which the British occupied for 200 years. Our administrative language
is English. I’ve hardly used any language but.

Yellow girls can’t speak English.

“It was a compliment.” He sounded aggrieved.

Although she did not respond with what immediately came to mind because she was
representing her institution at the science fair, her offense at the comment must have
registered on her face because of the boy’s defensive response, that he was just trying to be
complimentary. These examples show not just the frustration and burden of having to maintain
social peace by responding politely as these kinds of interactions happen again and again, but
they also reiterate that microaggressions often are unintentionally perpetrated, and therefore
even more difficult to address in the moment.
Of course, polite conversation does not just happen between workers and customers,
and questions of belonging are not just about exoticness or foreignness. In this other situation,
an established 49 year-old Black man also expressed frustration and disappointment with

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himself when he responded politely in the face of a microaggression questioning his ability and
intelligence, with centuries of the history and consequences of slavery and white supremacy
echoing in the fleeting exchange:
At the Grand Ole Opry hotel in Nashville TN, facilitating a conference. While navigating
this huge and confusing hotel, I stopped to read the signs, probably with a
dumbfounded look on my face. Two elderly, silver-haired, and very polite white women
asked me (49 y/o, black man, Mississippi born and raised, PhD student), “Can you
read?” I responded, “Yes, ma'am, very well.”
When these things happen, I always have a better response… once the moment is gone.

Like so many of the other stories collected in The Microaggressions Project archive, this
storyteller expressed regret about his response in the moment, alluding to the kind of
deleterious effects and mental energy used to process these kinds of moments. Additionally, by
saying “when these things happen,” he also communicates that microaggressions, and the
impact of not having a “good” response when they happen, are familiar experiences he has to
deal with on an ongoing basis. We are able to see both the experience from his perspective and
his frustrated reflection about it through the format of participatory storytelling structured by
this project. Notably, this specific microaggression about lack of intelligence, “Can you read?,” is
a common theme in multiple entries of this case study, as well as one that is featured in the
striking campaign images from the I, Too, Am Harvard project. In that case, the question was
shouted at one of the founders of the campaign while she was walking across the Harvard
campus quad.
Although participating in The Microaggressions Project does not allow participants to
actually go back in time and respond in the moment of their experienced microaggression, it
does allow a crucial avenue to express frustration about the experience from their perspective,
and is a place to have their voices heard about those moments. For the targets of

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microaggressions writing and sharing their stories, participating in the project serves as an
avenue to be heard and to process one’s experiences within a community of people who have
had similar experiences and who can understand without challenging the target’s experimental
reality or forcing them to explain why these seemly small incidences continue to haunt them.
This also gives people a sense that although they could not do anything or act how they wanted
in that moment, they can do something about it now, by articulating and sharing their stories in
this archive.

Showing Resistance

Although most contributors expressed regret, frustration, anger, sadness, or
disappointment with what they perceived as their inadequate responses to microaggressions
they experienced, others focused on highlighting their responses to show how they attempted
to resist or educate in the moment. These people either wanted to share their “good”
responses in the face of microaggressions, or share their frustration with what happened when
they tried to engage. For example, this person’s defiant response shows how they handled
themselves when a coworker wanted acknowledgement and participation in a microaggressive
“joke” at the expense of a young student:
Today at the elementary school I work at:
A kid on the phone w/ a parent, was speaking a different language, is asked by a (white
male) staff “Are you talking to someone or just making noises?” and proceeds to laugh
and looks over at me and the person sitting next to me, as if he wanted us to laugh
along with him. So I look him dead in the face like -____- (with no laughter) and turned
to the person sitting next to me and said loud and clear “do you know what
Microaggression is!?”

105

Although it is unclear whether the “ -____-“ look and blatant line of questioning prompted the
aggressor to check himself or learn what the term “microaggression” means if he didn’t already
know, the telling of the story in this way includes an example of how the person witnessing the
microaggression pushed back in that instance. We do not know what happened next, but that is
not the point of why the story was shared. The person telling the story is describing the
microaggression that happened, but also saying that she or he did something about it in the
moment by both resisting the aggressor and seeking to call out and teach him a lesson (albeit
indirectly) about his problematic “joke.”
Other contributors described their attempts to educate and the results of their efforts.
In this example, the storyteller uses very little words to effectively describe feelings of
exasperation from trying to engage in getting his or her manager to reflect on her racist and
sexist generalizing statements:
I came into work to pick up my paycheck, and hear my manager grumbling about a
couple as they’re leaving the cash.

“Urgh, Arab men are such chauvinists! They treat their women like shit!”

I try to get her to think about what she’s just said, and she thinks for a moment before
correcting herself.

“Yeah… but it’s just Arab culture. Arab men… they’re just like Latinos.”

Face palm.

Closing the story with a written description of a physical gesture we are all familiar with
communicates to readers the storyteller’s exasperated frustration at the further stereotyping
and microaggressing that resulted from trying to engage in a conversation about why the
manager’s first statement about Arab men was problematic. These examples show how

106

attempts to engage or educate in the midst of difficult conversations often result in further
stress or pain with more problematic statements, highlighting the risks you take when choosing
to speak back because microaggressions can rapidly build upon one another. And once again,
this was happening at work, which limits the conversational possibilities about this issue
between the storyteller and her/his manager, demonstrating why anonymity in contributing
stories to The Microaggressions Project is such a valuable aspect of providing an outlet for
these deeply frustrating and constraining situations. Participants in a project such as this are
able to vent their frustrations without having to fear retribution for making their voices heard.
The story above also demonstrates how microaggressions need to be understood not
just as racial slights, but as layered, invalidating comments and behaviors that are intersectional
and operate along multiple axes of identity. Stereotypical statements and their underlying
beliefs are about the intersection of gendered, sexual-oriented, and radicalized bodies, such as
in the example above, which reflects prejudiced thinking about Arab and Latino men, Arab and
Latino women, and their relationships with each other.
Similarly, other examples show the frustration that results when multiple aspects of
identity, in this case, race and class, are conflated in commonly-used coded language, so that
unpacking and addressing their problematicness in that quick moment is difficult and often
results in defensive arguments:
Friend:: How cool is Chicago?

Me:: I love it! You should come visit me this summer!

Friend:: If I come will you be my ghetto pass?

Me:: .........

107

I then tried every avenue possible to explain why this was a microaggression (mind you
he was very familiar with the term as we were in a graduate program that focused very
heavily on race, racism, and microaggressions). He told me I was over reacting and that
Eminem had said it so it was okay -__- He then said he's said it to other Black ppl. and
they were okay with it -__-.

This conversation between graduate students shows how microaggressions continue to occur
for marginalized populations and require constant negotiation and management even within
spaces that are trying to address them head-on. In this encounter, the aggressor blames the
storyteller for “over-reacting,” and sites a rapper and the fact that he has microaggressed other
Black people as evidence that his comment was acceptable and unproblematic.
Unsurprisingly in this word-based, digital format, many of the entries used punctuation,
such as the triple ellipses in the entry above, or text faces, such as :( or -__- to communicate
non-verbal cues that represent emotions and facial expressions. Unlike with portrait images
and video skits, because this project and form of participation is primarily word based,
participants included these simple but effective visual, non-verbal cues to help punctuate the
tone and details of their storytelling. In this next example, the storyteller uses parenthesis to
give us pertinent background and contextual information about herself and her reflections, as if
she is speaking directly to us as people who already understand the difficulty of the situation.
She uses the story to share her struggles trying to talk with her father about his prejudices
against LGBTQ people and how he responded with a corresponding statement about color:
My dad is pretty homophobic (i'm a lesbian in the closet)

Me:: Dad what do you think is wrong with homosexuals

Dad:: there is nothing wrong with them its just like dark-skinned people I don’t
discriminate them, but I wont marry a dark-skinned woman!

(correction homophobic and racist)

108

Using succinct storytelling and contextualizing skills, she begins the story by sharing that she is a
closeted lesbian and has difficult conversations about sexuality with her homophobic father,
and concludes by showing how one of those conversations led to disclosure of both his
homophobic and racial prejudices.
The diversity of the entries that shared their attempts to speak back and/or educate is
also reflected in the different kinds of people these kinds of encounters were happening
between. The examples above describe tense, strained, difficult conversations between friends,
family, and coworkers - people we generally invest time and energy in to maintain a
relationship. But what happens when the assailants are not those who are close to us, but
rather, people we do not know? These next two examples show both the anger that resulted
because of experienced microaggressions, and also more direct and confrontational statements
that were made in the face of microaggressions from strangers. For example, this man shared
how he responded to a woman trying to cut in front of him and two other PoC men in line:
“Do any of you speak English!?!?” (as the lady cuts to the front of the line) Yelled at me
while in line with two other men of color (different shades of brown) at Costco 1-Hour
Photo. Made me angry, so I gave it right back to her: “Yes! I speak English! The back of
the line is over there!"

In White and English language dominant countries, the rude behavior and frustrated question
about if anyone speaks English is another common manifestation of how people communicate
hostility towards people perceived as not belonging because they look like a foreign Other. The
storyteller uses his story to describe the incident, his anger, and his response, speaking back to
her racist assumptions and calling her out on her rude, invalidating behavior.

109

Similarly, this other PoC shared her/his scathing response to a woman who started with
a series of foreign language-based racial microaggressions, and then dug a deeper hole with a
racial, class, and English language-based microaggression:
While in a hotel restroom at a teacher conference, a middle aged lady came up to me
and said “HI” in Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean, then asked, “Did I get any of those
right? Are you one of those?”

When I responded that there are many other Asian countries out there with different
languages, she proceeded to gush that “It’s so nice to see one of you people not
working in a nail salon and speak good English.” I told her I spoke English well, and it’s a
damn shame the future generation has to learn from people like her.

Unlike the examples from the previous section where people were shocked, angered, or
humiliated into silence or politeness, this storyteller proudly shares her biting response in the
face of continued verbal assaults on her identity.
While some people show the direct or defiant ways they resist - either by calling people
out, getting into heated or difficult discussions, or otherwise shutting down situations - others
show resistance in less confrontational, more subtle ways. For example, this question about
being “foreign” or perceived as deviation from the White “norm” is a commonly experienced
question for PoC in situations when they are in the minority, and this student has a well-
practiced response to a familiar microaggressive question:
I am currently enrolled in a doctoral program. Another doctoral student tells me over
dinner that she and other students were trying to figure out if I was Indian. She then
asks me, “So, what are you?” I laughed and told her I was a human being from Brooklyn.
She was not satisfied.

This person shares her/his pointed response to the question “so, what are you?,” knowing what
the person asking wanted to know, yet refusing to answer in a way that was acceptable to the
person asking. The storyteller has a prepared answer, laughs it off, and takes satisfaction in the

110

microaggressor being not satisfied. She/he rejects the premise of the microaggression and
through their response, forces the question-asker to think about their question and why it
might be insulting, prejudiced, or otherwise marginalizing.
As we have seen with examples from this archive, the ways people choose to respond
and resist depends on a multitude of situational and contextual factors, and are often different
depending on each situation. Just like how microaggressions can look different depending on
context, the stories from The Microaggressions Project show how resistance can also take many
forms. The examples above show people challenging or speaking back to perpetrators. In this
other story, a woman describes a more subtle and generalized resistance that permeates her
day-to-day life. Noticing a pattern about the comments from her White coworkers regarding
her hair and physical appearance at work, she describes quietly but persistently making a point
to counter dominant norms to change what is perceived as socially acceptable or professional
in the workplace:
Every time I wear my curly/wavy hair pulled back in a bun, braid, or knot, my coworkers
tell me how it makes me look so much more “professional” or “mature."

This is why I don’t ever straighten my hair anymore, even though it’s something I used
to like to do for fun on occasion: because the "compliments” always seem to insinuate
that my normal hair is unprofessional, unruly, or otherwise socially unacceptable.

I’m a biracial/Black woman, all my coworkers are White women. I don’t even have
Natural Black hair, so I can only imagine what it’s like for those who do. Makes me feel
tired and rebellious.

This participant reflects on her biracial identity, physical features, and what experiences must
be like for men and women with natural Black hairstyles. She also describes how these
everyday interactions at work make her feel “tired and rebellious,” even as she is also
describing how she has personally chosen to resist them. This last point is important to note

111

because just because people have figured out different ways to stand up for themselves and
challenge or try to teach people in efforts to address microaggressions and their toxic roots, it
does not mean that they are any less tired from having to constantly work to do so.

The Microaggressions Project as Participatory Counter-Story

By centralizing the diverse voices and experiences of thousands of people from around
the world experiencing microaggressions, and treating these personal stories as
epistemologically-valued sources to be taken seriously, The Microaggressions Project shows us
over and over again that microaggressions take a toll, not just in the moment of their
occurrence, but often for a long time afterwards. The stories show how the stress and
frustration about microaggressions and responding to them is also triggered and continues to
build as more and more microaggressions occur, and people expend mental energy processing
how what has happened in the past relates to current experiences, and stressfully anticipate
assaults on their identities in the future. These stresses affect mental and physical health, alter
how marginalized people move through spaces and places, and have an impact on various
aspects of their lives, including on their schooling, employment, and relationships.
The diversity of voices and situations featured in this project illustrate how stories and
counter-stories from subordinated people serve as “a tool for exposing, analyzing, and
challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege.”
149
While some stories featured people
specifically articulating their resistance in the face of microaggressions, others showed people
ashamed, frustrated, or disappointed that they were shocked into silence or did not react in a
way that they wanted. Other storytellers simply only included what was said or done to them in

149
Solórzano and Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology,” 32.

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their entries, compellingly telling stories that invited identification without knowing how the
storyteller processed the event. Whatever the storytelling format contributors chose to use,
participating in posting and sharing their and others’ lived experiences is a form of engagement
and resistance contributing to the counter-narrative that speaks to how these damaging
everyday slights do matter. For the participants, processing their experiences among a
community of understanding others helps them to know they are not alone, that their voices
and contributions matter, and that they can do something about their invalidating encounters.
By telling their personal stories, they collectively show what microaggressions look like, how
prevalent they are, and how they cumulatively impact those who frequently experience them.
Seeing and being a part of these stories can also help foster and “strengthen traditions of social,
political, and cultural survival and resistance.”
150

In the next chapter, I will examine how youth activists used storytelling through the
creation and circulation of digital protest portraits to speak back to racial microaggressions,
using both words and photographs to spread their message.

150
Ibid., 23.

113

Chapter 3: Making Microaggressions Visible:
Digital Protest Portraits and the #ITooAmHarvard Campaign

I, Too, Sing America
151

Building on the legacy of Langston Hughes’ poignant 1920s poem “I, Too,”
152
the
following statement is featured prominently at the top of the I, Too, Am Harvard Tumblr site, “a
photo campaign highlighting the faces and voices of black
153
students at Harvard College.”
154

Our voices often go unheard on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our
presence is questioned – this project is our way of speaking back, of claiming this
campus, of standing up to say: We are here. This place is ours. We, TOO, are Harvard.
155

Launched on March 1, 2014, the I, Too, Am Harvard photo campaign
156
features 61 digital
portraits of over 50 Black and mixed race students holding up dry-erase boards with
handwritten examples of racist comments, talk-back messages and quotes, or other
problematic interpersonal and institutional interactions they experienced as students at
Harvard College. With the words “#itooamharvard” boldly printed next to their faces, each
student is shown holding an example of racial microaggressions people have said, such as “You
don’t sound black, you sound smart,” or a response to an interaction, such as “No, you can’t
touch my hair.” Other students hold up quotes from famous civil rights leaders, or are shown
simply standing in front of classrooms or chalkboards, letting their embodied presence and the
campaign hashtag speak for itself. By visually centering and displaying the stories and voices of

151
Hughes, I, Too.
152
Ibid.
153
I capitalize “Black” and “White” in my writing, but have kept the original capitalization
choices of authors and creators when quoting their work.
154
“I, Too, Am Harvard.”
155
Ibid.
156
I, Too, Am Harvard: http://itooamharvard.tumblr.com

114

Black and mixed race students, the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign utilizes visual culture and
networked communication to expose and speak back to a range of issues underlying and
structuring everyday manifestations of racism in the U.S, including postracial ideologies of
colorblindness, tokenism, assumptions of lack of intelligence or criminality, the myth of
meritocracy, devalued and dismissed perspectives, and problematic stereotypical exchanges.
Through the powerful images of students holding these comments or provocative
response statements in their hands, and with “#itooamharvard” stamped next to their faces,
the campaign also challenges public imaginings of who attends and belongs at prestigious and
well-known Ivy League colleges like Harvard, and in institutions of higher education generally.
The campaign articulates a counter-narrative to dominant perceptions of who occupies and
deserves to be at these campuses by increasing the visibility of a racially and ethnically diverse
group of students at Harvard, and by shedding light on how their presence is constantly policed
and challenged through exposing the varied and common kinds of institutionalized and
interpersonal racism students of color frequently face at historically White institutions. Like The
Microaggressions Project, the impact of this project reached far beyond its origins within the
Harvard community. Once it was posted and shared online, it was clear that the photo
campaign resonated with many people around the country and world as it rapidly spread across
the Internet and inspired marginalized students on dozens of other campuses to create and
share similar projects on their own Tumblr and Facebook sites. The campaign’s swift circulation
and amplified visibility also contributed to public discourse that put pressure on people and
institutions to recognize the pervasiveness and damage of microaggressions, and to take steps
to address them within their own institutions and contexts.

115

Context and Origins

While it may be tempting to only see the campaign for its more visible and highly
circulated digital components, the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign is actually another example of
young people already anchored in supportive peer groups and communities coming together to
take a stand both on and offline against institutionalized, systemic, and interpersonal racism.
The campaign’s digital photo project was just one part of a larger campus movement seeking to
raise awareness and change institutional practices and policies regarding racism on college
campuses. Like the genesis of so many other powerful projects and movements, the organizers
came up with the idea for the campaign rooted in their own experiences and in ongoing
conversation with friends and community members.
History has shown us that although we tend to memorialize and celebrate individual
civic actors such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., activism, activists, and social change
are fostered and pushed forward by the day-to-day hard work of many people in connected
communities. The idea for I, Too, Am Harvard came out of conversations during the annual
Kuumba Singers of Harvard College’s 2013 spring tour, a group which many founding members
of the campaign are a part of, including Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence (’16), Symone Isaac-Wilkins
(’16), Paige Woods (’16), Carol Powell (’16), Lydia Burns (’16), and Ahsante Bean (’15).
“Kuumba” is the Swahili word meaning “to create,” and the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College
are the oldest existing Black organization at Harvard whose “mission and vision is to proudly
proclaim and celebrate the creativity and spirituality of Black people.”
157
Created in an era of
Black Power and Black Pride and on the heels of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King

157
“The Kuumba Singers of Harvard College.”

116

Jr., the organization was founded in 1970 by two African American Harvard undergraduates
seeking to foster a creative and safe space for “a source of community, spiritual inspiration,
political motivation and cultural stimulation among the small but growing number of Black
students at Harvard”
158
(and Radcliffe) at the time. Past and current members continue the
tradition and vision of “doing what we can with what we have to make a space better than we
found it”
159
through music, song, and performance, community work, and relationship-building.
The conversations the students had about their experiences in the Kuumba Singers
community “raised complicated feelings of race, identity, and belonging, which inspired Kimiko
to broaden this conversation within the greater black community at Harvard”
160
through
academic research and participatory art activism. She wanted to create a play based off of
interviews she was conducting with black and African American students at Harvard college,
and was thinking about how social media might also be used to spread awareness of the play.
On October 23, 2013, a kickoff event was held in support of the Black Arts Festival and the
burgeoning I, Too, Am Harvard project, where members of Harvard’s black community were
invited to engage in open discussions about the developing I, Too, Am Harvard play, sign up to
be interviewed, and to come together to gather and increase visibility and support for the
project. As part of her independent study project that Fall, Kimiko set up, conducted, and
transcribed 40 interviews with black students about their experiences, and worked to draft
early versions of the play. Over the winter, she continued to read through the interviews and
work on the script of the play, which was to premiere in the Spring.

158
“History | The Kuumba Singers of Harvard College.”
159
Harvard University, The Gift of Kuumba.
160
“Who We Are - I, Too, Am Harvard: The Blacktivism Conference 2014.”

117

In early 2014, the group organizing I, Too, Am Harvard began to focus on spreading
awareness and publicizing their upcoming play, using photographs, film, and social media
platforms to create a visually compelling multimedia campaign centered on racial
microaggressions. Matsuda-Lawrence references being influenced and inspired by the widely
circulated 2013 Being Black at University of Michigan campaign, #BBUM,
161
where the Black
Student Union at University of Michigan asked students to tweet their experiences about being
Black at a predominantly White university using the campaign hashtag, #BBUM. While they had
been using their own hashtag, #itooamharvard, and posting the campaign photos here and
there on various social media platforms, the group decided to compile the photos all in one
place, and on March 1, 2014, featured them together on a single I, Too, Am Harvard Tumblr
blog. “Overnight the campaign took off and became part of a larger conversation surrounding
race and belonging on predominantly white college campuses. Finally, the play premiered to a
sold-out venue on March 7
tth
, 2014.”

Visibility and Spread

Like the text-based stories from The Microaggressions Project, the digitally circulated
photo portion of the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign quickly spread far and wide, reaching a large
national and global audience and inspiring marginalized students on dozens of other campuses
to create and circulate their own Tumblr and Facebook photo campaigns (such as “I, Too, Am
Oxford,”
162
“I, Too, Am OSU,”
163
“I, Too, Am NYU,”
164
and “I, Too, Am McGill,”
165
to name a few).

161
Lee, “‘I, Too, Am Harvard’ Photos Tell Black Students’ Stories.”
162
“I, Too, Am Oxford.”
163
“I, Too, Am OSU.”
164
“I, Too, Am NYU Official.”

118

The campaign served as a striking yet relatively easy to follow template for students in many
other places to create and participate in their own locally specific campaign efforts, and to join
their voices with the efforts of other geographically dispersed but digitally connected student
activists. As more and more of these campaigns were created, and more news and media
sources paid attention to them, the heightened visibility and rapid spread of the campaigns
prompted and contributed to larger, ongoing conversations about lived experiences of racism,
inclusion, and diversity, and the kinds of structures, policies, training, and systems needed to
better address these issues both within their local contexts, and in conversations nationally.
One example of how the campaign’s launch into the public eye gave them opportunities
to connect with others doing similar work in other fields and contexts was the organizers’
invited participation in the live-streamed and recorded March 10, 2014 “#AfterTheHashTag -
Race on College Campuses”
166
discussion. This online gathering featured student organizers
from #BBUM, #itooamharvard, and the UCLA Black Bruins, and was the first time
representatives from these groups had been brought together to speak directly with one
another about the similar issues they were facing in Michigan, Massachusetts, and California.
The conversation was moderated by reporter Julianne Hing from Colorlines, an online magazine
about race and politics in the U.S., and hosted by the people behind the 2014 film, Dear White
People. On the Dear White People YouTube channel where the recorded conversation is now
posted publicly, the short description states that this conversation is aimed at “amplifying the

165
Vidani, “I, Too, Am McGill - I Am McGill.”
166
Dear White People, #AfterTheHashTag - Race on College Campuses.

119

discussion about race on college campuses (by) featuring actual university students who are
living out the experiences satirized”
167
in the film.
Dear White People is a satirical drama-comedy film directed by Justin Simien about
escalating racial tensions at Winchester University, a (fictional) predominantly White Ivy-League
college, told from the perspective of several Black and African American students. The story has
diverse, intersectional, well-rounded characters and as one reviewer put it, “brilliantly uses the
complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic paradox of interpersonal
interaction. We are all stereotypes in one another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in
our own minds.”
168
Through the nuanced conflicts experienced by the movie’s multifaceted
characters, Dear White People artfully touches on issues such as shadeism, mixed-race identity,
race and LGBTQ identity, race and class, respectability politics, various manifestations of
relational and institutional representational pressures, and multiple expressions of student
activism that tries to address each of these issues. Released in 2014, the movie is also reflective
of the contemporary moment in terms of showing its students utilizing a wide range of media
and communication outlets to connect with one another. The characters fluently and
persuasively use radio shows, spoken word, zines/books, texting and polling by smart phones,
journalistic writing and reporting, video production, and social media to not only talk to each
other, but also to keep up with relevant community news and organize online and in-person
actions when necessary.

167
Ibid.
168
Scott, “Advanced Course in Diversity: ‘Dear White People,’ About Racial Hypocrisy at a
College.”

120

In addition to showing various everyday manifestations of interpersonal and
institutionalized racism throughout the film, as well as the networked communication practices
PoC youth use to survive and thrive in these contexts, the film’s simmering depiction of the
campus’ tense racial climate culminates with the Black students showing up to disrupt and take
down a blackface themed party, which was put together by White students in response to one
of the main female protagonists’ vocal racial politics and campus activism. The movie then
reminds us that the experiences of these fictionalized characters is based in reality, with flashes
of photo after photo of White students in blackface at these kinds of parties happening at real
college campuses across the country.
The description of the Dear White People hosted “#AfterTheHashTag - Race on College
Campuses” panel as a convening of Black students literally living out the experiences satirized
by the film was unfortunately not an exaggeration. For #BBUM, one of the groups represented
at this digital convening, the hundreds of tweets exposing the racism experienced by Black
students at their predominantly White institution started as a direct response to a 2013 “Hood
Ratchet”
169
-themed party on their campus. Like the blackface party in the movie, this party was
“invitation only” and invites were spread through social media, welcoming “rappers, twerkers,
gangsters (no Bloods allowed), thugs, basketball players, bad bitches, (and) ratchet pussy.”
170
By
exposing and skewering the racist, classist, misogynistic tenor and impact of these parties and
amplifying resistant voices through mediated communication and participatory politics, these
critically engaged students joined a national, multi-sited struggle towards addressing racism on

169
Abbey-Lambertz, “‘Hood Ratchet Thursday’ Party At University Of Michigan Fraternity
Canceled By School.”
170
Ibid.

121

college campuses. Due to the increased visibility of their voices and efforts, the students’
experiences and activism was put in conversation with a film, Dear White People. Together,
these mediated creations and participatory communication practices shone a stark light on the
persistent, underlying issues exposed by these ugly manifestations of everyday racism, vividly
bringing racism and social justice to the fore.
In addition to multi-platform discussions with media and entertainment industry people
focusing on similar issues in their filmic and television creations, I, Too, Am Harvard was also
featured in several news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC,
Huffington Post, USA Today, The Tavis Smiley Show, and many more. The amplified visibility of
the campaign also garnered the attention of not only the administration at Harvard, but also of
the White House, where I, Too, Am Harvard organizers were invited to participate in the first
ever live Tumblr question-and-answer session about “all things education” with President
Barack Obama on June 10, 2014.
171
Beyond contributing to the public discourse through these
various mediated outlets, the campaign and its successes also led to further in-person
organizing and networking with other students and groups advocating for similar social justice
issues, like the creation of an annual Blacktivism “intercollegiate conference focused on
exploring advocacy efforts specific to Black collegiate students’ interests.”
172
At the October
2014 Blacktivism conference, the I, Too, Am Harvard play was performed again on the campus
of Harvard college. This time, it was also recorded and posted on YouTube,
173
giving even more

171
Holst, “In Case You Missed It.”
172
“Who We Are - I, Too, Am Harvard: The Blacktivism Conference 2014.”
173
I, Too, Am Harvard, I, Too, Am Harvard Play.

