Effects of Microaggressions

Black and minority ethnic people, disabled people and other under-represented groups are likely to experience microaggressions as a frequent and familiar aspect of their environment, both within wider society and the university.

Despite massive changes in social attitudes, as well as significant changes in legislation such as same-sex marriage, LGBTQ+ people and other minority sexualities still experience discrimination and regular microaggressions from others.

Each microaggression on its own can seem minor and trivial to others; however, the cumulative effect can be devastating but invisible. Known effects are:

• Loss of self-esteem
• Feelings of exhaustion
• Mistrust of peers, staff and institutions
• Decreased participation and ability to study
• Increased risk of student drop-out
• A low sense of belonging

Student Quotes:

Microaggressions, I feel, always stem from stereotypes, which you think are the truth but they are not and so they come up as insult. So they aren’t opening room for growth. Because if you see Africans as poor, they are dirty, there’s a lot of diseases, they will always kind of see themselves that way.  If you keep on asking me questions like “How come your English is so good?”, “ I like your wig” and stuff like that it just makes me feel like that’s how I’m supposed to be - I’m not supposed to know English, I’m not supposed to be educated or something like that and it doesn’t really bring room for growth or improvement at all.

It puts you in a box that you’re trying to get out of - in a stereotypical box - it limits your social interaction with other students, because if you’re stereotyped in a certain way people will expect you to behave in that frame.

If you find people who fit in that same box as you, you might as well just bond with them.  So you end up having this cluster of grad students, Asian students together so it’s really hard to fit in with other groups.

It triggers your internalized homophobia, if that makes sense, because sometimes  I doubt if my feelings and like my identities are valid because I feel  if I can hide them maybe I should hide them - because what's the point of being [queer] if I can just ignore it?  It has triggered a lot of confusion inside me. So that also leads to loss of self esteem.