A Closer Look At “Micro”

I have struggled with the word microaggression because there is often nothing small about its effect. But perhaps the word micro becomes useful if I think of it not as the size of the harm, but as the speed at which ranking can happen.

A look. An interruption. A slight change in tone. Who is believed first. Who is listened to more carefully. Who receives warmth and who receives suspicion. Who is assumed to know and who is expected to prove.

Sometimes the ranking happens almost before we know we have done it.  That is what the term calls up for me: a ranking reflex.

Racism did not only produce evil acts. It also taught societies how to rank human beings. It shaped assumptions about who should lead, who should be believed, who should be considered intelligent, attractive, civilised or respectable.

Those habits can become so ordinary that they travel through everyday interaction almost unnoticed.

That, to me, is one reason a small encounter can carry such a long history.

Keeping the camera with us

This also makes me curious about what would happen if people of the African diaspora took this language and used it for some of our own exploration.

Not to say, we do it too.

Not to flatten racism into a universal problem of people occasionally being unkind to one another.

The historical and institutional power of racism matters.

But if ranking is learned, then we can also become interested in the places where ranking passes through our own relationships.

What happens when I speak over you?

When status determines who is heard?

When I compare myself with somebody else and quietly reduce either them or myself?

When somebody tells me they were hurt and my first response is to explain the intentions of the person who hurt them?

Maybe they didn't mean it.

There is that word again.

Onbedoeld.

Unintended.

Except this time the person I am protecting may look like me.

The useful question is not: Which one of us is the racist now?

It is:

What happened between us?

That question gives us somewhere different to go.

From injury to relationship

There is something powerful about keeping the camera with us while changing what we are looking for.

Not more evidence of what has been done to us.

What happens between us.

How do we respond when somebody names a hurt?

Can we notice when status, confidence, education, money, language, appearance or social position begin shaping how much attention we give one another?

Can somebody say, That diminished me, without the entire relationship collapsing?

Can somebody recognise, I did that, without becoming so consumed by shame or defensiveness that the original harm disappears?

Can we adjust?

Can we repair?

Can we remain?

This is where onbedoeld ongemak becomes more interesting to me.

Not as a cushion around the person who caused harm.

Intention does not remove consequence.

But something unintended can become something we are willing to see.

And once we can see it, we have choices.

This kind of exploration feels important because it gives us greater collective control over the conversation.

We are no longer only providing testimony about what others have done.

We are asking what kind of relationships we want to practise among ourselves.

Spaces where we can grow

That requires space.

Not every conversation needs to begin by establishing that racism exists.

Not every exploration of African or diaspora experience needs to be organised around convincing somebody outside that experience of its legitimacy.

There is value in spaces where we can start further along.

Where we can assume complexity.

Where disagreement is possible without constantly having to translate our humanity first.

Where we can examine what we have inherited, including what we may have inherited from colonial and racial systems, without making Europe the audience for that work.

I think those spaces can be critical to emancipation.

This does not mean withdrawing from wider society or abandoning the work of changing existing institutions.

It means recognising that our development cannot remain entirely dependent upon people who may still be at the beginning of examining their own miseducation.

We can work for change there and build elsewhere at the same time.

What might we build?

This is why I find myself thinking about Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States.

Their history is specifically American and cannot simply be transplanted into Europe.

But their existence raises an important question.

What kinds of educational institutions might African-descended communities build here if we began from our own intellectual, cultural and developmental needs rather than continually asking to be added to somebody else's centre?

Why, in Europe, are so many of our educational spaces still supplementary, temporary or dependent upon institutions whose basic architecture was created without us in mind?

What might it look like to create institutions where African history and thought do not appear mainly as an elective, a special project or a response to exclusion?

Where young people can encounter themselves within the foundation of the curriculum rather than waiting to appear at its margins?

This does not necessarily mean institutions exclusively for Black students.

It means being willing to imagine institutions whose intellectual starting point is different.

Places where African and diaspora histories, languages, knowledge systems, creativity and contemporary realities can be treated as sources from which inquiry begins.

Not beginning from zero

We do not have to invent everything ourselves.

There are histories of Black educational organising, community schools, movements, scholarship and institution-building across the United States, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.

There are people already doing pieces of this work.

The question is what becomes possible when those pieces begin to connect.

We have precedents.

We have knowledge.

We have experience.

And we have each other.

Perhaps the task is not to compete over who holds the most expertise, but to allow different kinds of knowledge to move between us.

One person knows the history. Another knows the institution. Another understands the body. Another understands the community. Another knows how to organise, teach, fund, write, care or build.

Nobody has to become the whole village.

We are the village.

That is one way I understand Ubuntu becoming practical rather than symbolic.

The question becomes:

What happens to us in one another's presence?

Do our relationships make us smaller, more guarded and more competitive?

Or do they create room for us to become more ourselves?

What do we want to pass on?

This matters particularly because our children are growing here.

We are already part of what Belgium and Europe are becoming, whether or not every institution has caught up with that reality.

So perhaps the work ahead is not only to ask:

How do we survive racism?

We can also ask:

What kind of people are we becoming with one another?

What do we want to practise?

What do we want to interrupt?

What are we willing to repair?

What do we refuse to pass on?

I do not want the next generation to inherit only a sophisticated vocabulary for describing injury.

I want them to inherit relationships in which they can be confident without becoming hard, connected without becoming the same, and different without having to become enemies.

I want them to know that belonging does not have to be rationed.

And perhaps this is where I want to leave the camera.

Not only on the wound.

Not only turned towards the people who need to examine what they have inherited.

Keep the camera with us, but change what we are looking for.

Look at what happens between us.

Look at the ranking reflex when it appears.

Look at whether we can name it.

Look at the repair.

Look at the spaces we create when we are no longer waiting for everybody else to become ready.

And look at what we decide to build together.