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people access to experiencing the performance, as well as the ability to participate in sharing
this part of the campaign.

The Campus Context

Although this chapter focuses on an analysis of the creation and spread of the digital
photo portion of the project, the Harvard University campus context is also an important factor
in situating and understanding this particular campaign. Established in the United States in
1636, Harvard University is a renowned educational institution recognized across the country
and globe. This level of visibility and prestige likely contributed to why the photo campaign took
off and was paid attention to the way it was, as opposed to the relative lack of visibility and
attribution to another digital photo campaign about racial microaggressions that was created
earlier at Fordham University in 2013.
174
Like other leading universities in the U.S., the official
Harvard University website proudly proclaims a diverse student body, with students coming
“from all 50 states and from over 80 countries; from cities, suburbs, small towns and farms;
from public, private and parochial schools; from every ethnic and religious background; and
from across the economic spectrum.”
175
However, despite the university’s official diversity
statement, it is also unsurprising that a historically elite, privileged institution such as Harvard
reflects and perpetuates hegemonic norms that have sustained the power of the institution for
so long. There are two recent notable instances that speak to the campus’s racial context in
terms of understanding the rise of the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign: an article in the student
newspaper about affirmative action, and a racially motivated incident at the law school.

174
Kim, “Racial Microaggressions, December 2013.”
175
“About Harvard / Harvard at a Glance / Student Life.”

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“Affirmative Dissatisfaction”

In a video promoting the campaign
176
and in interviews with reporters about the
project,
177
Matsuda-Lawrence references a news article that ran in the Harvard Crimson in the
Fall of her freshman year, 2012. Titled “Affirmative Dissatisfaction”
178
and written by Harvard
College class of 2014 student leader Sarah R. Siskind, the column took a pointed stance against
affirmative action, citing as an example the then ongoing Abigail Fisher Supreme Court case,
which involved a White woman challenging the admissions policies of the University of Texas at
Austin. As described in the column, Abigail Fisher did not gain admission to the university and
“maintains she was the victim of an admissions process that elevates skin color above academic
qualifications and gives unfair advantage to minorities.”
179
Siskind spends the column agreeing
with this assessment, arguing that while affirmative action might have good underlying
intentions, in implementation, it unfairly disadvantages White people and prioritizes the
bolstering of less-than-qualified people of color. She wrote,
Race-based affirmative action attempts to target these groups: the discriminated
against, the poor, and those with unique experiences and intellectual merits. However,
affirmative action is fundamentally flawed because it uses race instead of targeting
these groups themselves. Less academically qualified applicants should be treated as
such, unless they come from poorer households and therefore do not have access to the
same amount of resources as other applicants. However, this would be class-based
affirmative action, not race-based. Helping those with primarily low academic
qualifications into primarily academic institutions makes as much sense as helping the
visually impaired become pilots. How would you feel if you were assured before going
into surgery that your surgeon was the beneficiary of affirmative action in medical
school? I do not see why higher academic institutions should lower their standards for
admission.
180

176
Bean, I, Too, Am Harvard.
177
Butler, “‘I, Too, Am Harvard’: Black Students Show They Belong.”
178
Siskind, “Affirmative Dissatisfaction.”
179
Ibid.
180
Ibid.

124

Simultaneously demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding about how affirmative action
works and perpetuating a common, racially prejudiced false equivalency, Siskind makes the
argument that students of color are only admitted to schools like Harvard solely because of
their race, and not because of their intellect, accomplishments, or potential. In the second half
of the article, she argues that her experience as a legacy admit (her father went to Harvard)
gives her insight into what it feels like to be admitted to an elite institution through a similar
policy, and that it has plagued her with insecurity and doubt about whether she would have
been admitted otherwise. She goes on to argue that Black and Brown students admitted under
affirmative action must also be plagued by the same doubts, so it would be better if they did
not get admitted in the first place. And finally, at the end of her article, she talks about the
impact of such policies beyond college, citing conservative mouthpiece Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas as saying that down the line, potential “employers will likely regard a minority
candidate with greater skepticism if their alma mater engaged in affirmative action.”
181

The underlying logic of Siskind’s article comes down to 1) students of color are only
admitted to Harvard because of their race, and 2) all students of color at Harvard are not as
intelligent, qualified, or deserving as White students because they were only admitted because
of their race. This presumption of lack of intelligence and ideology of PoC being “less-than” the
“deserving” White people is also reflected in the way she tries to support her argument by
connecting it with the court case happening at the time in the national eye, where Abigail
Fisher essentially was arguing that “her” place was taken at UT Austin because an allegedly less
qualified PoC “took” it.

181
Ibid.

125

The underlying racist ideologies associated with those who believe in affirmative
action’s “unfairness” to White people was addressed head-on through several images of the
photo campaign (and will be discussed further in the sections below), but this Harvard Crimson
article speaks volumes about the realities of PoC experiences on campus, despite the touted
and purportedly welcomed diversity at Harvard. In an interview with The Washington Post, for
example, Tsega Tamene, one of the producers of the I, Too, Am Harvard play, described the
impact of “Affirmative Dissatisfaction” and how many students of color viewed the column as
an attack. “It just created a tense atmosphere on campus, specifically for students of color. It
was an op-ed piece, but it was very strongly questioning our presence on campus.”
182
This sense
of a hostile or unwelcoming campus climate was also reflected in the research and interviews
that Matsuda-Lawrence was conducting for her independent study leading up to the launch of
the campaign, where students’ concerns over the article came up unprompted,
183
and were
indicative of their sense of visibility, safety, and belonging on campus. Although Mastuda-
Lawrence does not consider the article a precipitating factor to the development of the I, Too,
Am Harvard campaign, she does point to it as a clear indication of the tense campus climate
from which the campaign was born.

Crossing Out Blackness

Lest we imagine that the controversy around the affirmative action article and existing
tense campus climate was due to a one-time incident, we now turn to a second example from
Harvard campus, which happened a year after the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign was first

182
Butler, “‘I, Too, Am Harvard’: Black Students Show They Belong.”
183
Ibid.

126

launched into the local and national public eye. In November 2015, the Harvard campus
experienced a blatant display of racist vandalism pointedly directed at Black members of the
Harvard community. In a law school building that proudly displays framed portraits of the
history of all tenured Harvard Law School (HLS) faculty in the hallway, strips of black tape were
systematically placed across the faces of all the Black law professors on display. This happened
the day after students at Harvard participated in anti-racism protests in solidarity with other
college students across the nation,
184
“demanding action against the entrenched white
supremacy and racism (that) still pervades campus life”
185
in schools across the country. At
Harvard, these efforts included a student walkout, and at the law school, an “art-action” and
petition to change the seal of the law school, which is the family crest of a wealthy, ruthless
slave-owning founder of the school, Isaac Royall Jr. “Royall, whose endowment founded the law
school in 1817, gained his immense wealth by way of his family’s Antigua plantation, where in
the mid-1730s ‘seventy-seven enslaved people were burned alive, six were hanged, and five
were broken on the wheel’ in retaliation for a slave uprising…The school adopted his family
crest in 1936 as a part of a fundraising campaign.” Given this abject history, the law school’s
seal is essentially the “confederate flag of Harvard,”
186
one HLS student put it.
In addition to other organized efforts aimed at abolishing the school crest, members of
the campus group Royall Must Fall (RMF) “placed black gaffer tape over the law school seal in
several locations of the school’s main hub, Wasserstein hall,” as a way to draw attention to the
history of the seal and urge for its removal. This same black tape was what was used to deface

184
Glenza, “US Student Activist Group Plans Day of Action to Challenge University Injustices.”
185
Lartey, “Harvard ‘Black Tape’ Vandalism Brings Law School’s Controversial Past to Fore.”
186
Ibid.

127

the portraits of the Black tenured faculty members in the same building. In an open letter by
RMF to the law school’s dean, they wrote,
Physical symbols are an expression of who we are and what we value as a community.
From the portraits of professors on the second floor of Wasserstein, to the paintings in
the library, to the current composition of the faculty, the law school is filled with visual
reminders that this school was created by, and for, white men. The most ubiquitous of
these symbols, the seal—which adorns all of our buildings, apparel, stationery, and
diplomas—honors a slaver and murderer.
Thus, we write to demand the removal of the Royall family crest as the official seal of
Harvard Law School. Replacing the seal would not erase the brutal history of the slave
trade. Instead, it would appropriately acknowledge the dark legacy of racism that is
presently hidden in plain sight. Many people see no clear connection between the slave
trade and the present. That is how structural racism becomes entrenched; forgetfulness
and indifference are tools of oppression. The refusal of our society to remedy past
discrimination has resulted in enduring racial disparities in nearly every quality-of-life
metric in the United States.

We cannot stop working toward the eradication of structural racism until every member
of our society is treated with equal worth and dignity.
187

In the same way that the I, Too, Am Harvard photo campaign claimed and took up physical and
virtual space, stating that Black students at Harvard are present and belong on Harvard
University’s campus, the reappropriation of the tape protesting the racist legacy of the HLS seal
was an attempt to reclaim some of that space for Whiteness. By using the tape to literally X out
the faces of Black tenured faculty whose portraits proclaimed their existence and success at the
institution, this action sought to deny and invalidate the presence of Blackness at Harvard.
These two examples about the campus climate at Harvard and the pervasive,
institutionalized, direct and indirect kinds of everyday racism people experience gives context
to how and why something like the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign would emerge and take off as
it did. Situating their actions within a larger societal context, Jeff Chang wrote about this

187
“An Open Letter to Dean Minow from Students of Harvard Law School.”

128

burgeoning era of young activists utilizing social media and networked communication to
connect with one another and make their voices heard.
With the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, a generation that had grown up
during an era of rising resegregation and inequality could see how the microaggressions
they experienced in often elite collegiate spaces connected to a broader context of
racial inequity. What’s more, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook helped them not only to
make their local struggles visible, but to recognize that they fit into a larger national
narrative of rising anger over inequity. Social media and the Internet accelerated
generational learning and mobilization. They had the tools, language, infrastructure, and
the belly-fire to respond to what felt like a deteriorating situation.
188

The I, Too Am Harvard campaign was one of these responses.

Dismantling Racist Ideologies

In Talking to Strangers (2006), a book on citizenship and trust in the years after the
landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, political scientist Danielle Allen opens with a
description of a photograph that captured an infamous moment representative of the painful
struggles of the time. The year was 1957, and the image shows 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford
walking soberly away after being blocked by the National Guard from attending her first
desegregated day of high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, flanked by an angry White mob
“escorting” her away. Behind her, one of the White women in the photo, Hazel Bryan, is
captured mid-sneer, her face screwed up by the force of the curses she is shouting at Eckford’s
retreating back. Photos from this moment were widely and rapidly circulated in national and
global news outlets at the time, and the incident, as represented through these images,
became symbolic of an America struggling to unshackle its ideological chains to reimagine a
new way of being. As Danielle Allen describes it, the widely shared display of Elizabeth Eckford’s

188
Chang, We Gon’ Be Alright, 46.

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public suffering “forced a psychic transformation of the citizenry.”
189

The photo forced a choice on its U.S. viewers, and its power to engage the imagination
lay in this. The picture simultaneously recorded a nightmarish version of a town meeting
and, by presenting to a broad public the visible structure of segregation, elicited
throughout the citizenry an epiphanic awareness of the inner workings of public life and
made those mechanics the subject of debate. Even today, the photo provokes anxiety in
its audience not merely about laws and institutions but more about how ordinary habits
relate to citizenship…[T]he image of Hazel cursing Elizabeth raises the challenge of
transformation not of laws but of ourselves.
190

The photos made evident the realities of everyday struggles occurring during this period of time
and “forced citizens to confront the nature of their citizenship—that is, the basic habits of
interaction in public spaces— and many were shamed into desiring a new order.”
191
In her
analysis of the symbolic and transformative power that photographs can have, Allen shows how
images can deepen our understandings of the everyday, prompt us to reflect on our own “basic
habits of interaction in public spaces,”
192
and motivate us to reimagine what is possible so that
we can each strive towards a better reality.
The following sections examine how through the embodied experiences featured and
circulated in digital protest portraits, the images and messages from the I, Too, Am Harvard
campaign work in many of the same ways. In order to deconstruct postracial ideology in a social
context that tries to deny the reality and impact of racial microaggressions, the I, Too, Am
Harvard campaign 1) exposes subtle instances of everyday interpersonal and institutional
racism, 2) makes visible and challenges how racial hierarchies are naturalized or disguised in
conversations about culture and class, and 3) disrupts stereotypic assumptions through images

189
Allen, Talking to Strangers, 3.
190
Ibid., 5.
191
Ibid.
192
Ibid.

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of resistance and resilience, all in the face of pervasive interpersonal and systemic racism.

Colorblind Ideology: “‘I don’t see color’…Does that mean you don’t see me?”

In Racism Without Racists (2010), sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes four central
ideological frames that interweave and overlap to protect and perpetuate colorblind racist
ideologies: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and the minimization of racism
(defined and discussed in more detail below). The communicative work that the “I, Too, Am
Harvard” campaign does is that it addresses and dismantles each of these ideological frames
and creates a counter-narrative which challenges and disrupts dominant postracial discourses
about racial discrimination in the United States. For example, one of the young women from
the campaign holds up a sign with the message, “‘I don’t see color’…Does that mean you don’t
see me?” Through her message, she asks the person making the statement a rhetorical
question, meant to prompt viewers to imagine that conversation in which the person saying “I
don’t see color” would be forced to check their own privileges and assumptions regarding race.
This message directly addresses a central tenet of postracial colorblind ideology – that race no
longer exists or matters. Her calmly defiant facial expression in the image, and corresponding
response on the message board (“Does that mean you don’t see me?”) re-asserts that while
some people conceptualize race as a distant, abstract notion of hierarchy that organizes groups
of people in our society, it is also concrete and tangible in that racial categories underlie every
interaction every person has in our society. As Richard Dyer writes in White (1997),
Racial imagery is central to the organisation of the modern world. At what cost regions
and countries export their goods, whose voices are listened to at international
gatherings, who bombs and who is bombed, who gets what jobs, housing, access to
health care and education, what cultural activities are subsidized and sold, in what
terms they are validated – these are all largely inextricable from racial imagery. The

131

myriad minute decisions that constitute the practices of the world are at every point
informed by judgements about people’s capacities and worth, judgements based on
what they look like, where they come from, how they speak, even what they eat, that is,
racial judgements. Race is not the only factor governing these things and people of
goodwill everywhere struggle to overcome the prejudices and barriers of race, but it is
never not a factor, never not in play. And since race in itself – insofar as it is anything in
itself – refers to some intrinsically insignificant geographical/physical differences
between people, it is the imagery of race that is in play.
193

Dyer’s use of the words “racial imagery” being “in play” forefronts the idea that the visual
representations and popularly held beliefs about racial assumptions are generative sites of
contention, construction, and replication of these unstable categories. The emphasis on the
visual is particularly pertinent in the case of the I, Too, Am Harvard photo campaign, since the
embodied presence of the Black and mixed race students in the images are communicating just
as much as the words in the handwritten messages they are holding. The performance of these
experiences of race in the images serves as a visual embodied representation of Black and
mixed race students communally exposing and taking a stand against racism, creating counter-
narratives against assumptions and stereotypes, as well as articulating and reinforcing student
belonging to the educational community at Harvard College. Taken together with the messages
that expose, name, and deconstruct racialized experiences, I, Too, Am Harvard disrupts
hegemonic colorblind and postracial ideals and pushes the conversation towards changing the
problematic perceptions and circumstances that perpetuate these inequities.

“You’re lucky to be black…so easy to get into college!”: Responding to Abstract Liberalism

Bonilla-Silva argues that in contemporary post-Jim Crow and post-Civic Rights America,
central tenets of liberalism, such as individualism, meritocracy, universalism, and choice have

193
Dyer, White, 1.

132

been adopted and rearticulated to rationalize and maintain hegemonic ideologies of White
supremacy and the inequities inherent in the U.S. racial status quo. In his book, he gives an
example of this self-reinforcing justification and rationalization process that is particularly
relevant to this case study, demonstrating how an abstract belief in “equal opportunity” can be
used to oppose affirmative action and other systemic efforts aimed at helping address past and
current disadvantages limiting equal access to opportunities for historically disenfranchised
minority populations.
By framing race-related issues in the language of liberalism, whites can appear
“reasonable” and even “moral,” while opposing almost all practical approaches to deal
with de facto racial inequality. For instance, the principle of equal opportunity, central
to the agenda of the Civil Rights Movement and whose extension to people of color was
vehemently opposed by most whites, is invoked by whites today to oppose affirmative-
action policies because they supposedly represent the “preferential treatment” of
certain groups. This claim necessitates ignoring the fact that people of color are severely
underrepresented in most good jobs, schools, and universities and, hence, it is an
abstract utilization of the idea of “equal opportunity.”
194

In other words, people can deeply believe in and value “equal opportunity for all” as an idea,
and at the same time, overlook gross evidence of racial inequities and resist tangible ways to
address them by rationalizing their stances with individualistic, meritocratic, and ahistorical
arguments. This dissonant rhetorical and conceptual struggle is also reflected in another
example Bonilla-Silva gives, showing how a former U.S. President can state, “I strongly support
diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity in higher education,” and then go on to
characterize a university’s affirmative action policies as “flawed” because it is “discriminatory
against whites.”
195
The logic that allows people to believe in both the abstract idea of having a
campus with a racial and ethnically diverse population and also thinking the policies and

194
Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 28.
195
Ibid., 4.

133

practices that would get you there are unfair for White people, who, according to this
reasoning deserve to be there, is maintained by an adherence to these abstract, hegemonic,
post-racial ideologies that work to maintain the privileges and dominance of whiteness in U.S.
institutions. Affirmative action debates are particularly contentious when discussing admissions
and employment in institutions of higher education, and is a topic that came up both as a
theme within the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign itself, and also as a permeating societal and
campus contextual factor influencing the experiences of the students who created and
participated in the campaign.
The I, Too, Am Harvard photo campaign exposes and challenges these postracial tenets
of abstract liberalism by highlighting and responding to Black students’ experiences of being
perceived as being beneficiaries of affirmative action policies. A persistent myth associated with
affirmative action in higher education is that the people of color in college are there not
because of their merits or accomplishments, but primarily because of explicit or implicit
affirmative action-like policies, which are perceived to not admit qualified peers, but rather
students that were purportedly given undue preferential treatment despite being “less
qualified.” These myths are exposed and addressed directly in the campaign. For example, one
student with a strained smile holds up a message board that reads, “‘You’re lucky to be
black…so easy to get into college!’ - old classmate.” While we cannot tell from the image
whether the “old classmate” was saying this when the Harvard student was admitted to college
while they were still in high school, or if it was a Harvard student saying this to a fellow
classmate at Harvard, the implications are the same. Cloaked as a compliment about “luck” and
alleged social privileges, the racial microaggression questions the intelligence of the student,

134

and their belonging at higher educational institutions, dismissing their accomplishments and
reducing them to what the speaker assumes is the only relevant feature in the admissions
process, the student’s racial identity. This comment is also reflective of the abstract ahistorical,
individualistic, and meritocratic ideologies that underlie people’s understandings and
experiences with the effects of affirmative action. Although one might read the sign and agree
with what was said, the image and its situatedness within a collection of images forces people
who are looking at it and reading the message board to, at the very least, stop to think about
what is being said and consider the implications about the various ways it could be read.
Another image speaks directly to viewers of the photo campaign: “Surprise! My
application to Harvard wasn’t just a picture of my face.” The dark-skinned black male student
who holds the sign is wearing dress pants, a dress shirt, and tie, holding the message board
with a hardened expression on his face. This striking image does two things simultaneously.
Because of the embodied representation of an educated, accomplished black man presented in
the image, as signified by the class markers of his “professional” attire, you are forced to
consider why he would be holding a sign with that message, getting viewers to at least consider
the potential intelligence and accomplishments of this person that are not discernible by a
surface judgment based on his skin color and gender. The image and message also reflects and
speaks to the social and campus climate, prompting viewers to reflect on assumptions about
college admissions processes and affirmative action, regardless of whether they are in support
of or against such measures, as well as think about how these assumptions play out in everyday
interactions. While the example above (“You’re lucky to be black…so easy to get into college!”)
was an example of a verbally delivered racial microaggression, this message, “Surprise! My

135

application to Harvard wasn’t just a picture of my face,” is an example of a student speaking
back to interpersonal comments and/or responding to an unwelcoming or hostile campus
climate that challenges their belonging at the school.
The intangible influence of the discourse and popular imagination of who does and does
not belong at our nation’s institutions of higher education are given a material reality when
demonstrated through another campaign image, where a student holds up a sign that shows
how incipient the messages of not-belonging are, and how they can be felt while in college, but
also can begin even before students arrive at college. “‘Oh, I heard her say she was going to
Harvard. I just assumed she misspoke’ - white parent to my mother.” On this student’s message
board, in addition to quoting the perpetrated racial microaggression, the context is also
succinctly revealed, describing a situation where a White parent of another student presumed
the Black student did not know what she was talking about because she said she was attending
Harvard. Like many of the other campaign images, this image demonstrates both the
problematic nature of the content of the particular racial microaggression, and also shows
without explicitly telling how microaggressions are often received, eliciting a response similar to
the psychic energy spent questioning the experience or validity of reactions to the experience
of a racial microaggression. Viewers of this image pause to question the possible motivations
behind this White parent’s casual and dismissive statement - was it about how difficult it is to
get into Harvard, or about the Black student’s individual intelligence and abilities, or about her
race, or gender? Was it simply a reflection of what that White parent imagined Harvard
students to look like, which in this case meant not her for one of the aforementioned reasons?

136

“Don’t you wish you were White like the rest of us?”: Whiteness and the “Natural” Racial
Order

The insistence of “colorblindness” as a way to practice equality is tied up with dominant
and underlying ideological frames that centralize whiteness as the desired, unmarked norm,
and blackness as its dichotomous opposite. In the “Western” world, whiteness is perceived as
the normal human condition, and we are taught to think of Whites as “just people,” with no
racial culture or identity. As Richard Dyer writes in White,
…there is something at stake in looking at, or continuing to ignore, white racial imagery.
As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people
are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are
raced, we are just people. There is no more powerful position than that of being “just”
human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity.
196

The clutches of this largely unseen ideology can be seen in the language we use to talk about
race. Dyer described in his book how he struggled with what terminology to use to write about
people who are not White, because he needed a phrase to describe that group while he was
writing about “making whiteness strange”
197
to disrupt its hegemonic authority and power. The
term “non-White” is generalizing and reinforces that the important category is “White,” and
everyone else is relegated to be defined against this norm as the negative “Other.” He
recognized that some people use the term “Black” as a shorthand to refer to all non-White
people, but did not want to exclude the many other non-White and non-Black people left out
by this term. He appreciated the inclusivity of the term “people of color” that is more
commonly used in the U.S., but did not like how that term once again reinforces the idea that
race and racism is a problem for people who are identified to have a race, which perniciously

196
Dyer, White, 1–2.
197
Ibid., 4.

137

leaves out White people as having a “color” and therefore absolves them of responsibility in
examining their own identity and positionality. “The sense of whites as non-raced is most
evident in the absence of reference to whiteness in the habitual speech and writing of white
people in the West.”
198
This reinforces the hegemony of White supremacy by not naming and
acknowledging White racial culture and identity, thereby reinforcing whiteness functioning as
the human norm.
Although largely invisible and seemingly unaddressed in the language we use to talk
about race and racial groups, the dominant normalcy of whiteness is actually being constantly
talked about and reproduced, and this can be seen everywhere in mediated representation.
The invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant)
discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity…In fact for most of the time white people speak
about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general.
Research – into books, museums, the press, advertising, films, television, software –
repeatedly shows that in Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and
disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all
are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard. Whites are everywhere in
representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to
be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered,
classed, sexualized and abled. At the level of racial representation, in other words,
whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race.
199

The uncontested invisibility of whiteness implies that race is something talked about with
“people of color,” as if White is not also a color in the racial system, and dominant hegemonic
hierarchies should be maintained because it is society’s “natural” order. In binaristic and
relational terms, the “natural” ideological order historically and currently prevalent in the U.S.
would be Whites as “naturally” “above” Blacks. This “natural” order is also created and
perpetuated in social discourse. Examples of this range from the history of eugenics in this

198
Ibid., 2.
199
Ibid., 3.

138

country, created and maintained to justify White dominance, to the infamous book and ideas
spread by the 1994 book The Bell Curve,
200
where authors Richard Hernstein and Charles
Murray argued that genetics and inherent IQ differences were the reason for stark racial
differences in life and achievement outcomes. In a more diversified conceptualization of this
“natural” racial hierarchy, the Black and White categories would represent the poles and folks
who identify with or are identified with other racial categories would be ranked in the middle.
Although these groups in the middle all have and will continue to go through different
experiences of racialization, they will primarily be discussed in public discourse comparatively
and pitted against one another as a wedge to demonstrate the alleged goodwill and morality of
whiteness and/or the “cultural deficiencies” of blackness. A contemporary example of how this
plays out would be Amy Chua, Tiger Mom, and husband Jeb Rubenfeld’s 2014 book, The Triple
Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America,
201
in
which the two Yale Law School professors rank American “cultural” groups in efforts to explain
their successes due to differences in inherent “cultural traits” while ignoring and not accounting
for history (such as context of immigration) or structural and systemic influences (such as
generational transfer of wealth and opportunity).
We see the students of the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign pointing out multiple
instances of expressed White supremacy or privilege, including where people have tried to pay
them a compliment by comparing them to the idealized White standard, simultaneously
reinforcing the dominant binary of whiteness as the desired ideal, and blackness, understood
here as non-whiteness, as the negative, undesired, “abnormal” identity.

