So, over the course of this week, I found myself listening and waiting to observe microaggressions in everyday life. What actually wound up happening is that I discovered more while watching television than in my everyday life, because I was sick in bed all week! The hardest part now is trying to determine which instance of a microaggression I should blog about because there were so many. From Survivor to ABC primetime show, Last Resort to The View, there were many instances that I took note of.
I think the best example would be the incident I witnessed on the season premiere of the television show, Survivor. Members of one tribe were discussing who to vote off the island. The group consisted of 3 white players (2 female, 1 male), 1 africcan-american male and 1 african-american female. The white male was talking to the white female about the african-american female as they observed her speaking to the african-american male further off in the distance. The white male said “Oh, she’s gettin gangsta now.” I immediately stopped and thought what a great example this was of a microaggression. It speaks to the stereotype of the African-American female being “the angry Black woman”. When he said the comment of her ‘gettin gangsta’, he changed his vernacular to sound like a Black rapper using slang.
This microaggression is a prime example of racial and gender microagression. Maybe in so many ways, he didn’t necessarily know or realize that what he was doing could be deemed insulting of offensive, yet it shows the prominent dominance of the White culture over everything minority. I’ve noticed a lot with certain reality-type game shows that microaggressions play a big part in determining who stays, who goes, who wins, who loses. The game show aspect in and of itself is a competitive environment, so taking scenarios of dominance from the “real world” proves to exacerbate the competition more.
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