200
Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve.
201
Chua and Rubenfeld, The Triple Package.

139

“‘Don’t you wish you were white like the rest of us?’ – old friend”

“‘You’re basically white.’ -Sorry, what???”

“You’re the Whitest Black person I know”

“Yeah, but you’re not ‘really’ black.”

“‘I don’t even think of you as Black’…but I am tho”

“You’re really articulate for a black girl.”

“You don’t sound black…you sound smart.”

The boundaries of blackness and whiteness are policed through the statements highlighted on
the message boards, and the visual restatement of these messages along with the
corresponding responses also written on some of the message boards (e.g., “Sorry, what???” or
“…but I am tho”) disrupts the assumptions of “naturalness” or “just the way things are” to
these potentially well-meaning, but offensive, casually racist statements. By visually capturing
and displaying these comments, viewers of this campaign have to stop to read and think about
the implications of these messages. The underlying theme of whiteness as the desired and ideal
norm and of blackness as undesired or less than whiteness (e.g., “Don’t you wish you were
white like the rest of us?”), and statements that reflect presumptions about the intelligence of
African American or black people (e.g., “You don’t sound black…you sound smart”) are hard to
ignore and read as “colorblind” in this format, especially because each of these quoted racial
microaggressions are being held up by an embodied representation of a Black or African
American Harvard student that these comments were addressed to. Additionally, even if the
students experiencing these comments did not respond or resist in the moment that these
microaggressions were happening, participation in this campaign allows them stand up to and

140

reject or reframe these comments through their images. This ability to speak back individually
and collectively is an important healing and empowering dimension of these kinds of
participatory groups and practices, especially because part of what makes the effects of
microaggressions so damaging is the amount of energy spent afterwards trying to determine
what should have been the appropriate response in situations that have no “right” response.
How, for example, should someone respond when someone says to you, “You’re the Whitest
Black person I know,” or tries to compliment you with, “You’re really articulate for a black girl”?
In addition to exposing and disrupting manifestations of ideologies that privilege and
center whiteness as normal and desired and blackness as abnormal and undesired, some of the
quotes also force viewers to think about the identities of the person making these statements
captured on the message boards, prompting reflection on the implications of that
communication relationship and the context with which the microaggression occurred. One
young woman holds up, “You’re not blacker than me because you can rap more Jay-Z lyrics”
and another states, “My name is Monica, not ‘my nigga.’” Both of these messages, in addition
to several of the ones quoted above (e.g., “You’re the Whitest Black person I know” or “Yeah,
but you’re not ‘really’ black”) can be read as statements or responses to statements expressed
by a racial “in group” or “out group” member, with differing social and relational intentions.
This ambiguity about who could have been making the statement and what they potentially
meant by it demonstrates how race is not a “common sense,” fixed category of identity, but is
actually an unstable social construct that is historically informed and also constantly being
negotiated and remade in everyday life.
202
This openness to interpretation about who the

202
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.

141

potential perpetrator of the microaggressions are also speaks to a deeper understanding of
racial microaggressions as a manifestation of larger societal structures and ideologies that can
be perpetrated not just by the dominant White majority, but by anyone who has been
socialized in this context, including other people of color.
Taken together, the sheer number and multiple forms of these similar quotes about
whiteness and blackness just within this one photo campaign powerfully demonstrates how
deeply ingrained and prevalent these postracial ideologies are since they were explicitly
featured on almost a quarter of the message boards. The campaign messages about whiteness
and blackness bring to the fore tangible manifestations of everyday, unintentional expressions
of White privilege and White supremacy. However, in addition to starkly showing the
problematic ideologies and assumptions that inform these kinds of comments, thereby
challenging the centrality and dominance of whiteness as the desired norm, the I, Too, Am
Harvard campaign also reinforces the hegemonic Black-White binary that dominates racial
discourse in the U.S. In interviews with news outlets that have asked about this, Kimiko
Matsuda-Lawrence has stated that they focused this particular campaign on Black and African
American issues, but in the future, wanted to be inclusive of the experiences of other
minorities.
203
While that kind of campaign or series of campaigns would be great, the change in
focus would take a kind of momentum and targeted leadership that may not be sustainable
given that many of the students who started this campaign have graduated or are graduating,
or may not be as invested in advocating for other groups. A large part of the reason the I, Too,
Am Harvard campaign took off and spread across the Internet was because it was addressing

203
Kahn, “‘I, Too, Am Harvard’ Campaign Highlights Black Students’ Frustrations.”

142

people within the bounds of the popularly-understood Black-White racial binary that dominates
local and global popular discourse about race relations in the United States. At the same time
that this campaign exposed and disrupted hegemonic ideologies of White superiority, privilege,
and anti-blackness, it also reinforced and perpetuated limited understandings of race and
racism in the U.S.

Race as Classed Culture: “Why do you look _____? A) Like a Thug, B) Ghetto, C) Hood, D)
Ratchet, E) All of the above”

In addition to the way emphasizing racial differences has been framed as being racist,
and how racism has been framed only as overt, individual acts of discrimination, another
consequence of postracial ideology is the knowledge that being racist is bad, but talking about
the same racial biases masked as “culture” is acceptable. This coded way of talking about race,
often deeply intertwined with notions of class (for example, “the culture of poverty”), is a way
to make the same biased claims about racial groups without appearing overtly racist. One of
the other main explanations of the persistence of racial inequities apart from it being the
natural order of things is that inequities persist because of deficient “cultural” norms or the
problematic ideologies of various disadvantaged groups. In this argument, culture is
synonymous with race, but generalizations about “cultural norms” can be talked about because
they do not have as many polarizing connotations as generalizations about race.
Under the semiotics of colorblindness, only open references to skin color or the use of
explicitly derogatory racial epithets count as racism. In contrast, alarmism about the
cultural or behavioral deficiencies of minorities – recall the evolving vocabulary: super-
predators, gang bangers, welfare queens, illegal immigrants, terrorists – ostensibly
bears no relation to racism and xenophobia.”
204

204
López, “Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Obama,” 1063.

143

In other words, in the postracial context, people may know not to make racist claims about
racial groups, but will oftentimes couch the very same assumptions in terms of a pathologizing
class-based “cultural” argument, with the accompanying belief that their presumptions and
statements have nothing to do with race.
The “I, Too, Am Harvard” students brought these problematic semantic frames to the
fore with layered, classist and racist comments people have said, such as, ““You’re dressed like
you might shoot me right now – such a thug,” and “Why do you look _____? A) Like a Thug, B)
Ghetto, C) Hood, D) Ratchet, E) All of the above.” One student’s message is a direct statement,
aimed at speaking back to and/or preemptively educating viewers before they make a
generalizing statement about a racial group’s “class” and “culture”: “Black is not synonymous
with ‘ratchet’ or ‘ghetto,’” she states. Another woman’s sign reads, “No, I will not teach you
how to ‘twerk,’” alluding to one of the many dominant stereotypical representations of black
women as hypersexualized visual objects valued only for their bodies.

Disrupting Stereotypes: “Are you all so fast because you spend so much time running from
the cops?”

In addition to addressing the tenets of postracial ideology, several of the campaign
messages directly address and challenge blatant stereotyping implicit in the students’
experienced interactions, forcing viewers to acknowledge and think about the assumptions
behind these messages and more deeply consider the reductive, limiting stereotypes that they
reflect. Some of the intersectional stereotypes mentioned were about black people or culture
generally, black women, black men, and African, African-American, and Black identity.

144

For example, a young black man wearing headphones holds up a sign, “No, it’s not rap,”
challenging viewers to check their assumptions about the kinds of music and culture black men
are presumed to enjoy and be a part of, and consider where those popular notions come from.
Similarly, a woman holds a sign that reads, “Having an opinion does not make me an ‘Angry
Black Woman,’” referencing the common stereotype of black women as volatile and angry,
which has the potential to trap and silence women who want to articulate their viewpoints but
not confirm stereotypes.
205
The next image in the series shows the same woman holding up a
follow-up to the first message, stating, “…but, then again…maybe I have something to be mad
about…,” inviting viewers to consider what she could be referring to. Seeing her back-to-back
also makes observers consider the boundaries and limitations of the Angry Black Woman
stereotype, including what it means to “confirm” stereotypes, and how the threat of doing so
can constrain the ways we perform and behave in various contexts, such as school and work.
206

Some of the highlighted messages manifested in backhanded compliments, the shape of
many microaggressions, such as, “Are you all so fast because you spend so much time running
from the cops?” The intention of this statement is not clear - was the speaker trying to be
disparaging, or was it a compliment accompanied by an unintended racist joke? Ultimately, the
way the person meant it is a secondary point. The question asserts two powerful and prevalent
stereotypes simultaneously – that all black people are “natural” athletes who can run quickly,
and that they are criminals targeted by law enforcement. Seeing the incredulous look on the
students’ face who is carrying this message reinforces how outrageously offensive a comment

205
Steele, “A Threat in the Air.”
206
López, “Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Obama,” 1064.

145

like this is. Additionally, perhaps because the “tone” with which the message was originally
delivered cannot be ascertained through the visual medium, the ambiguity makes the image
and message more effective in causing the viewer to pause and try and deconstruct the
meanings behind the words, exposing the problematic elements of the comment.
Stereotypes of people from African countries, Black people, and African Americans were
often conflated in the comments. One exasperated student held up something someone said,
“’You’re African; You’re not even Black’…..What….?!?!” Another young woman also held up
both a comment and challenge to the comment, forcing readers to think about representation,
race, and nationality: “‘You’re not African.’ Because I grew up in America?” Another student
held up a response message that makes viewers realize what kind of stereotypic statement
someone must have said: “No, I did not immigrate to receive HIV/AIDS treatment!” Highlighting
these statements rooted in ignorance or prejudice served to effectively and succinctly
demonstrate the social constructedness and historically and contextually contingent
malleability of racial, ethnic, and national categories.
While many of these examples were provocative messages that forced reflection and
reexamination of preconceived assumptions about racial and gendered groups, some also point
to the limitations of a campaign such as this. If the point is to get people to challenge and
rethink their privilege or racist assumptions, the downside of a visual campaign like this is that it
can only communicate a message that is understood. Discussing privileged and subordinate
racial and ethnic groups within a particular society requires a certain degree of existing
knowledge about the context of those statements, which is difficult to communicate through a
photograph if someone has no prior knowledge of the social hierarchies that govern that

146

society. Alternatively, while identity politics are largely contextually and socio-historically
contingent, as evidenced by the spread of this campaign, there are also common themes of
dominant and subordinate group statuses that resonated with people in different institutional
contexts across the country and in educational institutions in other countries. Examining the
societal context and communicative practices utilized in the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign can
illuminate how at least one group of people are actively using media technologies to articulate
and discuss complex issues, challenge one another’s ideological and cultural beliefs and
practices, and educate and mobilize around these pressing social and political issues.

Using Visual Culture to Protest and Resist

This chapter focuses on the image-based portion of a campaign that was spread around
the country and world largely through participatory digital media and social media networks, a
globally robust but relatively contemporary form of organizing and communication. While the
communicative tools of the past were different, visual culture - cultural creations that “invite
looking” - and the practices around them, have always been integral to expressions of protest
and resistance. Before delving into how the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign utilizes visual culture
to address racial microaggressions specifically, this next section first explores different ways
others have utilized visual culture in their civic engagement and political activism in the past.

Public Art, Visual Culture, and Social Movements

In The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets
of Seattle,
⁠207
T.V. Reed explores how the practices around the creation and circulation of various

207
Reed, The Art of Protest.

147

forms of cultural expression (such as music, poetry, painting, murals, writing, film, photography,
graphics, and theatrical performance) play a key role in social movements in the United States
from the 1950s onwards. Though he acknowledges that visual culture has been used across the
globe in social movements and protests long before this timeframe (e.g., the nation we call the
United States was created through a social movement: the American Revolution),
⁠208
by
highlighting the vibrant role of artistic, cultural productions and practices in social movements
from this period of U.S. history, Reed demonstrates the value of studying flows of culture and
cultural texts not in place of, but alongside the oftentimes more quantifiable social, political,
and economic dimensions of social movements. Through examples such as African American
civil rights era freedom songs, feminist consciousness-raising poetry, the mobilization of
graphics and performance art by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and the Chicano/a and
community mural movements, the author shows how ideas, values, practices, and self and
collective identities were shaped by participation in and exposure to the visual culture of social
movements as they were happening, as well as how movements learned from and built on each
other. The vivid examples also show how these practices continue to resonate and inform social
movements and the ongoing shaping of society today. Additionally, as evidenced by the history
of the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign, while a large part of Reed’s book is about how the people
participating in these movements were mobilizing and engaging with publicized, “dramatic
actions”
⁠209
and expressions, the author also takes care to emphasize that these visible public
expressions were effective only because of the less glamorous, ongoing, uncelebrated day-to-
day organizing and work being done for days, weeks, and years leading up to and following the

208
Ibid., xiii.
209
Ibid., xiv.

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more popularly remembered, publicized cultural artifacts or events. Along with what is most
often seen and remembered, these connections with the more mundane, less visible aspects of
social movements are also vitally important for remembering and considering the formation
and sustainability of social change efforts.
Situating work about everyday resistance in the study and utilization of “visual culture”
and “social movements” comes with mixed benefits and challenges. Both of these areas have
origins from and exist at contested intersections and borders of multiple traditional academic
disciplinary trajectories. Their definitions and value are understood differently in varying
contexts (for example, by traditional media scholars, art historians, sociologists, activists,
political scientists, or journalists), and while this means that contradictions, contestation, and
dismissal can come from multiple fronts,
⁠210
the wide range of theories and approaches that can
be utilized once you’ve staked your position in relation to these intersections leads in the best
case, to being able to reach and engage productively with similarly motivated people who may
come from different perspectives, but have shared goals.
Visual culture scholars Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define visual culture “as the
shared practices of a group, community, or society through which meanings are made out of
the visual, aural, and textual world of representations and the ways that looking practices are
engaged in symbolic and communicative activities.”
⁠211
Their definition includes a focus on
cultural objects and forms that “invite looking,”
212 ⁠ and a reminder that “foregrounding the
visual in visual culture does not mean separating images from writing, speech, language or

210
For example, see: W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin LXXVII,
no. 4 (1995): 540–44.
211
Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 3.
212
Ibid., 4.

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other modes of representation and experience. Images often are integrated with written words
or sounds, as in much contemporary art and in the history of advertising,”
⁠213
(and, I would add,
in the history of human communication). In terms of employing visual cultural analysis as a
critical method, Sturken and Cartwright utilize approaches that combine analyzing the
production, form, and circulation of the visual cultural objects or expressions in context of
social systems and structures, and the practices of looking and meaning-making surrounding
these processes. Nicholas Mirzoeff puts it another way, describing the critical practice of visual
culture as looking “between the visible and invisible, the material and immaterial, the palpable
and the impalpable, the voice and the phenomenon.”
⁠214

Social movements are another contested term within and outside of academia, but they
can be defined as “the unauthorized, unofficial, anti-institutional, collective action of ordinary
citizens trying to change their world...(they) have shaped our politics, our culture, and our
political culture as much as any other single force. Studying movements matter because they
have played crucial roles in making national and world history.” American studies scholar T.V.
Reed argues that although decades of researchers and activists do not agree on one definition
of what constitutes a social movement, the more important point is that everyone “knows one
when they see one.” Citing key concepts from social movement scholar Charles Tilly, Reed
foregrounds the importance of incorporating the study of visual culture in social protests and
movements, because
…the essence of movements entails “repeated public displays” of alternative political
and cultural values by a collection of people acting together outside of officially
sanctioned channels. (It is because those official channels have failed some people that

213
Ibid.
214
Mirzoeff, “Ghostwriting: Working out Visual Culture,” 191.

150

movements arise.) Movements, in contrast to their tamer, more institutionalized
cousins, political parties and lobbyists, seek to bring about social change primarily
through the medium of “repeated public displays,” or, as I would put it, through
dramatic action.
215

These “repeated public displays” of dramatic action can also be conceptualized as displays of
politically engaged public art.
By “public art,” I mean art that is created to be displayed or interacted with publicly, and
not only “high” art that is sanctioned to appear within spaces like museums and galleries.
Artistic expressions such as community murals, spoken word poetry, film, music, dramatic
performances, graffiti, sculpture, memorials, fashion, and images or objects circulated or on
display, are examples of visual culture where meanings are articulated and negotiated for those
who create and encounter it. These kinds of public artistic expressions can act as powerful
symbols representative of individual or collective identities that shift in strength or prominence
depending on creator, viewer, and sociohistoric context. They can also be constitutive of
alternative histories, counter-narratives, or as George Lipsitz puts it, “counter-memories,”
⁠216

which focus on articulating “localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and
refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience.”
⁠217
Like the collective
60+ campaign photos from #itooamharvard, and the wall of thousands of stories shared in The
Microaggressions Project, these examples of public art take up space, are reflexive, provoke
engagement, and “dares to awaken a public sphere of resistance, struggle, and dialogue.”
⁠218

This kind of dynamic, collective counter-storytelling has in the past and continues now

215
Reed, The Art of Protest, xiv.
216
Lipsitz, Time Passages, 213.
217
Ibid.
218
Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” 47.

151

to take many forms - from murals that celebrate alternative histories, to the symbolic power of
a wall of photographs in a film, to global participatory street art portrait projects.
Understanding #itooamharvard and other contemporary campaigns and creations like those
featured in this dissertation have to be understood within a larger historical context of the
kinds of civically-engaged public art and activism that have come before.

Those Who Paved the Way

El movimiento and the Community Mural Movements

One such example of public art that serves as the negotiated reclaiming of public space
and public memory was the Chicano/a and community mural movements that came into
prominence around the same time in the United States in the 1960s, and which are often talked
about together. Although they are separate movements, the community murals that cropped
up all over the West and Southwest that reference or pay homage to the burgeoning Chicano/a
movement at the time represents public art that invites dialogue through showing a history of
struggle, resistance, and avenues for empowerment around a collective identity represented in
visual culture.
The Chicano/a movement, also known as el movimiento, was a political identity and
stance of a group of Americans with Mexican descent crafted to “claim the right to their own
dignity, identity, language, and culture,”
⁠219
after a long history of struggle with multiple imperial
powers. Speaking in broad swaths, the history of Mexican occupation extends back to sixteenth
century Spanish conquistadors, and mid-nineteenth century U.S. domination of what are now

219
Reed, The Art of Protest, 105.

152

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado.
⁠220

This history of conquest, including the forcible “mixing” of Spanish, indigenous, and African
slave heritage, and the contentious immigration and border relationship between the U.S. and
Mexico that still exists today, has unsurprisingly resulted in a legacy of complex, deeply-rooted
social issues and difficult identity negotiations for people who identify with or who are
identified with this group. The Chicano/a movement that came into prominence in the 1960s,
and its intersections with the community mural movement, were shaped by labor union
struggles from the 1930s and 1940s, the art of famous Mexican muralists from the 20s and 30s
(e.g., Diego Rivera),
⁠221
and the free speech, labor, land rights, and other civil rights movements
in the U.S. in the 1960s.
We can see the role visual culture played in these inter-related social movements by
looking at one of the first murals that represent the beginnings, trajectories, and continuation
of the U.S. Chicano movement, painted by Antonio Bernal on the United Farm Workers/El
Teatro Campesino cultural center building in Del Ray, CA.
⁠222
First, the location of the mural is
significant, because the El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Worker’s Theater), was a theater
performance group that played a vital role in connecting farmworkers first to the farmworkers’
union movement (led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta), inspired other troupes to form
across the Southwest, and later, helped connect issues faced by rural or farmworker
communities to issues that were faced by Chicanos in the cities, shaping a collective identity
around shared Mexican heritage by communicating shared values through skits and

220
Ibid., 103.
221
Ibid., 106.
222
Ibid., 107.

153

performances.
⁠223
The placement of the mural on the offices of the United Farm Workers
building pay homage to and remind viewers to think beyond the visual representation of the
mural about the history of in-person, on-the-ground organizing that came before, and that is
required to invigorate and sustain social movements.
In terms of the people represented in the mural, the four figures on the left tell the
story of the history and influences of el movimiento, featuring heroines and heroes that
represented resistance to European and American racial, gender, and class-based domination in
the early 20
th
century,
⁠224
and act symbolically to “evoke a heritage of struggle by the peoples
inhabiting the space where Mexico and the United States have permeable boundaries.”
⁠225
The
next two figures were central to the rise and visibility of Chicano/a activism at the time of the
painting of this mural (1968), labor rights activist César Chávez and land reparations activist
Reies Lopez Tijerina. In addition to a set of shears, Chávez is shown holding a flag with an image
of a black Aztec eagle on a red background, which later came to be a prominent symbol that
represented the Chicano/a movement generally. The two figures on the right demonstrate the
Chicano movements’ connection to and solidarity with the fight for African American civil
rights, showing a black panther that may be representative of Malcolm X, with a rifle in one
hand and the other hand on the shoulder of Tijerina, and Martin Luther King Jr. standing next to
him. Here, we can see the role of community murals such as this one in articulating and inviting
people to collectively re-remember history beyond passive domination from multiple imperial
powers, telling an alternative story of ongoing empowered struggle and resistance, developing

223
Ibid.
224
i.e., La Adelita, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, Joaquin Murieta
225
Reed, The Art of Protest, 108.

154

a shared, collective identity for Mexicans and Americans with Mexican descent, and
demonstrating solidarity with other civil rights struggles.
A large part of the aims of the Chicano/a movement was about retelling the story of
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, mobilizing around this new political identity that “reversed
the policies and ideologies of assimilation and sought instead to recover, understand, and
celebrate the cultural heritage that made them unique, while insisting on their economic and
political rights as citizens of the United States.”
⁠226
The murals played a vital role in educating
and re-telling history, serving as referential rallying points to articulate the goals of the
movement and in doing so, influenced other forms of social change efforts, such as protests
demanding more representative and relevant curriculum in schools.
Neighborhood murals in which historical figures like these were portrayed as quite
literally larger than life became important “textbooks” that spurred an interest in
history. This interest could then be nourished by the writings of insurgent historians
whose academic work carried the movement to high school and colleges, where
hundreds of students walked out of classes or went on strike for an education that
respected their heritage and identity. These “blowouts,” as they were known, started in
high schools in southern California and were immensely inspirational. They challenged
older people to catch up with the younger ones.”
⁠227

Community murals, however, are just one example of public art where images and
representations of people are looked at and engaged with as points of identification and
unification for a group of people.

The “Wall of Fame”

Another example of the potential participatory power of public art in a different
medium is film. In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), he uses both the film itself as well as

226
Ibid., 105.
227
Ibid., 109.

155

multiple cultural mediums within the film to illustrate the complexities of race relations in the
U.S. In visual culture scholar W. J. T. Mitchell’s analysis of the film, he discusses how the “Wall
of Fame” that displayed framed, signed photographs of famous Italian-Americans on the walls
of the neighborhood White Italian-owned pizzeria becomes a central point of public
contestation and negotiation for the identities of multiple racial and ethnic community
members from the surrounding Brooklyn neighborhood.
228
Like the portraits of the Black
tenured faculty hanging in the hallways of Harvard Law School, the symbolic importance of who
was visible, recognized, and represented on this wall was challenged and negotiated
throughout the film. These struggles were made visible through mounting racial tensions in the
film’s storyline, where characters engaged in heated conversations, attempted to organize
boycotts, threatened violence, claimed physical space by blasting (hip hop group) Public
Enemy’s “Fight the Power” from a boom-box in the restaurant, and ultimately trashing and
burning down the place while tagging, reframing, and reclaiming the Wall of Fame with the
pinning of a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X over the ruins of the looted,
burned down store.
While the wall of photographs represented a central negotiated focal point that moved
and foregrounded these tensions within the storyline of the film, Mitchell reads the film itself
as a work of symbolically violent public art that provokes viewers to “Wake up!” (and
presumably act as more self-aware, reflexive citizens). He writes,
The film exerts a violence on its viewers, badgering us to “fight the power” and “do the
right thing,” but it never underestimates the difficulty of rightly locating the power to be
fought, or the right strategy for fighting it. A prefabricated propaganda image of political
or ethical correctness, a public monument to “legitimate violence” is exactly what the

228
Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing.”

156

film refuses to be. It is, rather, a monument of resistance, of “intellectual violence,” a
ready-made assemblage of images that reconfigures a local space – literally, the space
of the black ghetto, figuratively, the space of public images of race in the American
public sphere…If Do the Right Thing has a moral for those who wish to continue the
tradition of public art and public sculpture as a utopian venture, a “daring to dream” of
a more human and comprehensive public sphere, it is probably in the opening lines of
the film...‘Wake up!’”
⁠229

This notion of urging viewers to raise their critical awareness and to use this awareness to
affect their actions is also reflected not just in the creation and content of the film, but also in
“real” physical space. In front of Spike Lee’s production company 40 Acres and a Mule, which is
located in a small, tree-lined, urban residential neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY,
⁠ there is a bell
that hangs above the entrance outside of the unassuming front door of the studio, with the
words, “Wake up!” painted on it, for all who walk by to see. Young activists of the current
generation remind us now to “Stay Woke!”
230

“Inside Out” Street Art

Looking at a kind of public art that combines elements of the Chicano/a murals and the
filmic representations of framed photographs on the walls of a restaurant, Paris-based street
artist JR, in his global participatory art project known as “Inside Out,”
⁠231
uses the power of
photographic portraits of everyday people in large-format “street pastings” to invite people to
“make a statement for what they stand for. It is a global platform for people to share their
untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art.”
⁠232
Taking it
one step further than the #itooamharvard photo campaign, this street artist invites participants

229
Ibid., 47.
230
“StayWoke.”
231
“Inside Out.”
232
Ibid.

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to submit their photos to be printed out as large posters for display in physical space.
Any group of five or more people can start a “group action”
⁠233
project with their own
selection of portraits centered on a corresponding theme or issue that is relevant to them.
Participants submit their portraits within certain parameters (e.g., there are rules about what is
allowed to be in each photo – just one person’s face – and images cannot involve any brands,
products, direct markers of institutional affiliations, or racism, intolerance, violence, etc.), and
then they are printed out in large poster-formats (for a recommended contribution of $20 per
poster) and sent back to the people to paste up and occupy a visible location of their choosing.

The Visual Culture of I, Too, Am Harvard

These diverse and vivid examples demonstrate how visual culture plays an integral role
in public, personal, and participatory articulations of resistance in public art activism, social
movements, and campaigns like I, Too, Am Harvard. The choice of using portraits to reclaim
public space and memory, and to encourage dialogue about history and identities is a theme
that comes out clearly in the making and spreading of #itooamharvard. Like the Chicano/a
murals, JR’s “Inside Out” participatory art project, and the “Wall of Fame” in Do the Right Thing,
this school-based campaign can be read as a kind of public artistic expression articulated,
circulated, and engaged with in multiple public spaces. In localized contexts such as classrooms
within universities within cities, states, and countries, and in more “public” arenas, like on “the
Internet,” the portraits and carefully curated personal stories reflected in these images visually
articulate a political stance about lived experiences of institutionalized and systemic
discrimination. Additionally, the resonance of the circulated words and images and relative

233
Ibid.

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simplicity of starting and participating in a campaign based on one’s own contextually-localized
issues inspired dozens of similar student campaigns across the country and world. This kind of
engendered participation likely contributed to the ongoing development of other young
activists’ own understandings and negotiations of individual and collective racialized,
intersectional, civic identities, and has the potential to prompt them all to reflect on the risks
and affordances associated with making private stories public.
The importance of teasing out significant strands in the visible and invisible (and why
and how they are known as such) is another tension that is frequently highlighted in the work
of those analyzing visual culture, and is particularly important in the analysis of images that
include photographs. Photos have the aura of representing “truth,” but as we all well know,
truth is subjective, and photos can be easily manipulated, especially with today’s technologies.
However, the immediate emotional resonance that photos can communicate can be extremely
powerful, and has to be taken into consideration when thinking about why a campaign such as
I, Too, Am Harvard resonated and spread as quickly and widely as it did. In No Caption Needed,
a study of iconic images and their accompanying ideological influences on collective memory
and public life, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, for example, describe how the “great
images” that are famous and most remembered are not remembered for their specifics (e.g.,
people cannot necessarily recall the exact dates or places associated with them), but they do
tap into implicit, familiar “social knowledge,” and are “read” for the impactful, emotional,
abstract principles associated with the images (such as heroism, patriotism, bravery, grief, loss,
courage, etc.).
⁠234
While the earlier part of this chapter demonstrated how the embodied

234
Hariman, No Caption Needed, 141.

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representations in the campaign photos served as direct, visual challenges to postracial
ideology, this next section examines how the form and expressions of the I, Too, Am Harvard
photo campaign specifically allow it to address racial microaggressions on both surface and
more subtle levels.

Capturing Microaggressions

Even though the original impetus behind compiling the campaign photos into one
Tumblr account was to streamline efforts promoting the premiere of the I, Too, Am Harvard
play, this decision also played a pivotal role in the campaign’s successful launch into a wider
public discourse, consolidating and presenting the powerful campaign messages into an easily
accessible and shareable format. As discussed earlier in this chapter, in addition to publicizing
the play and the civic and political efforts surrounding these artistic expressions, the creation
and sharing of this photo campaign increased visibility and spread awareness about racial
microaggressions and the varied ideological manifestations of interpersonal, systemic, and
institutionalized racism that govern our society. Like activism that came before them, the
campaign also used participatory and visual culture to create and express individual and
collective identities, utilizing images and digital networks to challenge dominant narratives and
stereotypes through creating counter-narratives. However, the way this collection of images
was complied and presented also works on another level. The form and expressions of the I,
Too, Am Harvard photo campaign also gets at three insidious aspects of microaggressions that
are often difficult to succinctly address: their fleeting nature, the cumulative impact of them,
and the harmful ways they operate in challenging people’s experiences.

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Catching Fleeting Moments

First and most obviously, this campaign features what I am referring to as digital protest
portraits, or digital photographs featuring portraits of individuals either carrying, embodying, or
standing next to messages or symbols as a means of protest, activism, or civic engagement.
While the using of images, signs, and photos for civic and political engagement are not new,
and these activists are certainly not the first to utilize this form of visual protest, the students
have managed to effectively frame, capture, and speak directly to microaggressions, which are
usually quickly-passing interactions. These transient moments are visually captured on the
message boards in these images, frozen in time and space when they otherwise would be
intangible, ephemeral words or actions. Because this part of the campaign is made up of
photographs, which are for looking at and remembering, viewers are compelled to stop and
look at the people, words, and messages in the images, and to process what they see. This
pausing and moment of reflection can make a difference in getting people to reflect on their
own experiences and privileges, including similar experiences perpetrating, witnessing, or being
on the receiving end of microaggressions. The images also work to signify to frequent targets of
microaggressions that they are being heard and their experiences are being validated because
at the very least, people are stopping to “listen” to the voices from the photo campaign.
Additionally, since these microaggressions are captured in a tangible format, digital
photographs, like printed photographs, can be archived, shared, and used to remember
moments that have passed. Not only do these photos capture and freeze microaggressions into
single frames, but the format also gives the opportunity to revisit and re-contemplate the
campaign images after first viewing them. Because they are on the Internet and on a publicly

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accessible Tumblr site, they can be looked at as many times as a person wants (unless someone
disables the site), or they can be downloaded and collected for later reference. Like other
artistic creations, such as books, movies, songs, and paintings, new discoveries and layers can
be found upon repeated viewings and revisiting of these creations.

Providing Context and Showing Cumulative Weight

Compiling the campaign photos into one Tumblr account also has the effect of capturing
and displaying a wide range of racial microaggressions all together, demonstrating their
collective and cumulative impact. Microaggressions are often dismissed because they are
perceived to be small, “micro” slights, and therefore presumably insignificant and
inconsequential. Part of this is because they are often understood and related to as individual
instances removed from the larger social and historical context that shapes and manifests these
comments/actions. For example, “You’re dressed like you might shoot me right now - such a
thug” might be dismissed as an inconsequential comment about attire, but reads differently if
understood in the context of widespread race and class stereotyping, presumed criminality, and
systemic, racialized police violence of Black and Brown bodies. The other issue is that when
treating microaggressions as simple, one-time individual acts, it also ignores the build up of
previous experiences with microaggressions, which often have been occurring in all social
domains for a marginalized person’s entire lifetime. The longitudinal frequency and cumulative
experiencing of these instances is what is particularly psychically and physiologically damaging,
and is what is often overlooked and misunderstood when only focusing on one seemingly small
individual incident.

162

The I, Too, Am Harvard photo campaign addresses these aspects of microaggressions by
collecting and displaying in one place, a wide range of examples of different kinds of racial
microaggressions experienced by Black, African American, and mixed race students at Harvard
College. While the format of the images does not allow for as much contextual information to
be given as the written stories in The Microaggressions Project, the #itooamharvard campaign
name itself situates the faces and messages of the campaign on many levels, including within
Harvard University, in Cambridge and Boston, MA, and in the United States. The prevalent
dominant narratives about these places, including ideas about the people and prestige of
Harvard, and at the very least, a general sense of the history of slavery and ongoing problematic
race relations in the United States, is relatively widely known. Even a vague understanding of
this limited but effective contextual information helps situate the campaign photos and efforts,
helping to frame and communicate why the list of racial microaggressions featured on the
message boards are so problematic.
Displaying the 60+ images in one place also prompts viewers to see them as a collection,
and scrolling through them one after another gives a sense of what the cumulative weight of
everyday expressions of racial bias and inequity feels like. The form of the campaign and its
related viewing practices emphasizes and demonstrates how microaggressions add up over
time, and how common they are. Structurally, the compilation of the campaign images on the
Tumblr site are formatted so that you can see them individually and collectively, and also think
about them in relation to each other. After the framing message at the top of the page that lays
out the stakes and purpose of the campaign, the format of the site has three main viewing
options for the photos: scrolling down from the top of the webpage to view each image as it

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was posted in reverse chronological order, clicking on individual images to zoom in or see who
has interacted with it (e.g., shared, reposted, liked), and clicking on the “archive” tab for a
thumbnail view of the images as a collection. If you are accessing the images through the
Tumblr site, you will see them in relation to one another. They are clearly part of a group of
images, and the main point of entry introduces you to one image and encourages you to scroll
through the rest. Scrolling through and taking in, one after another, all of these oftentimes
shocking examples of things people have said gives viewers of the campaign a sense of the
range of forms microaggressions can take, and how they can and do come from everywhere,
even in contexts that are supposed to be open and “safe” spaces (such as higher educational
institutions). It also gives viewers a brief, grim taste of what it feels like to experience these
incidences cumulatively, if you do not already know what it feels like. If you do already know
what it feels like to be on the receiving end of microaggressions, then seeing them in a
collection contributes to validating the experiential reality of your own experiences with these
kinds of interactions.

Yes, It Happened.

One of the most insidiously damaging aspects of microaggressions is that because of
their subtle, fleeting, and often casual or unintentional manifestations, they can cause people
on the receiving end of them to question their own experiential reality. Questions like “Did that
really just happen?” (or “I can’t believe that just happened here”), and “What should I have
done?” (or “What should I do in the future?”) take a psychological toll in the instant that the
microaggression happens, and also lasts far beyond the immediate moment, building on both
previous related incidences and anticipated future experiences. People are left questioning

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their own reactions to these subtle and quick moments (“Am I overreacting?”), trying to gauge
and manage their internal reactions while negotiating with themselves about how best to act in
the situation. Additionally, if they do choose to address the microaggression in the moment,
such as calling someone out for their comment or action, the response of the perpetrator
and/or bystanders will often be defensive, such as, “I was just joking,” or dismissive, such as,
“You’re too sensitive - that didn’t happen because of your race (or gender, or sexuality, or
religion, etc.).” These responses often manifest as a combination of both defensiveness and
dismissiveness (“You know what I mean - you take everything so seriously”), devaluing and
denying the experiences of the targets of the microaggression, forcing them to either have to
explain or defend themselves to validate their experiences, or to stay silent and not engage.
This burden of having to explain and validate the self to people who do not understand
or who are blind to their privilege is an example of the invisible, unacknowledged labor that
many people in marginalized communities bear in contexts that marginalize them. As we saw
described in many examples from The Microaggressions Project, the expectation to either
silence or subsume your own emotions when experiencing an aggression, or to be the one to
teach in the moment about why something was problematic is common, as is the expectation
to not get angry and not react negatively, to remain calm and “civil” because the perpetrator of
the microaggression was just “joking” or acting unintentionally. These imbalanced dynamics
results in asking the receiver of microaggressions to constantly, over and over again, elevate
the perpetrator’s psychological wellbeing above their own. In some cases, this may be
necessary and a strategy of self-care or self-preservation, especially if there is high risk in
challenging the microaggression or if there are starkly disparate power dynamics at play (such

165

as if the microaggression is coming from a boss or from law enforcement), but having to choose
silence and self-preservation does not take away from the energy spent managing these kinds
of encounters. While creating and participating in campaigns like I, Too, Am Harvard cannot
solve all problems that manifest as a result of complex power dynamics and deeply entrenched
social issues, by putting their experiences out there, I, Too, Am Harvard is validating on three
levels: it is affirmation for the experiencers of microaggressions that what they experienced did
happen and is impactful, it shows that there are other people who also experience these things,
and it is evidence of what they are doing in the face of their experiences.
As many people who study, write, or speak about microaggressions can attest to, myself
included, finding the right name or words to express an experience can be a powerful and
transformative moment of understanding and discovery. Learning the term “microaggression”
gave me a way to articulate and better understand years of my own experiences that I
previously did not have the language for, and continues to help me process and negotiate
ongoing experiences with microaggressions (not to mention also continuing to shape and
inform my work and academic commitments, as evidenced by this dissertation). It deeply
impacted me to learn that I was not alone in my experiencing of these incidents, and I have
spent hours processing them with friends and mentors who understand their deleterious
effects. I have also felt what it is like to present work that resonates with people, having
educators and fellow students at academic conferences approach me after presentations,
soberly thanking me for giving voice to and acknowledging a framework that addresses their
experiences. Longtime critical race pedagogy and racial microaggressions scholar Daniel
Solórzano has also described the depth of impact his and others’ research has had on people,

166

including a time after a presentation at the University of Michigan when a high school student
in the audience tearfully addressed the speakers, thanking them and telling them, “You’ve
given me a name for my pain.”
235

Although naming our pain can be a simultaneously transformative, liberating and
painful, difficult process, all of this work in its many forms spreading awareness and knowledge
about microaggressions is helping people to reclaim their experiences, heal, connect, and
better prepare for future experiences. Through participatory activism rooted in creating and
spreading visual culture, projects like I, Too, Am Harvard amplify the lived experiences of
people of color and speak back to racial microaggressions by presenting vivid examples of their
prevalent, everyday existence. In addition to the traditional work of scholars, these projects and
campaigns work through social and cultural avenues to spread awareness and help people
name and process their experiences within a community of others with similar experiences.
Targets of microaggressions can see these visual and embodied representations of other
people’s similar experiences with microaggressions, which both validates that their own
experiences were real and that they were not “overreacting” or being “too sensitive” about
their everyday encounters with subtle manifestations of prejudice and inequity. This reinforces
that these incidents are not ok, and that other people go through them too. Notably, this is
done without targets of microaggressions having to question themselves or explain themselves
to others, because the campaign features and explains other people’s stories. This critical
distance that allows both identification with the experiences, but also distance and relief from
having to relive, describe, or defend your own experiences is a powerful aspect of the

235
Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 4.

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campaign. The recognition and identification provides a space for you to reflect on your own
experiences if you choose to, or to simply empathize with the experiences of those in the
campaign, and to feel and share in the power of their resistance.

What Can I Do?

Related to the questioning of one’s own experiences, another insidious aspect of
microaggressions is the physiological and psychological effects of trying to figure out an
appropriate response in the moment, when reliving it afterwards, and when a similar incident
occurs that triggers the memory of previous experiences. The questions of “what should I have
done?” or “what can be done?” are stressful and frustrating, especially when you spend time
going over the context and players of the situation again and again, and in many cases,
determine that the best action was inaction to keep yourself safe, because of shock, or to
preserve psychic energy. As we saw through many illustrative examples from The
Microaggressions Project stories, these feelings can be complicated because on the one hand,
you are acting in a way that is protecting yourself, and likely smoothing over a situation that has
become tense for you, but on the other hand, you are also “letting it go,” where the
perpetrator of the microaggression likely does now know what they said or did, and could
potentially unintentionally do it again to you or to someone else. The choice is often between
causing varying levels of tension and discomfort for yourself and the other person in that quick
moment, or subsuming your own reaction and letting it go unacknowledged. These conflicting
priorities are a lot to weigh in a split second.
The way this is addressed in the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign is not that it tells people
the “right” responses to microaggressions as if there is one, but rather, it shows that creating,

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participating in, or sharing something like this photo campaign is one kind of reaction you can
identify and affiliate yourself with. While this may not relieve the “I should have said/done X in
the moment” feelings, it does show another kind of response you can have, especially since you
often cannot go back to those fleeting moments once they have already passed. Like The
Microaggressions Project, these kinds of grassroots, participatory campaigns show a group of
people collectively giving voice and increasing visibility to shared experiences, and also defiantly
resisting, challenging, and responding to a wide range of microaggressions. The deflating feeling
of “there’s no good response” when a microaggression happens is challenged with the
collective force of these images. The format of the digital photo portion of the campaign can be
relatively easily created and replicated in your own context, platforms, and networks. The point
is not about whether or not these kinds of efforts directly addresses all the microaggressors
you’ve encountered, or whether they have learned from their comments and actions, but
rather that you, the target of microaggressions, feel like you can do something in the face of all
the microaggressions you’ve encountered. Being anchored in virtual and in-person
communities of people who have shared similar experiences is a critical part of developing a
sense of empowered resilience as you learn to navigate these ongoing everyday manifestations
of social inequity.
In the next chapter, we move from still images to moving ones, exploring how
storytelling through the creation and sharing of humorous videos can work to expose and
disrupt microaggressions.

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Chapter 4: Seeing it in Action:
Creating, Performing, and Circulating Satirical Videos about Microaggressions

This chapter is about the creative production and circulation of comedic or satirical
videos about microaggressions, and their healing, educational, and political potential. Different
from the other highlighted case studies that featured more grassroots participatory projects or
campaigns, these videos were created by people situated in professional or commercial
contexts, such as multimedia news and entertainment organizations BuzzFeed, Fusion, and
MTV. Published online between 2013-2016, the seven videos that will be the primary focus of
this chapter have from 60,000 to over 12 million
236
views each and all use humor to call out and
educate about racial microaggressions. While the videos are all comedic and intended to be
humorous to varying degrees, the differing form of these creative strategies to speak back to
microaggressions can be organized in three general groupings: 1) satirical skits ridiculing a
range of common microaggressions by inverting them and turning them on frequent
perpetrators (such as BuzzFeed’s, “If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say”), 2) sketch comedy
shorts that focus on one specific manifestation of a microaggression (such as MTV News’
“Where are you REALLY from???”), or 3) videos that have a more explicitly educational aim,
created for people that dismiss or are unaware of the impact of these everyday experiences
(such as Fusion Comedy’s “How Microaggressions Are Like Mosquito Bites”). Through different
approaches to humorous critique and media making, these creators and performers made
these videos as an avenue of coping with and resisting these everyday racialized experiences,

236
Site analytics as of June 11, 2017.

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communing with others who also experience them, and in some cases, aiming to educate by
publicly speaking back to microaggressors.

What’s So Funny?

Humor plays with social norms, forcing us to recognize and reflect on our everyday
actions and the beliefs and values that underlie them. All of the videos in this chapter play with
humor and satire, a particular form of humor that has its roots as a literary form used as “an
effective method of drawing attention to the ways in which human behaviors falls short of its
ideal and of trying to correct that within an accepted political and social framework.”
237
As
literary scholar Peter Buckroyd contends, “Features that distinguish satire from other kinds of
writing are its flexibility of tone and its consistent use of wit and irony. The most consistent
target for satire in any period is hypocrisy, and the predominant method is irony, where the
reader always has to be alert to the conflict between the literal and actual meanings of what is
being said.”
238
Similarly, in their book on satire television, editors Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P.
Jones, and Ethan Thompson highlight a particularly useful definition from research on political
satire in the 1980s. Satire, they contend, can be thought of as a “verbal aggression in which
some aspect of historical reality is exposed to ridicule. It is a mode of aesthetic expression that
relates to historical reality, involves at least implied norms against which a target can be
exposed as ridiculous, and demands the pre-existence or creation of shared comprehension
and evolution between satirist and audience.”
239

These complex definitions have multiple relevant parts when thinking about the efficacy

237
Buckroyd, “Satire,” 330.
238
Ibid.
239
Gray, Jones, and Thompson, Satire TV, 12.

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of satire. First, they characterize the wielding of satire as a “verbal aggression” with the goal of
exposing the hypocrisy or absurdity of a socially and historically situated norm by making fun of
it. The “ability to produce social scorn or damning indictments”
240
through uncomfortable and
playful ridiculing is where satire’s power comes from when it works to effectively entertain us
and prompt us to think critically. It causes us to look at how things are and think about how
they could be. As these definitions also describe, satire requires the participation of the
audience, where it is only decipherable if you can identify the experiential reference points of
what is being isolated for ridicule, and decipher “the conflict between the literal and actual
meanings of what is being said.”
241
While you may not agree with nor find funny what or how
something is being satirized, the form challenges audiences to make the familiar ridiculous,
which, at the very least serves as a starting point to communicate across lines of familiarity and
difference. While all of the videos in this chapter play with satire to address microaggressions,
this next set of videos shows how effective satire can be in lampooning the “normal” to point
out and speak back to these everyday slights.

“Do You Have a Normal Name Too, or Just Your White Name?”

The satirical “If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say,”
242
“If Black People Said the Stuff
White People Say,”
243
and “If Latinos Said the Stuff White People Say,”
244
are three similarly-
formatted BuzzFeed videos that show people who embody Asian, Black, or Latino identities
perpetrating a series of short microaggressive interactions with various White friends,

240
Ibid.
241
Buckroyd, “Satire,” 330.
242
BuzzFeedYellow, If Asians Said The Stuff White People Say.
243
BuzzFeedYellow, If Black People Said The Stuff White People Say.
244
BuzzFeedYellow, If Latinos Said The Stuff White People Say.

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coworkers, or strangers. Created and produced within weeks of each other in Summer 2014,
each video is about 2 minutes long and satirizes approximately 20 racial microaggressions
commonly experienced by that racial group. For example, the question about having a “normal
name” is from the “If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say” video, which is a common
question asked of Asians (and many others) in America, that at its root, reflects notions of
Asians as perpetually foreign and therefore not “normal,” and White culture (in this case vis-à-
vis language and names) as the norm. This interlocking tension of always being seen as a
foreigner who does not belong and of Whiteness as the dominant, unquestioned norm comes
through in varied ways in other examples from the video, such as an Asian American woman
complimenting a White man with, “Your English is great! Were you adopted?,” and an Asian
American woman eagerly asking a White guy, “Are your parents like, super White?”
Unsurprisingly, the video itself opens with the quintessential, “No, where are you REALLY
from?” question asked by an Asian American guy to a White American guy after the White guy
says he is from Tennessee. By flipping the situation and showing scene after scene of racial
microaggressions usually targeted at members of marginalized groups inverted and directed
back at unsuspecting White people, these videos are literally making the familiar strange. The
satirical videos vividly point out and ridicule just how absurd, ignorant, or offensive these kinds
of interactions can be, and prompt reflection on problematic norms that may otherwise be
taken for granted as acceptable, “normal” behavior.
Although primarily focused on racial microaggressions as grouped into these larger
racial categories, each video also demonstrates the complex, layered nature of
microaggressions, showing how these everyday expressions of racism are often intertwined and

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intersecting with other “forms of subordination based on gender, class, sexuality, language,
culture, immigrant status, phenotype, accent, and surname.”
245
For example, the opening scene
of the “If Latinos Said the Stuff White People Say” video shows two men, one Latino and one
White, accidentally bumping into each other while walking past each other on the street. The
White man grumpily says, “Hey, watch where you’re going!” and the Latino man shouts back in
Spanish (with English subtitles), “Hey, you’re in California, learn to speak Spanish!” This scene is
about language, citizenship, immigration, and belonging, with a subtle dig at the history of U.S.
colonial imperialism with regards to Mexico, which used to be California and many other U.S.
states that we now think of as American territories. Further commenting on issues of belonging,
borders, citizenship, and the words we use to talk about these concepts, another scene from
this video shows a racial microaggression based on immigration status that is particularly
common in the U.S. for Latinos and other perceived “outsiders.” A Latina says to a White
stranger, “So are you here like legally?…I’m sorry, I mean documented?” This particular
exchange shows how the damage can be done even when the person perpetrating the
microaggression partially catches and tries to correct themselves in the act. She changes her
wording from “legal” to “documented,” but asking in the first place is a racial microaggression
prompted by a presumption of foreignness and not belonging based on appearance, name,
accent, or language.
Each video addresses these kinds of layered interactions specific to stereotypes
associated with each racial group. In the “If Black People Said the Stuff White People Say”
video, for example, a Black guy asks his White friend, “Was it hard to grow up in the suburbs? It

245
Yosso et al., “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for
Latina/o Undergraduates,” 662–663.

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must have been really boring with no police activity or anything,” alluding to “urban” or
“ghetto” class and race-based stereotypes. In another scene, a Black man greets a White male
acquaintance by the break room of an office space. “What’s up my crack-…” he begins. The
White man is taken aback at the use of the derogatory term for White people, and the Black
man says, “ Oh. Naw man, it’s cool. You know, I can say it. My girlfriend’s White.” The White
guy shakes his head and says, “Not cool, man,” and the Black man apologetically says, “Ok, my
bad Daniel, my bad.” The White man looks affronted again and says, “it’s Greg.” This scene flips
two kinds of microaggressions - one references when non-Black people freely and uncritically
use a derogatory term for Black people, the N-word, and another where people of the same
race are commonly mistaken for one another or treated as interchangeable. Similarly, in the “If
Asians…” video, an Asian American guy is sitting waiting on a bench between two unrelated
White guys and asks, “Come on guys, don't you have trouble telling White people apart? Like, I
can't tell you guys apart.” These ironic and satirical jabs at Whiteness and making visible the
everyday manifestations of the dominance of Whiteness makes many of the scenes
uncomfortable to take in even as one may laugh and find them humorous, which is part of their
effectiveness.
Another prevalent theme across the videos features examples that point out common
gendered racial microaggressions that hypersexualize, fetishize, and exoticize men and women
from each racial group. In “If Latinos Said the Stuff White People Say,” for example, a Latino
man says to his White friend, “Man, I totally have a thing for White girls... They're
like…booosh!,” as he makes a straight down gesture with his hands to indicate a woman’s non-
curvy figure. This scene references stereotypes about Latinas as curvy, “spicy,” exotic, hyper-

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feminine, hyper-sexual beings, and inverts the stereotype to single out and describe White
women as the opposite. Similarly, in “If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say,” an Asian guy
sitting at a table with a White woman says, “Hey, you know, I'm really into White girls - just
White girls.” She glares at him and leaves, and he’s surprised, calling after her, “Hey, where are
you going? Come on! I bet you're really opinionated, probably a little dumb.” This scene flips
the stereotype of Asian women as submissive, intellectual, and quiet, and also demonstrates
how creepy and problematic the common and blatant fetishization of Asian (or any group of)
women sounds when used to approach and talk about White women. Of course, gendered
racial microaggressions are not only perpetrated against one gender. In “If Black People Said
the Stuff White People Say,” for example, a Black woman asks a White woman in a friendly and
conspiratorial way, “You’re dating a White guy. Does he have, like, a really tiny penis?” She
smiles knowingly as the White friend grimaces and pauses, not knowing how to respond to the
prejudiced and invasive question. This scene references microaggressions that stem from
stereotypes about Black men being hyper-masculine and hyper-sexual vis-a-vis stereotypes
about their sexual organs and prowess, showing viewers what it sounds like when it is turned
around to single out and generalize about the bodies and masculinity of White men.
In addition to gendered racial stereotypes and interactions, the videos also took on
cultural stereotyping, fetishizing, and appropriation, including the representational
reductionism and tokenism that comes from limited visibility and limited mediated and popular
culture representations for people with marginalized identities. Many of the scenes in these
videos, for example, used popular cultural references to take jabs at people who either reduce
race or heritage to one kind of cultural artifact or expression, or who equate enjoying one piece

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of culture as an indication they are then able to be identified as part of that culture. The scene
that opens the “If Black People…” video is about music, for example, showing a Black woman
saying to a White girl, “Wait a minute. You don't listen to Taylor Swift?” When she responds no,
the Black women throws her hands in the air and says, “Girl, I am like Whiter than you!”
Similarly, in another scene, a Black man asks a White man, “What do you mean you don't listen
to Macklemore?! You're White!” This policing of Blackness and Whiteness via reductive
stereotypes about “culture” is echoed in examples across this dissertation, serving as yet
another reminder of how the identities of marginalized people are constantly being called into
question and challenged in everyday representations and interactions.
Relatedly, in other scenes, these videos satirize microaggressions that stem from the
homogenization and reduction of racial identities to other kinds of token popular cultural
representations like popular television shows and films. In the “If Asians…” video, for example,
an Asian guy asks a White woman, “Hey, do you watch How I Met Your Mother? I'm so into
White culture.” She pauses and blinks at the generalizing statement. This scene speaks to two
related issues, one of which is the dearth of a range of visible, diverse, mediated
representations of non-White, PoC lives and stories. The second issue, like the ill-fated family
holiday dinner and Fresh Off the Boat conversation featured in Chapter 2, touches on what can
happen when people’s real lives, experiences, and cultures are reduced to being popularly
represented by only one prominent television show that features and centers a family of color.
Similarly, in the “If Black People…” video, a Black man approaches a White woman and holds
onto her hands sympathetically as he says, “So I just saw Titanic. How are you dealing? I had no
idea your people had it so hard.” Both of these examples satirically point to the everyday

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impact of limited mediated representations of well-rounded, diverse, whole characters and
storylines on popular shows and movies. In showing how these kinds of racial microaggressions
manifest, they also show the underlying ignorance and social privileges that belie the
perpetrators’ good intentions.
As reiterated in other parts of this dissertation, the ideology of racism and its partner,
White supremacy, is predicated on the idea that there are inherent differences between people
because of socially constructed categories based on phenotype and culture, and that Whites
are racially superior and therefore entitled to certain privileges over every other racial or ethnic
group. This ideology prioritizes (middle class, heterosexual, Christian) Whiteness as “right” and
normal, and everything else as deviant or less than. The BuzzFeed videos take on these
underlying ideologies of White supremacy by satirizing how they frequently manifest in
everyday conversation. For example, in the “If Black People…” video, a Black woman says to a
White friend, “I don't even think of you as White.” The White woman makes a face and the
Black woman earnestly continues on, “I don't! I really don’t!” By flipping this comment to be
said by a Black woman to a White woman about Whiteness and White people, this scene
ironically highlights and ridicules the fact that people frequently say this kind of thing (i.e. I
don’t even think of you as Black/Latino/Asian) to people of color all the time in attempts to
compliment them without realizing the invalidating, White supremacist, racist implications of
their statements.
In other examples, the videos show how these ideologies manifest in interactions and
comments about attributes like appearance and language that are rooted in racial stereotypes
and perceptions about “difference” from Whiteness. For example, a Latina says to a White

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woman, “You’re White? I'm sorry you’re just not what I picture when I think of a White person!
That's crazy!” In another scene, she says to another White woman, “You’re so pretty, you could
totally pass for Latina.” Both of these examples show people in everyday conversation
experiencing a microaggression that makes them have to figure out how to defend the
authenticity of their identities against racial stereotypes and ideologies that center Whiteness
as the optimal norm. These themes cut across the other videos as well, showing how
microaggressions can manifest both in words and in accompanying gestures. In the “If Black
People…” video, a Black woman compliments a White woman on her hair. “Your hair is
amazing,” she says. The White woman thanks her, and the Black woman continues on, “You
know, it's kind of like my Golden Retriever. It's so limp and lifeless. Like, how do you do that?,”
as she reaches for the White woman’s scalp and invasively runs her fingers through her hair. In
the “If Asians…” video, an Asian woman yells over to a White guy, “Hey, look at me!” She uses
her fingers to pull wide and hold open her eyes, announcing triumphantly, “I’m White!”

Catharsis in Flipping the Script

Calling out and making visible Whiteness and White-centric dominant language, culture,
and norms was a theme that cut across all of the videos in this chapter, as can be readily seen
just by looking at the titles of the BuzzFeed videos (i.e., If X group Said the Stuff White People
Say). Although the project creators are aware that everyone has internalized biases and can and
does perpetrate microaggressions at some point in their lives, they wanted to create these
videos to give marginalized groups a chance to “get back at” the racial group that benefits most
from the dominant racial hierarchy, White people. When asked about his intention and
motivation for making these videos, producer Abe Foreman-Greenwald said simply, “catharsis.”

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He wanted to create something for PoC who frequently experience these kinds of interactions
as a form of release from the stress of a lifetime of these experiences. He not only wanted to
call out and highlight these common racial microaggressions, but viewed the creation and
circulation of the videos as a way of speaking back to those who have been microaggressed like
this in the past. For him, it wasn’t about reaching the people who might frequently perpetrate
microaggressions, but rather, it was about being a release and response for people who have
been the target of them and had no good way to respond in the moment. He was happy if other
people happened to learn something from it, but his primary goal was to entertain and provide
an avenue of release for the people who frequently experience these everyday slights to their
identities.
Like we have seen with examples from the other case studies, these videos were
created both as a result of conversations between like-minded, connected friends, and because
of media activism that came before. In the case of the creation of the first video in this series,
“If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say,” the idea came from a Facebook post by writer and
journalist Jeff Yang, who besides being a prolific writer of many articles and books on Asian
American identity, history, and culture, is now popularly known as “dad of Hudson Yang,” the
young star of the 2015 television series, Fresh Off the Boat. In his Facebook post, Yang posted a
short video he liked where the creators had inverted common microaggressions perpetrated by
straight people towards lesbians, and commented that someone with video production skills
should make something similar about all the things people say to Asian Americans. Friend and
film producer Abe Foreman-Greenwald, who has been connected with Asian American
entertainment and creative circles for decades (including his wife and longtime partner being

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Asian American actress Lynn Chen), was working at BuzzFeed at the time, saw this Facebook
post, thought it was a great idea, and it all took off from there. These videos came out of
conversations between networks of people who were already in conversation with each other
online and in person through their common work and affiliations in the creative and
entertainment arts and because of their awareness of and advocacy for Asian American media
representation and social justice issues. Through film festivals, screenings, comedy shows, talks
at schools, personal connections, local and national activism, and making media together, they
knew each other through both strong and loose ties, and their in-person and digital connections
allowed them to come together at a moment in time to create something that spoke to a lot of
people. Additionally, their skills, creativity, and positioning within cultural and entertainment
media organizations allowed them to create and widely spread their messages.
Speaking to the rapid ways media and cultural organizations shift and adapt in the
contemporary evolving communications era, producer Abe Foreman-Greenwald and comedian
Jenny Yang, one of the actors in “If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say” and a key
collaborator in writing and producing the video, describe these videos being created at a time
when BuzzFeed was not yet known for its proliferation of identity commentary videos and
videos about just about anything, like it is now, just two and a half years later. Yang related to
this moment as a time when entertainment news/cultural commentary organizations like
BuzzFeed were just starting to expand from “listacles” and develop this model of focusing a lot
on short video production, playing around with different formats, topics, etc. to develop their
business models and see what would spread. For BuzzFeed specifically, this was their first video
focused on Asian Americans to go “mega-vi” or mega viral, in company parlance. This reach and

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spread was also because after writing, directing, and producing the video all within a week (the
rapid-fire speed with which BuzzFeed pushes out their creations), Foreman-Greenwald sent the
link to Phil Yu, who posted it on his popular blog on Asian American culture and issues, Angry
Asian Man.
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Jenny Yang remembers thinking no one would see the video because it was
posted on a Friday, but over the weekend, it went from 1 million to 3 million views, and
today,
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it is currently at 12,346,449 views and counting.
Following the success of the first video, the “If Black People Said The Stuff White People
Say” and “ If Latinos Said The Stuff White People Say ” were quickly created in the same process
and format in the weeks following. These videos also did well on the BuzzFeed YouTube
channel, but spread even further on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Foreman-Greenwald
describes the BuzzFeed model as taking something the company views as “successful” and then
replicating it with incremental shifts, creating multiple iterations of the same video with slightly
different but related focuses in hopes of creating more “viral” videos. This example gives us a
glimpse into company culture and what is valued. BuzzFeed prioritizes views and clicks and
might not be solely focused on social justice issues or helping people deal with racial
microaggressions, for example, but some people working within the company might be, and
those people are allowed and encouraged to flex their creative muscles to create and spread
their work using the BuzzFeed vehicle as long as they can convincingly pitch their ideas and
show why they will resonant with large audiences.
Within this commercial context, the collaborative and participatory elements of this
project were possible because of both the culture, work, and organizational structures at

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“Angry Asian Man.”
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Site metrics as of June 11, 2017.

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BuzzFeed, and because of the people heading these projects. When Abe first took the idea to
Buzzfeed, he began by starting a conversation on one of their internal discussion forums to
brainstorm ideas, and dozens of Asian American and Asian employees from BuzzFeed offices
around the world contributed their own stories to the conversation. Comedian Jenny Yang, who
did not work there but was brought on to the project because of previous work she had done
with Abe, joked that coming up with examples for it was so easy that there was smoke coming
out of her keyboard from typing so fast. It is important to note that Abe recognized that his
White male identity likely precluded him from being able to come up with a representative
range of racial microaggressions targeted at Asians and Asian Americans, which is why he
crowdsourced ideas. It is also notable that he worked at a place where there were institutional
structures and a culture in place (e.g., the forums) to pursue this collaborative exercise. These
inclusive practices may seem obvious on both personal and institutional levels, but it is not
something to be taken for granted as universally understood or practiced. A glaring public
example of how the “point” of including diverse voices is misunderstood happened recently in
an argument between White male producer and actor Matt Damon and Effie Brown, an
experienced Hollywood producer and Black woman. In a room full of predominantly White men
(there was one White woman present), where she is the only person of color in the room, they
were reviewing a film project on the fourth season of his documentary television series Project
Greenlight. In the episode, Effie Brown is advocating that a person of color should be brought in
to direct a delicate scene featuring violence towards a person of color on screen, when Matt
Damon repeatedly interrupts her to assert that diversity is only about who is cast onscreen, and
not behind the camera. This mentality of token representation being all we need, and that it

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does not matter who is doing the storytelling, is pervasive in Hollywood culture. The producer
of the BuzzFeed videos not only sought and centered the voices of the racial groups he was
highlighting in the videos, but advocated on their behalf when there was pushback by people
who did not understand, further demonstrating the importance of having someone not just
behind and in front of the camera, but also at the table and in the room when decisions are
being made.
When asked if he came across any resistance or barriers to the concept or creation of
the first video, Abe said he had the freedom to run with the idea after pitching it to his
manager, but also described a meeting later on in the process where he had to advocate for the
content of his work with three White senior producers (alluding to company culture, he joked,
“I was always senior in age, if not in status”). They were providing feedback about the rough cut
of the video, and suggested segments to cut because they did not think “audiences” would find
them funny.
They said, “I don’t know if this one works,” and I was like, “It does. We need that in
there.” There were a couple things that they said, “Maybe this won’t get a laugh,” and I
said, “No, it’s a strong joke, we need it in there.” And I think they listened to that, that I
was passionate about it and confident that certain things worked, and they did. And (the
video) was not for them, so, yeah.

Age jokes aside, Abe said he usually took those feedback meetings in stride and would address
and incorporate the notes from the senior producers in his work, but for these, he felt much
more strongly about taking a firm stance against some of their comments. His confidence and
belief in the work came from the collaborative way he, with Asian Americans, had come up with
these 20 microaggressions to feature in the video. So when the White institutional gatekeepers
at the media company were challenging the White producer about the content that was co-

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created and based on the personal experiences and stories of Asian Americans, he had the
motivation and confidence to stay firm in his stance, especially because, as he said, the video
“was not for them.”

How to Eat PB&J

In terms of how this video impacted some of the participants in the video, Abe and
Jenny both described how the visibility helped launch the careers of YouTube-famous
celebrities like BuzzFeed’s Eugene Lee Yang, and Jenny’s own career in comedy and on the
Internet. Their celebrity in turn has helped them reach more people as they have become more
confident in being active participants in entertainment circles, including on the Internet and in
the social media world. For example, Jenny reflected on how her work with Abe on “If Asians
Said the Stuff White People Say” opened doors for her to transition to more work in the
entertainment industry.
I definitely would say this video was a really big video to my career in terms of having
people and visibly and having people see a part of what I can do. Yeah, it was a big part
of it, 'cause, you know, my thing was just being a standup comedian as a core craft. And
I was just starting to explore writing, and I had no real experience with producing
videos, even though that was what everyone was doing and I knew a lot of Asian
American YouTubers, it was really a huge blessing to have this experience with Abe and
BuzzFeed so that I could actually be a part of that process and start to learn about it,
you know? Since then, my first main job in entertainment since I decided to transition
from politics was to be an assistant to a producer to a sitcom. So I was seeing sort of a
like, full standard, high budget comedy production, behind the scenes, seeing it how
was set up. That’s multi camera, which is live audience. And the next assistant job was
Key & Peele, which is single camera, which is like setting up locations and all these
things. I really attribute to my comfort in knowing how to imagine myself as a producer
as well as a writer and as a content creator to all of these experiences together. Because
through the experience with Abe with YouTube, other people recognize me as someone
they call upon to do their digital work too. Since then, I’ve worked with so many other
YouTubers, had my own talkshow with Angry Asian Man, practiced talking on camera
with that, so you know, acting in more things, for different comedy, like Funny or Die,
I’ve been acting more. Um, so yeah, I really feel like that was a big part of my

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development and education to being hopefully relevant and adaptable to this kind of
media environment now. ‘Cause you have to do everything now, in order to have a
platform or impact.

Jenny describes having more opportunities to hone her comedic and acting skills, and being
able to imagine herself “as a producer as well as a writer and as a content creator” because of
her experiences working at BuzzFeed and subsequently, on various other entertainment sets.
All of these experiences and skills came together last year when she decided to respond to a
public controversy by producing her first video.
For me, as of September, was my first ever self-produced comedy video that I
conceived, produced, I got the location, I wrote, I starred in, I got the people, the crew,
the lighting, the costume. Like, I did the BuzzFeed experience for the first time for
myself in September of last year, and this is after three years of being on sets and
working with other people. But, because of that experience, it was literally like, I
anticipated that I would feel more comfortable doing it, and then when the opportunity
came with something that went viral that was upsetting, I came up with something that
was a response to it, in a very short amount of time. And it was like, oh, this is how it
feels to conceive something and execute it because I’ve had this experience elsewhere.
‘Cause it’s also a sense of rhythm and capacity, here’s a format that’s doable, you can
execute it.

The “something that went viral that was upsetting” she references was the 2016 Bon Appétit
video featuring Tyler Akin, a White male chef in Philadelphia telling people the “right” way to
eat pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup and traditionally popular street food. In addition to
featuring the noodle dish as if this White chef had discovered it or was innovative because he
was cooking it, Bon Appétit framed pho as “the new ramen,” effectively trying to replace one
Asian noodle soup with another, as if there can only be one kind of Asian noodle soup at a time
in the White imaginary. The video has since been deleted because of all of the pushback Bon
Appétit received, including the satirical video response Jenny made, “How to Eat PB&J (Bad

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Appetite Magazine).”
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In the quote below, she talks about what prompted her to create the
video and believe that she could respond to this issue publicly in a way that was relevant and
timely.
So (the Bon Appétit video) dropped on a Tuesday. Later on on Tuesday, I got tagged by a
friend on Twitter who was like, “Is this “columbusing?’” and I just quickly looked at it
and I was just like, “oh OBViously,” ‘cause she’s from Philly and then I kind of just
dismissed it. But then on Wednesday morning people posted it, and I was like eh, I
should post it and so I did and made some sort of comment, and it just generated so
much energy on my Facebook thread that part of it was like someone should do a
response to this, and I was just like you know what, fuck it, let’s just do it. So that was
when, that moment of fuck it, let’s do it, was at 3pm on Wednesday, that’s the day after
the video had come out. 3pm until the next day 3pm Thursday, in 24 hours, got together
with the crew, came together with the concept, and did all of it, shot it at 3pm the next
day, and from 3-6pm treated my crew to dinner. We got pho.

Jenny saw an issue that she cared about generating a lot of discussion online, thought someone
should respond, and then decided that because of her previous experiences, she could be that
person. Once she decided to do it, she quickly pulled people together and got to work. After
writing, acting, directing, filming, and then editing it over the weekend, they posted it on
Monday, and “How to Eat PB&J” is currently at 47,608 views on YouTube.
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Jenny was happy
with the video because it scathingly satirizes the original video by once again “flipping the
script,” featuring Asian American “chefs” talking condescendingly about the “right” way to eat
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and because she was proud of how she managed to
produce it and respond so quickly to a current, relevant topic.
It looks good and all different levels, fast turnaround yeah, I was happy with it. And it
did what I wanted, which is it generated a ripple into the conversation, that was the
point of it. Like, I went to KPCC to talk about it, you know, on local NPR, public radio.
And that was great and there was all this other coverage in food platform as well as
others included it in the discussion about the controversy, and that’s actually going to

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Jenny Yang, How to Eat PB&J (Bad Appetite Magazine).
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As of June 11, 2017.

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be some stuff I’m going to be doing more of.

Because of her experiences, she continues to feel more confident with her comedy, writing,
performing, and producing skills, and wants to continue the work of being able to respond
quickly and effectively to instances like this, contributing counter-narratives against everyday
racism with the production of satirical videos.

That Dreaded Question

Whereas the BuzzFeed “If Asians/Black People/Latinos Said the Stuff White People Say”
videos took on 20 or so common microaggressions in each of the three videos, the next videos
focused on satirizing one type of racial microaggression each. In “Where are you REALLY
from???,”
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an episode of MTV News’ web series Decoded with Franchesca Ramsey, and in
“What Kind of Asian Are You?,”
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a video created by web personality and author Ken Tanaka,
the writers, producers, and actors of these videos address the ever-prevalent line of
questioning about racial and ethnic heritage that PoC often face that starts with the question,
“Where are you from?”

Where Were You From Before You Were Born?

The two minute video “What Kind of Asian Are You?,” posted May 2013 and viewed
over 9 million times,
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captures and satirizes one example of how microaggressions about
racial, ethnic, and national identity can manifest in causal, everyday interactions with strangers.
The video shows an Asian woman in jogging clothes stretching by the side of a hiking trail when

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MTV News, Where Are You REALLY From?
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helpmefindparents, What Kind of Asian Are You?
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As of June 11, 2017.

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a friendly White male jogger stops to talk to her. They make genial small talk about the weather
before he starts inadvertently peppering her with microaggressions. He begins, “Where are you
from? Your English is perfect.” She replies, “San Diego. We speak English there.” He pauses
slightly at what he interprets as a miscommunication, shakes his head, and says, “Oh, uh, no,
where…are you…from?” slowly re-articulating his question as he gestures with his hands to the
past. She pauses for a beat to look at him, but then gives a partial answer, still not answering
the question she knows he is trying to ask. “Well, I was born in Orange County, but I never
actually lived there,” she says. He responds, “I mean, before that.” “Before I was born?” she
says. There is a pause, but unperturbed, the White man continues on, “Well, where are your
people from?” She finally gives him the answer he is looking for, “Well, my great grandma was
from Seoul.” He beams and exclaims, “Korean! I knew it! I was like, she’s either Japanese or
Korean. But I was leaning towards Korean.” “Amazing,” she replies with a straight face, still
entertaining the conversation. He does not pick up on the subtle sarcasm, but instead,
continues on, eager to demonstrate his knowledge about a range of “Asian” things. He says a
greeting in Korean, puts his hands together in prayer position and bows, and then goes on to
talk about food. “There’s a really good teriyaki BBQ place near my apartment. I actually really
like kimchi.” “Cool,” she says again with patient, subtle sarcasm at his attempt to make
connection. Her expression softens for a second, and she reciprocates, asking, “What about
you? Where are you from?” San Francisco, he answers. “But where are you from?,” she asks,
emphasizing and dragging out the word “from” like he did. “Oh,” he says, “I’m just American.”
“Really? You’re Native American.” Her statement is less of a question, but more of a repeated
statement, prompting him to reflect on what he said. “No. Uh, just regular American,” he

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answers. This evokes a silent, pointed look from the Asian woman. “Oh, uh, well, I guess my
grandparents were from England.” “Oh. Well, then,” the Asian woman bursts into an
exaggerated, loud, English accent, “‘ello gov’na! What’s all this then?! Top o’ the morning to
ya!” She continues on, theatrically acting out successive stereotypical British phrases, “Let’s get
a spot o’ tea, a spot o’ tea! Double, Double, Toil and Trouble! (hunches over, pretends to mix a
cauldron), Mind the gap!! Beware Jack the Ripper! Bloody hell! Pip pip! Cheerio! (she does a
little jig and clicks her feet together in the air).” Returning to herself and her normal voice, she
looks at him and says with exaggerated emphasis, “I think your people's fish and chips are
amazing.” Disturbed by the turn of events, the White man says, “You’re weird.” “Really? I’m
weird?,” she says, “must be a Korean thing.” She smiles, fixes her ponytail, and jogs away on
the trail. The White guy, disconcerted, watches her leave and then slowly walks away in the
other direction.
In this video, the friendly but oblivious White man does not realize that his increasingly
targeted questions trying to find out the ethnic background of the Asian woman he just met is
full of presumptive racial microaggressions. Starting with the “compliment” that he is surprised
because her “English is perfect,” to not accepting that she can be from San Diego or born in
Orange County, to finally finding out her great grandma was from Seoul and then making a
series of generalizations about culture, language, and Asian food in attempts to connect and
demonstrate a knowledge and awareness about Asianness, their entire conversation is full of
well-intended but cutting microaggressions. His White privilege shows even further when he is
questioned about his own ethnic background right after their protracted exchange about where
she is “from,” and he expects her to accept that he’s from San Francisco, and then when

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prompted again, that he is “just regular American.” When she still does not accept this national
identity like he did not accept hers, he has to think about it and then says that he guesses his
grandparents were from England, indicating that he likely has the social privilege of not having
to frequently, or ever, identify with that aspect of his heritage if he chooses not to. And finally,
the section of the video where the Asian woman animatedly performs stereotypical British
expressions and then compliments him about “his people’s” fish and chips turns the lens back
on Whiteness to show what these common racial microaggressions experienced by people of
color sounds like when turned to generalize about White people and culture.
As the video shows, these pointed and obliviously marginalizing questions about racial,
ethnic, and national origin can take many forms but is often represented by the question “No,
but where are you REALLY from?.” This type of common microaggression was also addressed in
multiple examples from Chapters 2 and 3, such as in the many stories from The
Microaggressions Project where people described the frustration and invalidation they felt with
experiencing these exact kinds of interactions where people tried repeatedly to label them as
stereotypes, foreign outsiders, not “normal,” or “other” through their words. Similarly, in the I,
Too, Am Harvard photo campaign, one memorable campaign image features a young man of
color holding up a message board that reads, “‘What are you?’ is not a cute introduction.”
While the forms of expression featured in these other projects relied on descriptions of these
incidences and/or descriptions about people’s reactions to experienced microaggressions, the
videos in this chapter feature people vividly showing you what they look like when they
happen. Additionally, since these are satirical videos, they go one step further and
exaggeratedly lampoon the situations, not only showing you how these kinds of

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microaggressions typically manifest, but also turning the situation on its head to jab back at the
well-intended but racist underpinnings of the interaction and demonstrating the
problematicness of the questions by redirecting them back on unquestioned Whiteness. By
seeing both what frequently-experienced microaggressions by people of color look and sound
like around this topic, and then seeing them similarly perpetrated at White people, even if
viewers do not recognize the racial microaggressions as they “normally” manifest, the videos
challenge viewers, at the very least, to stop and decipher what is going on in these scenarios
and think about why it is being satirized.

What Kind Are You?

The 2015 “Where are you REALLY from???” video from MTV News’ Decoded also takes a
similar approach to highlight these same kinds of well-intentioned racial microaggressions
about foreignness and belonging, showing what they sound like when directed at a Black
woman. In this two and a half minute video that has over 68,000 views,
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a Black woman and
White man sit down at a table in a local cafe. She comments that she likes the vibe of the place
and can’t believe she hasn’t been to it, since the cafe is in her neighborhood. He asks her if she
just moved to the area and she says, no, she’s lived there for awhile. Then, the question comes
out, “Where are you from?,” he asks. “Florida,” she responds. “No, but like, where are you from
from?” he asks. “So, West Palm Beach, which is like an hour away from Miami,” she offers. Still
not satisfied, he continues, “I think you're misunderstanding my question. Where are
you...from?” “Oh, I know what you mean,” she smiles knowingly, followed quickly by, “Florida.”
He tries a different tactic, “Alright. Um…where are your parents from?” “Florida,” she responds.

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As of June 11, 2017.

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In rapid frames cutting back and forth between the actors, the satire begins. “What about your
parents' parents?” “Florida.” “Where are your grandparents' parents from?” “Florida.” “So,
you're from Haiti?” “Florida.” “Jamaica?” “Florida.” “Suriname?” “Florida!” The speed of the
conversation slows to a normal pace for a moment as he rephrases his inquiry again, and asks,
“Where are your people from?” The rapid framing commences again, with the Black woman
reacting negatively to the phrasing of his question. “My people?” she repeats incredulously.
“Your people.” This phrase is repeated again back and forth by the two of them until he again
asks, “Where are your people from?” “Oh, my people!” she says with a smile. She happily pulls
out her phone to show him a picture of two Black friends, one of whom she starts to explain is
from Minnesota. He cuts her off again and says, “Listen, listen. Not this. This is not what I'm
asking. Where are you from originally?” She repeats his question, “Where am I from originally?”
and then breaks the fourth wall, looks directly into the camera and asks, “Where are any of us
from originally?” as she stands and the background changes from the coffee shop to the
cosmos. In a dreamy voice, she narrates as the stars and galaxies swirl behind her, “Let’s go
back to the very beginning, The Big Bang. The universe is a high-density speck expanding
across…” The scene abruptly cuts back to the cafe as she sits back down and the White guy
says,”No, no, no. Not like that. So, I'm one quarter German, and then I'm actually 5/13 Native
American, Tribe of the Cherokee,” he says proudly. A Native American barista is bringing coffee
to their table when he overhears him, and says, “You're Native American? I'm Haliwa-Saponi,
and Tuscarora. Sequoia-quasi. What clan-ship are you from?” The White guy responds, “My
entire family is in a clan. And I'm a (mumbles gibberish names) as well.” The Native man says to
him, “Oh. You're not from America. Where are you from?” The Black woman adds with

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emphasis, “Originally.” The White guy raises his hands up in defense and says proudly, “I’m
American alright. My relatives came over on the Mayflower.” “So you’re from England,” the
Native man says, “And you wanna give this young lady a hard time about where she's from?
Enjoy your lattes…chap.” He smiles and walks away. The scene focuses back on their table and
sad, dramatic music plays in the background as the Black woman asks, “Why are you so
concerned with putting me in a box? I mean, it was really hard for me to share with you that I'm
from Florida. Why don't you just get to know me instead? Can we leave the whole ‘Where are
you from?’ thing alone?” He apologizes, “I’m really sorry about that. I never know what's right
to say.” She brushes it off, “It's not that big of a deal,” and changes the subject. “ So this coffee
is really good, huh?” “You like it?,” he asks, “I’m on it.” He turns around to talk to the cafe
worker again and calls across the room, “Hi! Where's this coffee from? I think it's Mexican from
what color it is, but…I’ve learned so much, I don't wanna regress.” The skit ends as the show’s
logo flashes on the screen and music closes us out. In the outro, while showing links to other
similar videos on one side, the other side features words you both see and hear in Decoded
host Franchesca Ramsey’s voice: “The question ‘Where are you from?’ is something people of
color deal with all the time. On it's own, it's not a bad thing. The goal should be getting to know
someone, not put them in a box. And if you ask the question and someone gives you an answer,
just believe them.”
Similar to the “What Kind of Asian Are You?” video, “Where are you REALLY from???”
shows a well-intentioned White guy persistently asking a Black woman a series of questions full
of microaggressions about her identity and heritage. The problems start with the question,
“Where are you from?,” which as the final seconds of the video reminds us, is not in and of

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itself a negative question. However, as seen above, it is something that can quickly become
problematic, and these problematic aspects are something that people of color experience all
the time. Like the other video, this video demonstrates the different ways these kinds of
questions can play out depending on your perceived identity within a specific social context.
Despite the Black woman’s repeated answers to the White man’s questions about being from
Florida, he did not accept her city or country of origin and continued to ask further and further
back into her family’s history, asking about her parents and grandparent’s parents. When he did
not get the answer he was looking for with that line of questioning, he changed tactics to ask
about a series of Caribbean and South American countries: Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname. And when
that still did not work for what he wanted, he changed his wording again to ask about where
her “people” are from, a coded phrase that is highlighted by their back and forth about the
phrase and the misunderstanding where she tries to talk about her Black friends, one of whom
is from Minnesota. The satire deepens as undeterred, the White man rephrases his question
yet again, and asks her where she is “originally” from. Unlike the joggers video which only
briefly mentions Native people as a counterpoint to being the “original” people on this land,
this video further emphasizes the history and implications of White settler colonial privilege by
featuring a Native person pushing back on the White guy who claimed his five-thirteenths
Native Americanness. When questioned about his affiliation with the Native roots he claimed,
his knowledge breaks down, and a subtle joke passes quickly playing on the words (Native
American) “clans” and (White Supremacist) “klans.” Unlike the “What Kind of Asian Are You?”
video where the Asian woman closes out the skit by jesting the White man and leaving, this
video shows a different way that someone might respond to being the target of these kinds of

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microaggressions. Near the end of the video, the Black woman, hurt and vulnerable,
straightforwardly asks the White man to stop trying to put her in a box because it was already
difficult for her to admit to being from Florida. She forgives him quickly when he sincerely
apologizes, but cleverly, the skit is not over, showing how microaggressions can happen quickly,
again and again, even when you (or you and a by-standing barista) have just seconds ago spent
time pointing them out and explaining why certain kinds of comments are harmful,
disrespectful, or invalidating. The skit ends with the White perpetrator apologizing for causing
harm through his previous line of questioning, acknowledging that he has learned something
from their conversation, and then turning right around to make another racial generalization
about another topic, in this case, about the brown coffee probably being from Mexico.
In both of these videos, the scenes and dialogue forces viewers to consider the
implications of the line of questioning that often comes after “Where are you from?” for people
of color. Despite the non-malicious intentions of the question-askers, the videos expose how
these kinds of questions presume foreignness, difference, and not belonging because people of
color are physically identified and then interacted with as if they are inherently different from
the (White) American norm, and therefore not able to be “from” here. Both of the videos also
show a range of how many different forms these questions can take, both generally (e.g.,
Where are you REALLY from?, Where are your parents/grandparents/great grandparents
from?, Where are your people from?, Where are you originally from?, Where were you from
before you were born?, What are you?) and when targeted at specific racial and ethnic groups
(e.g., What kind of Asian are you?, Are you from Japan, Korea, China, Thailand? What kind of
Black person are you? Are you from Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname?). In satirical redirection of these

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kinds of questions to the White guys in each skit, the videos also show the privileges of
Whiteness in that White people are seldom asked these kinds of question in terms of their
ethnic origin, and can often choose whether or not to identify with their European immigrant or
other heritages. This ability to be “normal” or unmarked as different or foreign is an affordance
that people of color do not have in the United States. Because of dominant and prevalent
conceptions of what “American” looks like, as well as the language and labels we use to talk
about national identity and racial groups, White people in America are often not challenged if
they answer that they are from a city, like San Diego, or a state, like Florida, or, if they say they
are American, because they fit the dominant perception of what being “from” America looks
like. This manifestation of White settler colonial privilege is further underlined in both videos
with references to Native and Indigenous peoples, who are both historically and to this day, the
deeply and systemically marginalized, brutalized people “originally from” this country.

Origins and Motivations

The origins of these two videos speaks to the motivations behind why they were
created, and the kinds of things the video makers wanted their videos to do. While “What Kind
of Asian Are You?” was created by a group of creative friends connected in the entertainment
industry, and “Where are you REALLY from???” was created in the context of a web series for a
media organization, unsurprisingly, both were inspired by personal experiences.
The idea for the 2013 “What Kind of Asian Are You?” video came up because actress and
professional dancer Stella Choe (the Asian woman in the video) was at a party with her friend,
actor David Ury (one of the video’s co-writers), when a White guy she had just met asked her,

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“What kind of Asian are you?,” the question that ultimately became the summarizing title of
the video. Describing the situation, she said,
After telling him my parents were both Korean, he proceeded to tell me about his co-
worker who was Korean. He was friendly enough, but (David and I) found it funny that
he wanted to tell me about his Korean co-worker, simply because I was Korean. It took
me back to all the times I had been asked where I was from, and people's attempts to
connect and begin to tell me about all their Korean knowledge.

Although she recognized that the guy was friendly, well-intentioned, and trying to make a
connection, her short description of this situation also shows how these kinds of casual
interactions trigger memories of previous experiences with microaggressions, alluding to their
cumulative and long term weight. Although she describes the situation lightly and as something
her and her friend found entertaining, David Ury, a White American man who likely does not
encounter these kinds of situations often, sounds slightly more exasperated and less forgiving
when sharing his perspective of the event:
I was at a party and I overheard a guy asking Stella ‘what kind of Asian’ she was. When
he heard ‘Korean,’ he began to name off every Korean person and foodstuff he could
think of. The conversation was pretty close to what’s in the video.
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Stella and David, who were already talking about making something together before this event,
shared their experience at the party with Ken Tanaka,
255
another creative friend with video
production experience, and that is ultimately how the video came to be. Co-producer and co-
writer Ken Tanaka, born Ken Smith, is famous on the Internet for videos on his YouTube
channel. Born in Los Angeles but adopted by a Japanese family and raised in rural Japan, he
returned to LA to search for his birth parents at the age of 33 and documented the search in
videos on YouTube. He eventually met actor David Ury because many people kept commenting

254
“Who Is David Ury?”
255
“Ken Tanaka.”

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the two looked alike, or got confused that they were actually the same person because of their
similar appearance and both being White men who speak Japanese fluently (with different
accents). The two eventually became friends and collaborated on many creative projects like
this video and others that playfully speak to identity and stereotypes and their everyday
ramifications. For example, “But we’re speaking Japanese!,”
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published in 2014 with 1.6
million views,
257
features a group of friends, 3 White or White passing people (including Ken
Tanaka and David Neptune, another co-producer for both videos), 1 Black man, and an Asian
woman (Stella Choe) at a Japanese restaurant, where the Japanese waitress seemingly cannot
understand the four people who speak fluent Japanese but don’t “look” Japanese, and instead
keeps trying to communicate with Stella, who looks East Asian, but doesn’t speak a word of
Japanese. In one scene, David Neptune’s character, who looks White, imploringly asks the
Japanese waitress in fluent Japanese to open her mind to the social constructedness of racial
categories based on appearance, and to embrace the diversity of the global 21
st
century. Like
the creation of the BuzzFeed videos, The Microaggressions Project, and the I, Too, Am Harvard
Campaign, these videos are yet another example of people who were connected on- and offline
through their creative, personal, and professional networks who came together to make and
circulate media in response to experiences with racial microaggressions.
Similarly, across the U.S. and in a different context, Brooklyn-based writer and comedian
Rekha Shankar describes how she came up with the idea for the 2015 video “Where are you
REALLY from???” for MTV’s Decoded based off of the many experiences she and other PoC
friends had with these kinds of frustrating everyday interactions about identity and belonging.

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helpmefindparents, But We’re Speaking Japanese! 日本語喋ってるんだけど.
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As of June 11, 2017.

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I wrote it based on my experiences and the experiences of my women of color friends
with the seemingly harmless question, “Where are you from?" It probably sounds trite
at this point, but I never knew how to answer. Because when I would tell people
"Philly," as a kid, there was always the follow-up question, "But where are you from?,”
which basically translated to, “Why are you brown?" I even had a boss last year ask me
where I was from, and I said, "Philly, but my family is from India," and then she said, “Do
you go home often?" and I asked what she meant and she said, “Do you go to India
often?" Uhh, because that's my "home??”…While I am absolutely proud to be Indian,
she was making me feel like I had no claim to also being American. Even though I was
born in Connecticut, which is basically the opposite of India.

Rekha’s translation of the question, “Where are you from?” to really mean, “Why are you
brown?” is both an indication of her dry wit and a poignant statement about the othering
implications of these kinds of interactions, pointing out the underlying message that because of
her features, it is implied that she cannot be “from here” because she is not “normal
American,” or in other words, White. Her well-rehearsed succinct answer of “Philly, but my
family is from India” in response to the question from her boss also shows how often she has
been asked these kinds of questions, as well as how her preemptive attempts at nipping
potential microaggressions in the bud by answering all possible meanings of the question still
failed to prevent them in this instance.

Who Are the Videos For?

While it was clear that the creation of these videos stemmed from personal experiences
and served as a creative way to speak back to these kinds of interactions, I was also interested
in the creator’s ideas of who they wanted to be reaching with the videos. Like how Abe
Foreman-Greenwald and Jenny Yang described the BuzzFeed videos as “catharsis” for PoCs,
both Stella Choe and Rekha Shankar described creating these videos for “release” and as an
outlet to channel frustrations from all of their own cumulative experiences, and as a way to

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acknowledge, affirm, and entertain their fellow PoC friends whom they knew would identify.
When I asked Rekha about who she had imagined the audience to be for her creations, she
reflected,
You know, when I started writing stuff for Decoded, I thought the audience would be
White people who are curious about social justice issues that they may or may not know
about. But after really thinking about it, I think it's equally if not more for POC to feel
validated that their experiences are worth talking about, worth exploring, and real.
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This dual goal of educating unwitting perpetrators of racial microaggressions as well as the
desire to commune with frequent experiencers of them lies at the heart of each of these
projects. In the quote above, Rekha emphasizes the importance of these videos being able to
center stories about and validate the experiential reality of people of color who frequently
encounter these subtle everyday interactions that may be easily dismissed even as they build
up to do cumulative damage. The fact that she has to reiterate that POC stories are “worth
talking about, worth exploring, and real” speaks to a U.S. entertainment industry context that
has much more work to do in terms of creating, sharing, and valuing diverse stories told by
diverse storytellers. While Rekha highlights the importance for writing this piece as a release
and affirmation to PoCs, she also hopes that videos like this can help communicate to White
people and others who do not experience this persistent challenging of their identities to
realize how common place, disruptive, and invalidating it can be for marginalized people who
are constantly reminded that their very person is somehow problematic.
I thought it was important to focus on this (topic) because I think a lot of people don't
see the harm in this kind of questioning. I didn't even see it for a long time! But every
time you get asked that - and White folks, please rest assured that we are always asked
that - it forces one inch of distance between you and the White folks who "belong"
around you. It's a question asked to categorize you…I don't think some White folks know

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Emphasis here her own (via written responses to interview questions).

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how bad it feels to be second-guessed literally everywhere you go for just trying to
exist.

In the quote above, she talks about the prevalent and cumulative pain of experiencing
microaggressions, and specifically, this specific type of microaggression, over and over again.
She describes how it feels being “second-guessed literally everywhere you go for just trying to
exist,” speaking to not just the humiliating and invalidating stress of each instance, but also the
frequency and weight of these encounters that happen persistently in all domains of life. Her
statements also reflect that she is aware that many (White) people may not know what these
experiences are like and therefore unintentionally continue to contribute to these experiences,
but that despite good intentions, these actions have consequences and she wants them to
know that. In the middle of her explanation, she even included a preemptive response
statement to potential naysayers, stating again, yes, “White folks, please rest assured that we
are always asked that,” demonstrating that she has been challenged about the validity and
weight of these kinds of repeated experiences. And importantly, when she mentions that she
understands many people do not see the harm in these kinds of questions, and that she herself
didn’t see it for a long time, she also acknowledges that unpacking stereotypes and how
privileges and oppression manifest structurally, systemically, and interpersonally is a process of
ongoing learning that takes time and effort for every one of us.
These same sentiments were also echoed when Stella, reflecting on her role in “What
Kind of Asian Are You?,” connected microaggressions with larger structural and systemic issues,
reiterating that
we are all at fault sometimes, making assumptions based on stereotypes, because they
are so ingrained in us. These subtle interactions, while seemingly harmless, lend

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themselves to perpetuating other stereotypes and racial prejudices that do much more
harm, as we witness and hear about all the time.

Although the “villains” in these videos were unwitting White men, and the writing, acting, and
editing purposefully highlighted the hypocrisy and problems with White-dominant thinking,
both Stella and Rekha indicated that the important thing for both of them in creating these
videos was not necessarily to place blame, but rather to build awareness. Yes they were
speaking back to their lifetime of experiences with people like the White men featured in the
videos, and hoped that the satire would open their eyes so that they could learn from and take
responsibility for the examples of racial privilege and oppression highlighted in these videos,
but they also hoped to be helping people of color to be confident in being able to articulate,
define, and find the humor and absurdity in these invalidating experiences they experience all
the time. By creating and being a part of these projects that spoke back to these
microaggressions in this public, spreadable way, the creators were healing from their own
experiences, strengthening their own voices for future experiences, and sharing these stories of
resistance, humor, and resilience with PoC audiences they hoped to be reaching.
Although all of the videos featured in this chapter were created to varying degrees both
as creative, communal acknowledgement or resistance for PoCs and frequent experiencers of
microaggressions, as well as an attempt to show detractors why and how microaggressions
matter, these next two videos were created with more of an explicit educational focus in mind.
Through the form that these videos take as well as the intentions behind the pieces as
described by the creators, “You CAN’T Sound White!” and “How Microaggressions Are Like
Mosquito Bites” were created to not only speak back to, but also teach about microaggressions.

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My Voice is My Voice

With 81,000 views,
259
“You CAN’T Sound White!”
260
is a two and a half minute Decoded
episode published online in January 2016. Like the videos from the previous section, this video
focuses on unpacking the issues around one specific microaggression, the comment that
someone “sounds White.” Unlike the “where are you really from” videos however, “You CAN’T
Sound White!” also highlights how microaggressions can be perpetrated by people of all
backgrounds and not only by White people. As the video description states,
There's a lot of messed up things with the phrase "You Sound White!" On one side,
some people are trying to give you a weird, backhanded compliment that implies that
only white people are educated and intelligent. On the other side, people of color often
use the phrase to tell you that you don't belong. It's a common saying that's both dumb
and hurtful because at the end of the day, your voice is simply your voice.
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By pointing to multiple examples of different kinds of people saying the same microaggressive
comment, the video addresses a nuanced point about microaggressions - that although they
frequently come from people of the dominant majority, because we are all socialized within
this system, microaggressions can also be perpetrated by other marginalized people. Through
its content (discussed below in more detail), the video ultimately shows how the same words
can take on different meanings depending on the identities of the people involved, and
prompts viewers to think about how intentionality and context, taken together with frequency,
contribute to the weight of these experiences building over time.
The format of this video is also different than the others that have previously been
explored in this chapter, indicating that beyond just being about entertainment, this video was

259
As of June 11, 2017.
260
MTV News, You CAN’T Sound White! | Decoded | MTV News.
261
Ibid.

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created to try to teach something. Whereas the other videos have been made up entirely of
satirical sketch comedy scenes, “You CAN’T Sound White!” follows a video confessional format,
featuring four people of color individually talking directly to the camera about their experiences
with this specific racial microaggression. Although the people in the video are comedians and
actors and the tone of the video still includes satirical and humorous moments, the people are
not acting out a scene. Instead, they are each talking directly to viewers about their personal
experiences in order to speak back to and educate about the implications and impacts of being
told they sound White.
Since the video is about sound, appearance, race, and voice, the form and content of
the video references and reinforces these themes throughout. For example, the opening scenes
introduce us to the people featured in the video by showing us first a dark silhouette of a
person before hearing their voice. Only after each silhouetted figure makes their initial
introductory statement are we then shown what they look like. The first voice we hear is the
host of the show, Franchesca Ramsey, saying, “The whole concept of ‘You sound White’ is like a
multi-layer bean dip of sh—.” As the lighting shifts and she is no longer in silhouette, we are
met with her smiling face and see that she is a Black woman. The scene then moves on to the
next person in silhouette, and we hear his voice, “The craziest thing about sounding White, is
you can't sound like a race.” As the light comes on at the end of his statement, we see Mike
Brown, a Black man. The next silhouette appears and we hear, “People make these
assumptions about my English as though it's been a struggle, when in fact, it's the only language
I've ever spoken,” and Joel Kim, an East Asian man, appears with an exasperated, tired
expression on his face. And finally, the last silhouetted figure says, “Please don't tell me I sound

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like a White girl to make me more digestible to you,” as the light changes and we then see that
it is Rekha Shankar speaking, a South Asian woman. This filming and editing structure of first
hearing the actor’s voices before seeing what they look like forces viewers to listen to what
they are saying before being able to make assumptions based on what they look like.
The rest of the video is roughly divided into two sections, one in which the comedians
are each talking individually about people telling them they sound White as a compliment, and
the second about people using the same words as an accusation or chastisement. In back to
back frames, they share their experiences:
Franchesca: On one hand, when I hear from White people, it's almost like they're trying
to give me a compliment.

Rekha: “I’m saying you're as close to being one of us as possible!”

Joel: “Oh, you're one of the good ones.”

Franchesca: “Oh Franchesca, you're so White.” Guess what? My whole family's Black.

Mike: Not just Black, but Jamaican. Actually, I should be (switches to exaggerated
Jamaican accent) sounding like this mon!

They go on to explore how problematic it is to infer that Whiteness equals intelligence and that
non-Whiteness does not, including pointing out coded language that communicates the same
underlying assumptions.
Rekha: I think people always mean you sound educated, which is really f—ing insulting.

Joel: Are we really supposed to believe that only White people sound smart and
articulate?

Mike: Fun fact, the other term for sounding White is, “well-spoken"

Joel: I know a lot of words, is that a White thing?

Mike: Barack Obama: (air quotes) “Well-spoken.” Will Smith: (air quotes) “Well-spoken.”

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Franchesca: Being White is not the standard. Being White does not mean the best.

Joel: I love it when people are like, "Oh, I was just trying to give you a compliment,” and
it's like, "Sorry, are we not friends anymore because I wouldn't accept your sh—ty
compliment?…Bye?”

Through candid and humorous reflections on their experiences, these comedians not only point
out the insulting and offensive values underlying a “compliment” about a person of color
“sounding White,” but also shows some of the different forms this “compliment” can take.
Their words also prompt viewers to think about the difference between intentionality and
impact. Like the “where are you from, no, where are you really from” videos, these examples
reiterate how it is often difficult to conceptually untangle the racialized implications of our
words from the (good) intentions behind them. However, as the video demonstrates, the
intentionality of the perpetrators of these kinds of comments needs to be understood
separately from the impact that their words have on the people experiencing the
microaggressions. Just because it was intended as a compliment does not mean it does not
have a detrimental effect. Just because the perpetrator may be experiencing pushback to one
comment does not mean that the person on the receiving end of the microaggression is
experiencing this comment or the subsequent difficult conversation about it for the first time.
Through humor and sharing of personal experiences by the actors, the video encourages us to
see the underlying White supremacist values undergirding the “compliment” of sounding
White, and also shows how these experiences are connected to each other, how they happen
repeatedly, and how they have an effect over time.
As mentioned above, whereas other videos featured in this chapter singled out White
people as the primary perpetrators of microaggressions, “You CAN’T Sound White!” also spends

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time showing that people of color do it too. The first half of the video unpacked White
“compliments” about sounding White and the second half features the actors describing how
alienating it is to be criticized with the same words by their own family and friends of similar
backgrounds.
Rekha: And when you hear it in your own community, it's an insult, because it's another
way to say, "You don't belong here."

Mike: “Yo, Mike, what's up with that White voice? You're not in an interview, b.”

Franchesca: I heard this all the time as a kid, that by the time I became an adult, it was
so engrained in me that I became kinda self-conscious about speaking up, and making
jokes, and being who I really am, because I was just worried about being judged, the
minute that I opened my mouth.

Mike: I was like, okay, any time I see an “e-r,” I’m gonna throw an “ay” or an “ah.” Hey,
you're looking bigger. No, I'm feeling bigga. You see how that happened?

Rekha: You're supposed to be like, “God, White people, right,” with your family? And
they’re like, "No, that's you."

Their examples show how the constant policing of their identities with the criticism of
“sounding White” by fellow PoC family or friends made them feel judged, insecure about their
voices, and like they did not belong. When coming from other PoC, this comment comes across
as an accusation of racial betrayal or inauthenticity, a reflection of the PoC perpetrators having
a predefined notion that there is such a thing as a “true” or “real” expression of a particular
racial or ethnic identity, and that “sounding White” is not one of them. As their stories show us,
this constant reminder reinforcing the underlying belief that there is only one authentic and
acceptable way of being made some of these PoC consciously change the way they talked, if
they chose to speak at all. Their stories showed not just how hurtful, insulting, or alienating this

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particular microaggression can be, but also demonstrates how it has impacted and changed the
way they move through the world.
The video concludes with the four actors directly challenging and speaking back to this
microaggression, some making direct statements resisting or deconstructing the underlying
assumptions that motivate people telling them they sound White, and others making quips
imitating and expanding on the comments they have heard.
Mike: Frankly, it's bullsh-t. No matter how I talk, I'm always Black.

Rekha: There's a whole continent of White people that don't speak English!

Joel: (sarcastically) “You sound great! White is right!”

Mike: (exaggerated “Black” accent) “We don't sound White! You punk boy!”

Continuing with references to voice and silencing, there are also brief flashes throughout the
video of close-ups of each actor with a thick strip of masking tape covering their mouths. Each
strip of tape has a message on it, referencing one of the stories they discussed. Joel Kim’s taped
mouth reads, “I speak good English,” Rekha Shankar’s states, “I don’t ‘Sound White,’” Mike
Brown’s implores, “Free Speech!!,” and Franchesca Ramsey’s message is, “My voice is my
voice.” In this closing section of the video, each actor is shown peeling off the tape covering
their mouths, as phrase by phrase, they individually say a part of a larger message together:
“This is my voice. This is what I sound like. All the time. This is me. You'll get used to it.”
And because this is still a comedic and entertainment-focused video even as it is also
political and educational in nature, as the credits for Decoded are rolling, pointing viewers to
subscription links and other similar videos to watch, a small window on the side shows a b-roll
scene from the actor’s session, featuring Mike Brown speaking directly to the camera with

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deadpan humor, “Does Siri sound White?” In a small turn of his head and brief flicker of
expression across his face, you see that someone behind the camera has reacted to his
question. The next frame shows him holding an iPhone, asking, “Hey Siri, how can I sound more
Black?” A beat later, Siri responds, “I’m afraid I don't know the answer to that.” Smiling at
someone’s unheard response off camera, Mike then looks directly into the camera, and shrugs.

The Voice Box

The idea for “You CAN’T Sound White!” came from a generative conversation Decoded
host Franchesca Ramsey had through her personal YouTube channel. She brought it to the
writers’ room for Decoded, and together with the writing and production team at Kornhaber
Brown, came up with the ideas for the video. In addition to highlighting and building off of
Franchesca’s personal experiences, the creators also thought it was important to include other
people of color with different intersecting identities to talk about their experiences with being
told they “sound White.” To do this, they reached out to a handful of comedians, actors, and
writers in their networked “pool of talented, funny young people in New York,” as the Decoded
showrunner put it, who they knew could speak “fluently and humorously” about these topics
and invited them to participate. Although the questions being asked the comedians/actors off-
camera were prepared beforehand, the stories they are seen sharing on camera are candid
responses and examples from personal experiences.
When asked about her participation in this episode, Rekha Shankar described that it was
important for her to play a role in creating this video as a person of color who often
experiences this particular microaggression, but also as someone who is both a writer and
performer in the entertainment industry.

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I think this topic is also important to me especially because I am a writer/performer. It's
important to know about this topic as a writer so you don't write someone to "sound" a
certain ethnicity (especially one you do not belong to). As a performer, it affects me
directly because the casting calls for WOC are few and far between, and a lot of times
are ethnically-charged. It is hard for me to audition because of that. With one
exception: voice over. In the voice over world, my voice carries privilege, as I have a
Northeastern American accent. While I really do love voice over, it bums me out that
something as uncontrollable as the way my voice sounds could be the only "asset" to
me as a performer. So the idea of "sounding white," while it does not exist (because
what even is Whiteness - it changes all the time), is supposed to be some sort of
compliment meaning "you're one of the good ones," and in that way becomes a
privilege.

In the quote above, Rekha talks about how our voices represent and reflect presumptions
about our national, racial, and ethnic identities, not to mention that they also mark other
intersecting aspects of our identities, like class and gender. While so much of racial stereotyping
and prejudiced behavior is based solely on people’s physical attributes, the way that a person
sounds, and especially how they sound speaking English, powerfully affects how they are
perceived and therefore treated in an English-speaking nation such as the U.S.
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Dominant
ideas about national, racial, and ethnic belonging are partially represented by our ways of
speaking, and ultimately determine whose English and whose accents verbally and physically
embody “Americanness” and “difference.” Through Rekha’s personal examples about her work,
we see how these engrained, hegemonic notions of belonging, difference, and foreignness are
systematically reinforced in her various roles in the entertainment industry, including how
difficult it is to create and find non-stereotypical acting roles for women of color, and how the
prevalence of oppressive and stereotypical casting practices has impacted her motivation to
even go audition for these limiting roles in the first place. Even when describing her relative
privilege of having a Northeastern American accent for voiceover work, she shares how

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Davé, Nishime, and Oren, East Main Street, 300.

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frustrating it is that only one piece of her repertoire is the only acceptable and desirable part of
her range of performative skills. The implication being that while her voice does not “match”
the way she looks, it works in this context because she sounds “right” and will not be seen.

Those YES Moments, and Pain Recognition

Similar to the Decoded “Where are you REALLY From?” episode she wrote, in terms of
an imagined audience, Rekha had both frequent experiencers and potential perpetrators of
microaggressions in mind as she helped create “You CAN’T Sound White!” Speaking about the
desired impact of her work, she reflected, “I hoped these videos would make POC feel less
alone, and give them those "YES" moments you have when you finally see someone relate to
the nuance of a certain experience you have had." She views writing, staring in, and continuing
to help create these kinds of videos a way to help acknowledge, affirm, and validate the
experiences of people of color whom she fears may feel alone in their marginalizing
experiences. And she continues making these kinds of videos because she believes that they
can and do make a difference in this respect.
For “You CAN’T Sound White!” in particular, she wanted people to learn about this
specific oppressive manifestation of White supremacist values when it comes to voices, and
how it plays out in the everyday. She said, “I wanted the takeaway (of the video) to be that a lot
of people center Whiteness as "professional”- or "normal”-sounding. And how that is damaging
and depressing.” Echoed across her responses about her media creations is a desire to reach
perpetrators of microaggressions on two levels. On the one hand, she wants people who
unwittingly perpetrate them to both understand the oppressive values and implications behind
the microaggressions that make them problematic (in this case, the centrality of hegemonic

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Whiteness vis-à-vis voice), but importantly, she also wants them on a more basic level to realize
and understand that these experiences are harmful and damaging to the people experiencing
them. This speaks to wanting to address the invalidating nature of microaggressions, and the
way that the impact of these subtle everyday manifestations can be easily dismissed. In other
words, she wants people to understand that once you see them and their prevalence and stop
dismissing microaggressions as insignificant, it means you also have to recognize that they are
harmful. Ostensibly, the thought that then follows is that you would look inwards to see how
you yourself might be implicated in this system, and subsequently make changes to address
your own actions that may be harming others.
While this video uses personal stories to illustrate, speak back to, and educate about a
microaggression like “you sound White,” the next video aims for a more general lesson about
microaggressions, showing how the harm they cause is both individual and systemic, and can
have lasting, serious ramifications long after the initial fleeting moment they are perpetrated.

Torching Mosquitos

The educational motivation behind the animated “How Microaggressions Are Like
Mosquito Bites” (October 2016) is most readily apparent with the opening words of the video,
“For people that still don't think microaggressions are a problem, just imagine that instead of
being a stupid comment, a microaggression is a mosquito bite.” We see two women waiting at
a bus stop, represented by simple cartoon characters that look like they could be from a
children’s book. The White woman then leans over and tells the dark-skinned woman of color,
“Oh, you’re so well-spoken!” Frustrated, the woman of color puts her hand to her forehead and
sighs deeply, exasperated. Offended at her reaction, the White woman turns into a human-

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sized mosquito, bites her, and says, “Ugh, it’s a compliment!” Sinister buzzing gets louder in the
background as the human-sized mosquito chases the woman of color who runs away
screaming.
Created by production company Kornhaber Brown for Fusion Comedy’s web series
Same Difference, “How Microaggressions Are Like Mosquito Bites” (62,000 views)
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uses
animated human cartoon characters and giant mosquitos to accessibly talk about the complex
topic of microaggressions. As the opening suggests, the creators substitute talking about
microaggressions with talking about mosquito bites, using the analogy and affordances of
animation to demonstrate their persistence and harm. As the video points out, like
microaggressions, mosquito bites are small, some people experience them more than others,
and aside from being irritating, they can carry and spread a range of terrible, deadly diseases.
The first half of the video goes on to feature a variety of scenarios with different people
in everyday places experiencing microaggressions, showing a range of what they sound and
look like, and how prevalent they can be for people who frequently get “bit.” Unlike the other
videos in this chapter that focus primarily on racial microaggressions, “How Microaggressions
Are Like Mosquito Bites” addresses microaggressions generally, showing examples of racial
microaggressions, but also what microaggressions look like when targeted at other aspects of
identity, like gender, sexual orientation, and ability. For example, a woman of color responds,
“excuse me?” when her date, represented in the scene as a large mosquito, comments, “Oh,
your English is so good!” He bites her after the “compliment” and we hear a draining, sucking
sound as his mosquito abdomen fills with blood. In the next scene, we’re in the produce aisle of

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As of June 11, 2017.

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the grocery store when a human-sized mosquito tells a PoC man in a wheelchair, “Everything
happens for a reason,” biting her with her stinger. As her abdomen fills with blood, he
responds, “I’m just here buying apples.” The next scene shows a mosquito and White woman in
the car commuting to work when he asks her, “So, when are you gonna have a baby?,” turning
his head to bite her as he drives. Another scene shows a PoC watching TV at home when a
mosquito on television says, “We have to keep the Redskins name! It’s part of our culture and
history!” The mosquito in the screen becomes bigger, reaches into the living room, and bites
the person watching TV. The last example in this section shows an LGBTQ couple walking down
the street holding hands. A mosquito says, “I couldn’t even tell you were gay!” As the narrator
of the video is saying that microaggressions happen all the time, half a dozen more human-
sized mosquitos appear, surrounding and following the couple as they try to get away, saying,
“Do you know John? Can you give me shopping advice? So fabulous! I love Cher too!”
In addition to showing a range of microaggressions and their unpredictable, persistent
prevalence in everyday life for people with marginalized identities, the video also focuses on
acknowledging, explaining, and affirming people’s reactions to microaggressions. In the next
section of the video, the creators identify and explain why some people react in seemingly
disproportionate ways to what may appear like a small, one time irritant to people who do not
frequently encounter these kinds of experiences. The scene shows us a Black woman being
bitten repeatedly by first one giant mosquito, then more and more, with speech bubbles
showing the microaggressions they wield. “Can I touch your hair?,” they ask, “It’s so pretty, can
I touch it please?” With a body covered in pink, swollen puncture marks, surrounded by a group
of unrelenting human-sized mosquitos whose cutting words and bites repeatedly fill their

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abdomens with blood, the Black woman becomes increasingly irritated and angry and finally
pulls out a flamethrower and waves it around with a crazed look on her face, burning the
mosquitos to a crisp. Over this scene, the narrator is heard saying that if this were happening to
you multiple times a day, everyday, it would be understandable that you would want to “go
ballistic on those mosquitos, which seems like a huge overreaction to people who only get bit
every once in awhile.” As she says those words, two White characters come upon the scene and
are taken aback as the Black woman angrily finishes off the last mosquito with her blazing
flamethrower. “It’s just a mosquito bite,” they say. “Who cares?” The Black Woman, calm now,
shamefully considers their words, and one of the White characters says, “It’s just another Angry
Black Woman.” He turns into a giant mosquito after saying that and a tear drops from the Black
woman’s eyes. In addition to showing how the repeated experiencing of microaggressions has
cumulative, long term effects, this layered example also demonstrates how reactions to
microaggressions are often critiqued, denying the experiential reality of the person
experiencing them, and often done in a way that further perpetrates more microaggressions.
Beyond demonstrating the unrelenting irritation caused by persistent mosquito bites
and why people may react with the force or intensity that they do, the video also shows how
microaggressions are connected with and can readily escalate to other forms of threatening
and harmful systemic issues. After the scenes showing why one might feel compelled to wield a
metaphorical flamethrower on perpetrators of these kinds of casual, everyday comments, the
next part of the video shows how microaggressions can seriously impact educational
achievement, career goals, and health and life outcomes. Over a scene with a PoC student
daydreaming about a career in advanced science while waiting happily in the office of his career

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counselor, the narrator of the video says, “Of course beyond just being annoying, some
mosquitoes carry truly threatening diseases that can mess up your life for years.” A giant
mosquito career counselor comes in and says to the student, “Astrophysics? Hmm, maybe you
should try a less challenging major.” She reaches across the table and bites him, her mosquito
torso filling with blood. The happy expression on the student’s face changes to a sad one as his
ideal science job in the dream bubble changes drastically, and boils and sores develop on the
student’s face as a result of her bite. As we see his idea of what is possible for himself
deteriorate, we also hear the dream crumple and burst, and he says, “Ow! My dreams!” The
narrator continues as another scene comes into focus, “And other mosquitoes carry strains that
can even kill you.” The frame focuses on a chalk outline on the floor and then zooms out to
show yellow police tape crisscrossing the scene over the outline of the body, and four police
officers taking notes while talking to a human-sized mosquito holding a gun. “It looked like he
was up to trouble, ok?” the mosquito says, “I felt threatened.”
The video concludes with the narrator’s voice saying, “So next time you think someone's
overreacting…”, the scene shows a diverse group of five people of color standing in a row,
waving off small mosquitoes buzzing around their heads and bodies, “…just remember some
people experience mosquito bites all. the. time.” A human-sized mosquito enters the scene and
says, “You're all so exotic, wow!” The PoC all look at her angrily and each whip out a fly swatter.
As they are poised, holding the swatters above their heads, we hear the narrator say, “and by
‘mosquito bites,’ we mean ‘microaggressions,’” as the PoC all swipe down with their swatters
and collectively squash the giant mosquito with a splat.

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Because I Was That Guy

Like the other videos and projects in this dissertation, the impetus for this video came
from personal experiences in both work and home realms. Andrew Kornhaber, showrunner for
MTV’s Decoded and co-founder of Kornhaber Brown, the production company that created
“How Microaggressions Are Like Mosquito Bites” for Fusion, is also the person who came up
with the idea for this video. Andrew describes the professional and personal experiences he
had that contributed to how he came up with the idea:
To talk specifically about how the microaggression mosquito idea came about was a
combination of a few factors. Uh, I’m a White guy, um, I’m a straight White guy, so I do
not really experience microaggressions. Um, and so, there was a combination of factors
that led to thinking about this. Number one, in our first season of Decoded, we had done
an episode, like, “what if White people experienced microaggressions” and that came
out of our writers room, which has various people of color and very smart, funny people
coming up with different ideas for sketch comedy. So I was familiar with (the concept of
microaggressions), but I think that maybe one of the more inspiring elements was being
wrong in a discussion with my wife. Which is that, my wife is from New Jersey, but her
family is from India, so she has a rather different experience of the world than me, and I
did not really realize this 100% when we first started dating or when we first started
talking about these things. Because she would frequently get asked, “Where are you
from?,” and I have been asked “Where are you from?” maybe five to ten times in my life
in the more like, “no no, not like New Jersey, where are you from? Like, what is your
background?” way. To me, that is a thoughtful thing to ask. It’s just like a curious, nice
person thing to ask, because that was my personal experience with it, but my wife’s
experience with it was rather different because of the frequency at which it happens
and the context that gets labeled for her because she is not a White person. So I sort of
was like, the first time this came up in conversation between us, like, she got like mad at
me, not mad, but we were having a discussion about it, and she was like, “No, you don’t
get it.” And she explained to me why I didn’t get it. And I understood later that no, I did
not in fact get it.

Andrew talks about two kinds of formative experiences that helped him, a heterosexual White
man, “get it” with regards to the impact of microaggressions. In the first part of his quote, he
talks about the professional experiences he had working on shows like Decoded, which tackle
various expressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other social justice-themed issues in

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their media-making all the time. He described producing an early episode of Decoded (in 2015)
that was specifically about microaggressions, the idea for which came from their diverse
writer’s room. In this episode, “If Microaggressions Happened to White People,”
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actors of
color are shown “flipping the script,” directing microaggressions at White people, much like in
the BuzzFeed “If Asians/Black People/Latinos Said the Stuff White People Say” videos. Working
collaboratively on these projects and with a diverse group of smart, funny, creative people
helped everyone involved become more aware of and fluent in these topics.
The second formative experience he shares, the story about the “discussion” with his
wife, shows us in yet another example of how influential personal experiences can be, even
when, in this case, it was not a personal experience with a microaggression, but an argument
about whether or not something was a microaggression. This aspect of the story shows how
knowing about a topic and being able to speak coherently about it does not make one above or
somehow outside of the dominant hegemonic systems that continually work to inform our
actions. It also shows how learning takes time, and is an ongoing process. When pressed about
what he meant when he said he “understood later” as opposed to in the moment of the
discussion, he said, “well, these things take a minute to sink in.” The story and his comments
allude to the kind of painstaking labor that people of color (and those with other marginalized
identities) shoulder in order to try to get unknowing or unsympathetic loved ones to try to
recognize and understand the extent of their marginalizing experiences. This difficult emotional
and psychic work of having to argue for the validation of your own experiences is a big part of
what makes microaggressions so difficult to deal with. Unlike more direct expressions of

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MTV News, If Microaggressions Happened to White People.

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discrimination or bigotry that are more easily identifiable, these common, everyday slights,
when taken individually, are seemingly “not a big deal” on the surface, but do real and lasting
harm. Having to explain why they are problematic, why they are harmful, or why you
responded the way you did is taxing work, especially if there is pushback, and doubly so if the
pushback is coming from a loved one.
Continuing his description of how he came to thinking up the mosquito analogy and
video, Andrew described the role his own relationship to the topic of microaggressions
influenced what we see in the video:
Then with sort of doing Decoded and all of that stuff, and sort of reading about
(microaggressions) and understanding it more and understanding not just the “Where
are you from” stuff, but the other experiences people had, this idea coalesced in my
mind. Because for me, I was the White guy in the beginning of the video where it
doesn’t happen to me that much so these things don’t really bother me. Which is the
beginning of the analogy of the mosquito thing. But if you got bit, and it happened all
the time, I can definitely see how it would be really annoying and frustrating, which is
sort of the principle I latched on to for that video in particular. Because that’s like
mosquito bites, which, humorously enough, I don’t get bitten by mosquitos very much,
but my wife does.

He describes being “that White guy,” the one who does not understand why microaggressions
are a problem because they do not frequently, if ever, happen to him. Along with people who
do frequently experience microaggressions, this unknowing person is one of the main people
he has in mind when creating videos like this.
Personally, and this is not true for everybody on my writing team or producing team, or
broader teams for Decoded and these videos, (but) I feel there are two types of people
who will respond to a video like this, and I think about both of them. Which is there tend
to people who either have experienced this and can use this to explain to their friends
and sort of identity with it, which is like “YES this is exactly how I feel,” and that prompts
sharing, and there’s this other portion of the audience I like to think about, which is that
I frame them as kids, but ….I don’t think them as all kids, people who are genuinely
curious and maybe who have not had this explained to them in a proper way, because I
feel like, I think about it as like being a 14 or 15 year old, not necessary that age group

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specifically, but I think in those terms - someone who just doesn’t have experience with
this but is open to the possibility of it being true and just needing sort of like a clear
explanation of what it is.

As he describes above, the dual goals of acknowledging and helping frequent experiencers of
microaggressions as well as educating likely unknowing perpetrators of microaggressions are
both present when creating videos like “How Microaggressions Are Like Mosquito Bites” for
Fusion, and the aforementioned “Where are you REALLY from?” and “You CAN’T Sound
White!!!” for Decoded. He describes wanting to reach an audience in a clear, intelligible way
(such that a 14-15 year old could understand), and wanting to provide an educational service
for those who are genuinely curious and receptive to learning, but who maybe just need
exposure and a clear explanation of the topic with relatable language and examples. He also
envisions that for people who already understand and can relate to the topics covered in these
videos, that they might share it with their friends either as a “YES, this is exactly how I feel”
moment, or as a related, “see, this is what I mean” tool to help them in their conversations, like
the one he had with his wife.

Charm and Disarm

When asked about the decision to go with animation versus an in-person sketch comedy
video, Andrew talked about the constraints that shaped what they did with their ideas.
We originally thought maybe this was a sketch series, but realizing we didn’t have the
budget for that, we had to think creatively about what works and we sort of locked into
animation because creatively, it actually solves a lot of problems and gives you infinite
freedom to do whatever you want. So you can let your mind go into weirder, more crazy
places, which is great for humor. Stylistically…we picked a style that was based loosely
off of children’s books, similar to a fake children’s book that we saw and really liked.

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Their team was also influenced by the widely-circulated 2015 Tea Consent video
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(4.1 million
views)
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that uses animated stick figures and a cup of tea as a way of talking about the concept
of sexual consent. They felt they could put their own Kornhaber Brown twist on a similarly
serious topic, microaggressions. In his discussion about the affordances of animation, Andrew
also described how cartoon characters and animation can effectively charm and disarm you, so
that your defenses are lowered, which hopefully makes you more receptive to hearing the
message of the videos.
Animation also does something nice in that it’s very disarming because it’s not particular
people and it’s cartoons and it’s something you associate in your brain with kids books.
It’s like, not threatening in any way, so in that way, it is very disarming. It’s sort of like
you get to push the boundaries with animation. Because I wasn’t going to get people to
dress up as giant mosquitos and that would just maybe be weird and not funny, but
when you do it in animation, because there are no rules, it kind of works, and then
combined with the characters themselves just being funny, quirky children’s book
characters, it contrasts very well with the seriousness with what we’re talking about.
And contrast always works really well for getting people to pay attention, creatively, in
almost anything. So, the bigger the contrast, frequently, the easier it is to absorb
sometimes.

In addition to the non-threatening, disarming nature of seeing cartoon characters and giant
mosquitos in an animated video talking about a serious topic like microaggressions, Andrew
talks about how contrast, generally, is a time-tested artistic, expressive strategy that works to
compellingly communicate messages. Further demonstrating this point, in talking about the
similar disarming qualities of humor, he referenced the most widely-circulated video their

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Blue Seat Studios, Tea Consent.
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As of June 13, 2017.

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company has produced (17.6 million views),
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“Porn Sex vs. Real Sex: The Differences Explained
with Food.”
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Our biggest viral video was “Porn Sex versus Real Sex.” Sex in particular is something
most people are uncomfortable with for a variety of reasons, but they want to talk
about it. When you make dumb food jokes that represent something like a penis or
vagina, there’s a thing your brain does, which is doing two things at once: I know they’re
talking about penises and vaginas but I can’t really be embarrassed because it’s a
cucumber. And that tension sort of like makes you laugh. It sort of relieves a lot of the
stress, and you can actually accept what we’re talking about without being weird about
it because humor as a thing in general is just disarming. The whole thing is that once you
laugh, you can’t really, you’re just more open to what’s being said, which is why humor
is such a valuable part of a lot of the work we do. And also it’s just entertainment, I
mean who doesn’t like to laugh?

The answer to his rhetorical question, of course, is that everyone wants to laugh, feel happiness
and pleasure, and be entertained in their lives. And humor serves as a way to get people to let
their guards down, release stress by laughing at themselves or at the ridiculousness or irony of
some situation outside themselves, and maybe even learn something in the mean time. When I
asked him if that is why their company created satirical or humorous videos like this as opposed
to “serious educational videos,” he said,
Yeah, those are boring. That’s school. I mean you need school, sometimes you need
school to learn these things, but sometimes you need the humor and the little other
things to like “get it.” Or you need a joke about Kanye, or reference to something that is
more in your everyday world so you can sort of absorb it. I think humor is really critical
for a lot of this stuff because if you make it entertaining, you just make people more
happy to accept it and understand it.

In the end, this is what these kinds of accessible videos can do for us. Through humor and
satire, they can serve as important affirming or educational resources for people who come
across them on their own or through their own personal networks, or they can be used

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As of June 13, 2017.
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kbcreativelab, Porn Sex vs Real Sex.

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strategically in classroom and learning contexts as supplemental resources that can help drive
home points about complex topics like racism, stereotyping, and microaggressions.
Furthermore, these kinds of videos can be used as jumping off points to discuss what it means
to be a media-maker, circulator, and/or engaged participant in our increasingly digitally-
connected world.

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Chapter 5:
Taking Your Foot Off Your Throat

You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some
ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating
seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did
you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently
tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an
ambition.
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The excerpt above is from Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine, winner of the
National Book Award for her mixed media, prose poetry book about racism and racial
microaggressions. As we can see from just the brief sampling of her work quoted above, she
artfully captures the everyday, fleeting, subtle nature of microaggressions and the lasting toll
that it takes on frequent targets of these everyday slights, including the cumulative stress of
experiencing them, the second-guessing of one’s own experiential reality, and the pressures of
deciding what to do and why. Her deceptively simple double use of the word “you” in this short
passage pulls us in to both identify with the perspective of the storyteller (e.g., “You take in
things you don’t want all the time”), and asks us to reflect on our own awareness and actions in
these moments (e.g., “Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just
do that?”). Through her powerful prose, she illustrates and exemplifies the strategies that
microaggression scholars have described as the way forward to disrupting these insidious
everyday manifestations of racism, which is a process of learning to recognize, reflect on, and
take appropriate action in each of these moments.
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What “appropriate action” is in each
instance is of course largely contextually dependent, but the overarching point is that people
need to be able to both recognize the ideologies and structures that underlie these everyday

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Rankine, Citizen, 55.
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Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions,” 3.

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interactions, and see themselves as agents able to construct their own futures
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in order to
thrive in spite of them. After all, “just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”
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The projects and campaigns focused on in this dissertation have centralized the
experiences and creations of people who have taken their foot off their throats. These are
people speaking back to and disrupting racial microaggressions by creating and circulating
counter-narratives through networked, participatory platforms and communication practices,
pushing themselves and others to continue recognizing, reflecting, and acting to disrupt the
hegemony of these impactful everyday slights and the larger institutionalized and systemic
ideologies that support them. What follows is a review of the ways in which they have done this
through their creations and work.
Recognition

The strength of the mediated creations featured in this dissertation is that they vividly
and publicly document microaggressions so that they are seen and heard, making it difficult to
ignore, downplay, or dismiss their frequency and cumulative impact. Whether it is by reading
through thousands of anonymous microaggression stories from a digital archive, viewing a
compelling collection of digital protest portraits, or watching satirical videos skewering
microaggressions spread across the Internet, each of these projects amplifies personal stories
affirming that yes these everyday slights are happening, and yes, they matter.
Dismissals of microaggressions are addressed by these projects on both interpersonal and
systemic levels. For frequent targets of microaggressions, the visibility and spread of these
projects serve a communing and validating function. As multiple examples from each of the

271
Chester, “Psychiatric Problems of the Black Minority,” 520.
272
Rankine, Citizen, 55.

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case studies demonstrated, when microaggressions are dismissed by others in the moment that
they occur, it is because the fleeting and seemingly “small” slights are viewed individually and
without context. Targets of microaggressions are often accused of being too sensitive, taking
things too seriously, or overreacting to something that did not happen. This invalidation and
denial of people’s experiences and lived reality often contributes to the discomfort,
uncertainty, and pain that they feel, adding to the damage of previous encounters in addition
to the current situation, and potentially influencing their reactions to future experiences. While
these projects and campaigns can do nothing to be there in the moment of every
microaggression and invalidating response that occurs, the public and visible stories described
or embodied by thousands of others with similar experiences validates and acknowledges both
microaggressions experienced in the past, and those that will come in the future. People can
see that they are not alone in their experiences of these subtle everyday interactions, learn to
name and articulate the nuances of their experiences, and recognize a community of people,
connected digitally, that also experience and are speaking back to these everyday interactions.
These projects and campaigns also help relieve the burden on frequent experiencers of
microaggressions from having to continually explain the nuances and weight of their
experiences, artfully and accessibly showing what microaggressions look and sound like to
those who do not know, and demonstrating how these situations can play out despite the
sometimes good intentions of those perpetrating. For perpetrators that are open to it, these
resources can teach them to see microaggressions, reflect upon them, and hopefully change
their actions towards helping to stop or assuage their proliferation and impact. Although this
dissertation focuses primarily on how these kinds of projects and practices can benefit frequent

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targets of microaggressions, the importance of frequent perpetrators of microaggressions being
able to identify and understand the seriousness of them is also of upmost importance. As
reiterated elsewhere, we are all socialized within systems of power and oppression. While
some people are socially located with many more privileges and therefore more likely to be
repeated perpetrators of multiple forms of microaggression, every one of us is just as capable
of being aggressors whether we mean to or not. Without everyone being able to recognize how
and why microaggressions happen, disrupting them and the unequal values, structures, and
systems that support them is impossible.
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Because we are dealing with everyday manifestations of underlying systems of power, in
addition to the individual and interpersonal levels, the dismissal of microaggressions also
happens on cultural, institutional, and systemic levels. This can look like contentious social and
journalistic debates conflating issues of structural marginalization with arguments about
censoring free speech, “PC culture,” or that we are creating hypersensitive, “coddled” children
as discussed in Chapter 1, for example, or it can look like inflammatory local and national
debates about postracial America, affirmative action, and belonging on college campuses, as
discussed in Chapter 3. These discourses impact how we operate within our organizations and
institutions, where upholding the status quo as opposed to “developing and implementing
policies and practices that challenge racial [and other forms of] microaggressions each time
they are recognized”
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participates in continuing to ignore or minimize these everyday
expressions of structural inequity. By maintaining things as they are and turning a blind eye to
these daily manifestations of institutionalized racism (and sexism, classism, etc.), systematic

273
Pérez Huber and Solórzano, “Racial Microaggressions,” 3.
274
Ibid.

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subordination and exclusion continues to be replicated and perpetuated through discourse,
policy, and processes that structurally silence and invalidate the lived realities of marginalized
people. Given this structural context for systemic change, it is unsurprising that some activists
focus on other channels to organize and amplify their voices around the issues they seek to
influence.
The creators of the projects and campaigns highlighted in this dissertation sought
recognition and visibility about microaggressions and structural oppression not through
formalized institutional channels, but through cultural expression and networked
communication, creating counter-narratives that demonstrate how and why their voices and
experiences matter. By capturing microaggressions in these artistic and expressive forms, the
projects “slowed down” the usually fleeting moments, allowing us to stop and see vivid,
succinct, and embodied examples of what microaggressions look and feel like. Additionally, the
networked communication tools that were used to create and spread these stories had
relatively low barriers to participation, both in terms of helping create the projects themselves,
and also sharing and interacting with them. Through collaborative organizing within flatter
hierarchal systems, the creators and curators of these projects sought to highlight and center
multiple diverse voices while encouraging participation at multiple points in developing the
projects. Taken together, the collaborative and participatory practices, the affordances of
diverse forms of creative expression, and the ease and speed at which we can participate,
share, and respond to stories through social media and networked communication amplifies
the visibility and impact of marginalized people’s lived realities quickly and for a lot of people
across time and distance. The forms of expression that the projects embraced, such as images

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or stories spread through Tumblr, or satirical videos spread through YouTube, Twitter, and
Facebook, are less threatening, more accessible, and easier to grasp than reading an academic
journal article on the same subject matter, for example. Although deep understanding of these
complex, interrelated issues is obviously vitally important, these projects, campaigns and
communication practices can serve as an important starting point for those who have not
recognized or thought about these issues because of their privileges of never having been
directly and incessantly impacted by them.
Ultimately, these creations force people to stop and see microaggressions for what they
are. Because these projects are made up of concrete personal stories being shared and
amplified, it is harder to argue that these experiences do not exist or are insignificant because
the microaggressions are visually captured for examination in front of us, and because each
project highlights not just one voice, but many. In challenging the dismissal of microaggressions
by valuing people’s lived experiences, these projects contribute to the healing and
empowerment of marginalized people by asking us to bear witness to and hold space for their
stories. In the end, nothing can change if the problems are not first recognized and
acknowledged for what they are. Reflection about why they are important is what comes next.

Reflection

Through listening to and empathizing with other people’s diverse stories and
experiences or being asked to uncomfortably witness, laugh at, and face our own privileges and
missteps, these projects prompt not just recognition that microaggressions exist, but also
encourages reflection about their impact. The project creators structured a process of both

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recognition and critical reflection into the creation of each of these projects and campaigns,
practicing it themselves as they developed these projects, as well as encouraging it from the
people engaging with and sharing their creations.
For example, engaging with stories from The Microaggressions Project encourages
reflection about people’s experiences that are both similar to and vastly different from your
own. Whether you are someone who experiences microaggressions all the time, or someone
who does not know at all what they look like, the wall of stories allow for multiple entry points
into the different ways that microaggressions can manifest, showing a wide range of people
interacting in geographically and situationally diverse contexts. For creators and participants of
this project, critical reflection about their experiences was built into the submission process for
each person’s story. In addition to describing the microaggressions they experienced,
participants were asked to reflect on how the experiences impacted them. This structured and
communal reflection was built in to the process of storytelling so participants could individually
and collective name their pain and witness and learn from the experiences of others. As we saw
in Chapter 2, some of the biggest initial pushback to this archive was people dismissing and
criticizing the inclusion of these reflective aspects of each participants’ story. Despite this
pushback, the project creators continued to solicit and highlight both the microaggressions
themselves and the reflections on how the storytellers were impacted because they saw the
value of putting these experiences in words and to be seen and heard. Articulating the
momentary and lasting impact of microaggressions validates that not only do microaggressions
exist, but that “oversensitive” reactions to them are not to be dismissed. Whether it is anger,
sadness, shock, exasperation, or frustration, these responses are justified when

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microaggressions are seen for their cumulative impact and connections with larger systems of
power and oppression. Through the structure and participatory development of the project,
and through the impact of the archive as a whole, The Microaggressions Project reminds us that
the reality of our pain and lived experiences does not depend on whether or not someone else
believes it exists. Having a space to tell these stories validates the everyday experiences of
marginalized peoples and features their voices as valuable sources of knowledge and
understanding, freeing them to be critically conscious change agents in their own lives.
Similarly, the creators of the I, Too, Am Harvard photo campaign invited both
participants and viewers to hold space for witnessing their own and each other’s experiences
with interpersonal and institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism as students of color at
Harvard College. By taking an in-person and virtually visible stand through the campus
campaign, theatrical performance, and corresponding social media campaign, these students of
color formed a protective political block
275
to defiantly and proudly declare that they, too exist
within and belong at one of the nation’s top universities. They did this to affirm and publicly
reflect on individual experiences as well as to speak back to a hostile campus context, where
students of color, especially Black students, were constantly being told personally and
institutionally that they were not welcome and did not belong. The widely circulated digital
protest portraits from their campaign grab people’s attention, prompting viewers to identify
with the Black and mixed race students in the photos, to read the handwritten microaggression
experiences they held, and to think about how the meanings behind the words relate to the
people in the images. These protest portraits resonated and engendered so many other locally-

275
Lipsitz, Time Passages, 152.

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situated photo and social media campaigns around the country and world because of the visual
strategies and practices used to amplify these personal stories about difference and belonging
that so many can identify with, despite different and shifting contexts. The embodied
representations of what microaggressions look, sound, and feel like, along with the rallying
hashtag declaration #itooamharvard, prompts viewers of the campaign to reflect on the
experiences of these students. In doing so, we can also see ourselves reflected in their
expressive faces and body language, and in the quotes on their message boards.
From static images to moving ones, the satirical videos about microaggressions showed
how critical awareness and reflection was built into both the collaborative development of the
videos as well as for the people the creators hoped to be reaching with their videos. As
explored in Chapter 4, the producers, writers, and actors of the various videos benefited from
having a creative outlet to speak back to and express their frustrations with their personal
experiences with microaggressions and systemic racism. Being a part of making, writing, and
acting in the videos made them think about and pick apart their experiences in order to find
and articulate moments to flip and exaggerate for satirical and comedic effect. This process of
asking people to reflect on and articulate their experiences was built in to the collaborative
processes at various points through the production of each of these videos, whether it was
diverse groups of people of color generating and highlighting dozens of different
microaggressions organized around a specific racial identity like in each of the BuzzFeed videos,
or the longer sketch comedy skits featuring composite experiences unpacking and poking holes
in the escalating depths of one form of microaggression, like the “Where are you REALLY
From?” and “What Kind of Asian Are You?” videos. In other cases, the creators of the videos

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explicitly highlighted people of color reflecting on their personal experiences with a particular
microaggression as the bulk of the video (“You CAN’T Sound White!”), or created a video
prompted by a learning experience of a producer seeking to explain the concept of
microaggressions to unknowing people who may also be open to knowing more about them
(“How Microaggressions are like Mosquito Bites”). Through media-making, the video creators
helped themselves process microaggressions and their everyday impacts as they also sought to
reach audiences to prompt them to reflect on their own experiences as targets and
perpetrators of microaggressions. The satirical and comedic commentary in these videos
prompts viewers to have to either figure out what is being made fun of through the sketch
comedy, or in other cases, to take in and digest what is still humorously but more explicitly
being stated in videos more directly intended to teach. Although some of these creations may
make people feel uncomfortable as they see themselves and their privileges being reflected in a
negative light, this recognition and knowledge of how and why microaggressions occur is the
only way forward towards acting to personally and systematically disrupt them. Only when we
are able to both see what the problems are and critically reflect on them can we also then
figure out how to act upon them.
Action

To be clear, a main argument of this dissertation is that these media and artistic
creations are action. They should not be thought of as insignificant because they operate on
cultural levels and are spread through informal social media networks, nor should they be
dismissed because they do not readily lead to immediate radical overhauling of entrenched and
institutionalized systems of oppression like racism. As I have shown throughout these chapters,

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in their various artistic and expressive forms, these project creators and participants created
counter-narratives that challenge public understanding about the roots and shapes of
microaggressions and their cumulative effects on marginalized populations. By amplifying
personal stories, they reach and support those that are incessantly impacted by
microaggressions, helping to validate their lived realities within hegemonic contexts that work
to silence them, and offer spaces of community, tools, and resources to help people deal with
future experiences with systemic racism. In addition to the sustaining impact these projects and
campaigns can have on an individual level, in raising the visibility and public discourse about
microaggressions, these projects also led to other kinds of actions geared towards institutional,
legal, or systemic change.
As we saw with The Microaggressions Project and the I, Too, Am Harvard campaign,
both started with student activists on college campuses, and both sparked activism across many
other campuses where students and educators created their own similar, locally-specific
campaigns and projects. The visibility and spread of I, Too, Am Harvard and The
Microaggressions Project raised awareness about everyday manifestations of structural racism
and contributed to public debates that often dismiss or belittle the reality and impact of them
on marginalized people’s lives. Structurally, these projects and campaigns also played a
supplementary role in the efforts of people working in educational and social institutions that
were already trying to systemically develop policies and practices that challenge and disrupt
microaggressions. For example, when The Microaggressions Project took off, creators Vivian Lu
and David Zhou became the highly visible “go to” people for an overwhelming number of higher
education, government, religious, and other social institutions that were requesting trainings

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and education materials to help them address microaggressions. These community leaders -
including social workers, psychologists, clergy and religious leaders, legal advocates,
researchers, college residential life professionals, college diversity affairs administrators,
student services, and deans and faculty from colleges and universities - wanted more resources
as they grappled with how to put policies in place to deal with structural discrimination and
cultural competency within their own lives and places of work, and looked to Vivian and David
for “answers” because of the resonance of The Microaggressions Project. Although these
demands on the project creators were unrealistic for the two of them to meet, this surge of
outreach was a clear indication that there are people out there who recognize the problems
and are doing the work, but who are also in need of more effective and compelling tools and
resources to help them do it. These institutional and social leaders saw the energy and
participatory practices around The Microaggressions Project as a potential pedagogical tool and
sought more resources from the creators to help them apply it to their own teaching and
learning contexts.
The I, Too, Am Harvard campaign also prompted and contributed to larger, ongoing
conversations about lived experiences of racism, inclusion, and diversity, and the kinds of
structures, policies, training, and systems needed to better address these issues. Within the
context of their own higher education institution, the campaign resulted in public
acknowledgment and inclusion in planning meetings with Harvard deans and administrators to
address the systemic discrimination that students of color on campus face. Nationally, the
visibility and spread of the campaign, boosted by the prestige associated with the Harvard
name, also caught the attention of the U.S. Government and representatives from I, Too, Am

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Harvard were invited to participate in President Obama’s social media town hall about issues in
higher education. Although these two examples are just small steps towards the kind of
sustained, institutionalized change that needs to be led and upheld by administrative
leadership at multiple levels, they do show how the visibility of student-led, participatory
campaigns can put pressure on those in power to pay attention to and address the issues at
hand. Although the challenge with sustaining student activism includes difficulties inherent in
school rhythms and sustaining continual participation in institutional efforts as students
graduate and focus on other things, the beauty of a publicly accessible campaign on the
Internet is that it lives on virtually and can and will be referenced in the future when the next
racially-charged campus controversy inevitably occurs. As we already saw with the spread of I,
Too, Am Harvard, the visibility and buzz that came from both traditional news sources and from
students and cultural commentators sharing and engaging via social media effectively amplified
the issues, experiences, and activism of students of color at Harvard and added to the chorus of
voices speaking back to similar issues on historically White college campuses across the nation.
These campaigns led directly to the development of student-led academic and professional
development conferences such as the annual Blacktivism Conference, and other public
convenings, such as the broadcasted, recorded, and posted virtual conversation with student
organizers from #BBUM (Being Black at [University of] Michigan), #itooamharvard, and the
UCLA Black Bruins, hosted by Dear White People and moderated by Colorlines. These online and
in-person actions put interpersonal and systemic racism front and center, with students of color
coming together to put pressure on college and university administrators to stop with the

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diversity and equity lip service and to actually do something about these deeply problematic
issues that continue to plague the communities they are responsible for.
Beyond their role in generating media that contributed to speaking back to and
educating about microaggressions by showing us what they look like in action, the creators of
the satirical videos from Chapter 4 also talked about how the processes of recognition,
reflection, and action that helped them make these videos also contributed to them wanting to
create more media that addressed these kinds of topics. Whether it happened in a context as
part of an organization’s business plan to maximize clicks (e.g., BuzzFeed), with explicitly social
justice oriented shows and networks (e.g., Decoded and Fusion), or if the creations were
spurned by a developmental arc in personal experiences (e.g., “Where are you REALLY from?”
or the mosquito video), participatory media-making encouraged more participatory media-
making. These writers, producers, and actors felt the cathartic impact of creating and
circulating these videos and saw how it resonated with so many people, which also kept them
going despite what one respondent referred to as the “cesspool” of vitriol that can come
through in video comments sections. When viewers communicated gratitude and identification
with the videos in person and online, it bolstered them to keep doing what they are doing in
making entertaining videos that shine light on and challenge people to face and think deeper
about these everyday manifestations of structural inequity. Many of the creators also talked
about how participating in making these videos also made them more confident and skilled to
publicly take on controversial social issues in other videos and projects (e.g., “How to Make
PB&J”). Within supportive networked communities and media institutions, these media makers
put out disarmingly humorous videos counter-narrating against dominant public discourses that

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dismiss microaggressions, and due in part to the resonance with viewers, it energized them to
create more.
Similar to the outreach that happened with the creators of The Microaggressions
Project, these media makers were also contacted by many people who wanted to use their
videos for pedagogical purposes in classrooms, workshops, and diversity trainings. Ken Tanaka
continues to receive messages from teachers and educators about using his “What kind of
Asian are you?” video in their teaching, as does MTV’s Decoded host Franchesca Ramsey, who
saves every single tweet, direct message, or email where someone tells her they watched or
want to use one of her videos in class, in a workshop, or in a training. Many of the video
creators have also been invited to speak at conferences, festivals, and other PoC gatherings to
speak about race, racism, and microaggressions. For example, in addition to helping launch her
career and visibility as a comedian and Asian American cultural commentator and activist, Jenny
Yang has spoken around the country to many student groups, and has also developed and
facilitated workshops that can help students unpack and navigate these experiences. In one
series of workshops she co-facilitated at the University of Minnesota, students of color wrote
down, reflected on, and shared their own experiences with microaggressions and then
collectively brainstormed and practiced how they would react in other scenarios where similar
microaggressions might occur. This collaborative role-playing in a safe space was a way to
directly help people process the microaggressions they have experienced in the past as well as
helping to prepare them for those they will experience in the future.
As these examples have shown, the impact of these projects reaches beyond the virtual
world. While these projects and campaigns can play a valuable role in helping individuals learn

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about and deal with their everyday experiences with microaggressions, they can also be utilized
as vivid resources to push for sustained, institutionalized and systemic change.

Directions for Future Research

The intersectional, multileveled nature of microaggressions and the different ways to
culturally expose and resist them means that there are many areas that future research can
expand in to both deepen knowledge around these issues and also continue to develop ways to
deal with and disrupt them.
My research has primarily focused on mediated counter-narratives to racial
microaggressions. Although I have made efforts towards an inclusive, intersectional approach in
my analysis of these manifestations of everyday racism, more research that shows how
microaggressions are layered and happen across multiple aspects of identity is ripe for
development. Doing this would require consideration of how other systems of power and
oppression operate together with racism (such as ablest, heteropatriarchy for example), and
how these systems reinforce one another interpersonally and institutionally. In addition to
going wider, future research could also pursue deeper dives into this range of issues, including
continuing to hone in on specific combinations of identity within specific contexts to center
more marginalized people’s lived experiences and learn more about the implications of how
other kinds of microaggressions operate. Whether it is research on first generation LGBTQ PoC
community college students, or mixed race female physicians in Mississippi, or Asian hijab-
wearing Muslim high school girls in LA, for as many combinations of identity and contexts there
are, there are that many voices that should be heard and valued epistemologically. The

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ultimate goal of this kind of work is to contribute to disrupting and breaking down dominant
systems of power and value by continually challenging them from the margins. In this way, as
intersectional feminist, educator, and activist bell hooks writes, the margins can be “more than
a site of deprivation,”
276
but also “a site of radical possibility (and) space of resistance.”
277

In addition to building on the existing and growing research that makes the case for
recognition and acknowledgment of microaggressions and their impacts, we also need more
research on the kinds of supports, tools, and resources that best help frequent targets of
microaggressions cope with and navigate them in everyday life. This includes further
understanding the in-person and online media and communication practices that may already
exist between people dealing with these kinds of everyday experiences. In my work, I examined
the communication strategies and liberatory and learning affordances of several different
examples of visual culture, such as the wall of written stories, the campaign portraits, hashtag,
and message boards, and satirical videos. However, many other creative and mediated forms of
resistance to microaggressions are also being created and circulated. This includes gifs, memes,
PoC podcasts, and people developing apps to capture, map, and provide quickly-accessible
resources to help record or respond to these everyday occurrences. An exploration of these
other kinds of creations and the participatory practices around them would expand our
knowledge about what different forms of resistance and engagement can do for people
participating in creating, sharing, and learning from them, as well as what kind of change is
targeted and possible through these varied activities.

276
Hooks, Yearning, 149.
277
Ibid.

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Within each case study covered in this dissertation, there are also many opportunities to
go more deeply into each project and campaign, and to trace the histories, trajectories, and
impact both on creators, participants, and engagers of these creations. In my work, I primarily
sought the perspectives of the creators and initial participants for their motivations and
experiences developing and participating in these projects. Future research could explore if
viewers, other participants, and circulators of these projects and campaigns were impacted by
interacting with them, and if so, how. Additionally, examining how creators and participants
were impacted by and dealt with criticism about their projects and practices (whether it was in
comments sections, emails, in person, through institutional pressures, or in journalistic op-eds)
would also illuminate the kinds of risks and constraints participation in these kinds of activities
can have. This research would then be able to make stronger claims about the impact and reach
of these kinds of participatory projects and practices from the perspective of those that
engaged with them, and it would deepen knowledge about the potential risks and benefits of
structuring these kinds of activities in educational situations.
While I have been making the argument that the campaigns and projects featured in
this dissertation can serve as good tools and resources to teach and learn about both content
(e.g., microaggressions, racism, intersectionality) and engaged participatory practices (e.g.,
media and civic participation skills), future research would benefit from testing and exploring
these claims. This research could take many forms, including finding educators (including
community and institutional leaders) already engaged with this work and seeing how they
could use some of the projects and campaigns to supplement their existing lessons, trainings, or
workshops, or it could look like introducing educators to these projects as a way of getting

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them to focus on these issues and then creating lessons around them. Finding out the impact of
this work on both the educators and students would then follow. Ideally, this research could
then be shared back with media makers, educators, and students which could then inform the
creation of similar media and projects organized around other issues, populations, and
practices.
The Time is Now

In October 2016, a series of tweets and corresponding New York Times article written by
reporter Michael Luo spread across the Internet,
278
adding yet another voice to the mounting
evidence of those decrying the dire state of race relations in the U.S. This was just one month
before the culmination of a highly-publicized, sharply divisive election season that ultimately
resulted in the election of a candidate who won by stirring up divisiveness around the country,
for years, with a blatantly White supremacist, nationalist, racist, misogynistic, bigoted, ablest,
xenophobic platform. In this context, and organized around the hashtag “#thisis2016,” Michael
Luo had taken to social media and digital journalism to share an experience that had just
happened while standing with his young family and a group friends on the sidewalk in
Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The group of Asian Americans were checking to see if a
restaurant had room for them to have lunch after church when a well-heeled White woman
walking by was annoyed that the family’s stroller was blocking her way. When she reached the
end of the block, she turned around and yelled at them, “Go back to China!” Stunned, Luo
hesitated for a second and then ran to confront her. Scared likely, of violent retribution, she
pulled out her iPhone and threatened to call the police. In his writing, he reflected that the

278
Luo, “An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China.”

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scene was almost absurdly comical in retrospect. He thought it was ironic she thought the
police would hear what happened and not just as likely charge her instead. Both of their
reactions about the police show their privilege of relating to law enforcement as people to call
for safety and justice, a luxury not all people of color have. Based on centuries of narratives
framing White women as innocent victims of male PoC aggression, systemic brutalization and
incarceration of Black and Brown bodies, and heated contemporary rhetoric about violently
criminal “foreign” immigrants and refugees, I am not so sure that they just as easily wouldn’t
have also taken her side. As Luo walked away from the situation, she screamed, “Go back to
your fucking country!,” to which he yelled back, “I was born in this country!” “It felt silly,” he
reflected about the shouting match, “But how else to prove I belonged?”
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At the end of February 2017 another grim story dominated domestic and international
news. A 51-year-old White man shot two 32-year-old Indian immigrant tech workers at a bar
and grill in Olathe, Kansas,
280
one of whom was killed. A 911 call reveals that the shooter had
run to hide at a nearby restaurant and confessed to a worker that he was “on the run from the
law”
281
because he had shot two “Iranian”
282
men, as well as a bystander who tried to intervene.
Earlier in the night, he had been escorted out of the bar because he had been harassing the
Indian immigrants, asking what visas they were on, and whether they were in the country
legally. When he came back to shoot them, he had yelled “Get out of my country!” before
opening fire.

279
Ibid.
280
Eligon and Najar, “Hate Crime Is Feared as 2 Indian Engineers Are Shot in Kansas.”
281
Ibid.
282
Berman, “FBI Investigating Shooting of Two Indian Men in Kansas as a Hate Crime.”

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Racial microaggressions need to be understood not as isolated, individual incidences,
but ecologically, as “everyday racism at the most interpersonal and direct level of societal
interaction within a larger system of institutional racism and ideologies of white supremacy.”
283

These terrible examples described above are just two of thousands of similar incidences that
continue to show how the impact of microaggressions are really not micro at all. It is not
difficult to see how “Get out of my country!” relates to “Go back to where you came from!” and
is really just the other side of “No, where are you REALLY from?” With people, institutions, and
a dominant culture that tries to silence marginalized people to tell us we are abnormal and do
not belong, is it any wonder why we are in pain, scared, humiliated, sad, and furiously
demanding that our humanity be recognized?
The need for dismantling racism and white supremacy in America is urgent. It has always
been urgent for Native, indigenous, and enslaved people systemically dehumanized since the
very founding of this country, but this work is not only for them, nor is it only something for the
past. It is the responsibility of all of us who benefit from and are complicit in these systems. As
the concept of “racial microaggression” shows us, “racism is not merely about individual
chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry…the social structures that create premature death do not
harm only those individuals who have the misfortune to come into contact with bigots or quick-
trigger authorities who have not yet learned how to see. They also prevent people from getting
adequate food, shelter, and housing. They limit physical, economic, and social mobility. They

283
Watson and Pérez Huber, “Micro In Name Only,” 2.

245

refuse to let us all be free.”
284
And because our lives are bound together in these relations of
power, only when all of us are free can any of us be free.
285

While dominant racist ideologies have held on and cycled through repeating patterns of
crisis, progress, and backlash, demonstrating incredible adaptability and resilience over time,
286

so have the counter-hegemonic forces that never stop resisting and disrupting them. These
resisters are motivated by the deep injustices of the way things are, but also by the belief that
there can be new worlds and new futures where these issues no longer plague us. The
contemporary moment offers many of us resources in the form of media and networked
communication tools to help center and amplify the incessant struggles of the oppressed,
which are starting to be louder and more visibly undeniable as ordinary citizens both organize
in person and take to virtual spaces to document and challenge the pain and violence of the
status quo. Having more access to the means, skills, and social infrastructures needed to utilize
media and networked communication in the pursuit of political action, we are discovering
different ways everyday people can participate in shifting discourses and culture towards a
reality where there really can be equity and justice for all. In his most recent book that looks
across a broad range of contemporary topics on race, culture, politics, and activism, Jeff Chang
writes about the transformative and revolutionizing work that needs to be done in order to
even begin to get such a place.
Here is where we must take a leap—of faith, maturity, imagination—in the same way
the post-Ferguson Movement for Black Lives has called on all of us to rethink everything
from the bottom up—our shared language, images, and stories; the spaces where we
learn, live, and work; who we think we are, individually and collectively. I use the term

284
Chang, We Gon’ Be Alright, 3.
285
Crass, Towards Collective Liberation, 255.
286
Chang, We Gon’ Be Alright, 3.

246

“we” here advisedly. If we are to undo resegregation and racialized exclusion, the fact is
that some of us will have to work much harder than others. All of the forms of refusal,
denial, and justification that preserve the structures of power will have to be undone to
make room for those who are the most marginalized.
We often think of revolution as something to be won in bloodshed through war
and the violent seizure of power. But as Grace Lee Boggs has put it, the next revolution
might be better thought of as “advancing humankind to a new stage of consciousness,
creativity, and social and political responsibility.” Her revolution would require us to
move away from finding new ways to divide and rule, and instead move toward
honoring and transforming ourselves and our relations to each other.
287

The projects and campaigns featured in this dissertation represent just a handful of the kinds of
actions that people have recently taken to reframe, resist, and educate about the issues of
inequity that affect us all. By humanizing these everyday experiences, they show how we are all
connected, how systems of power and oppression implicate us all, and demonstrate that
through critical recognition, reflection, and action, we can disrupt existing power structures and
“embrace the power within each of us to create the world anew.”
288

287
Ibid., 164.
288
Boggs, Kurashige, and Glover, The Next American Revolution, 51.

247

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Asset Metadata

Creator Lee, Diana (author)

Core Title Centering impact, not intent: reframing everyday racism through storytelling, participatory politics, and media literacy

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/01/2019

Defense Date 05/03/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art activism,civic engagement,counter-narrative,critical pedagogy,critical race theory,digital media,media literacy,networked communication,OAI-PMH Harvest,participatory politics,racial microaggressions,storytelling,visual culture

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Solórzano, Daniel (committee member), Thorson, Kjerstin (committee member), Trope, Alison (committee member)

Creator Email dianaclee@gmail.com,lee.diana@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-395635

Unique identifier UC11264480

Identifier etd-LeeDiana-5476.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-395635 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LeeDiana-5476.pdf

Dmrecord 395635

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Lee, Diana

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA