4. From Microaggressions to Macro-Affirmations with Danny Solórzano and Lindsay Pérez Huber

Episode 4 Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/3axw3k9p

In Episode 4, Professor Jabari Mahiri engages in conversation with Dr. Daniel Solórzano and Dr. Lindsay Pérez Huber. Dr. Solórzano is a Professor of Social Science and Comparative Education and Director of the Center for Critical Race Studies in Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The conversation highlights the importance of origin stories. Dr. Solórzano and Dr. Pérez Huber share their scholarly journeys that led to studying microaggressions. They discuss the origins of their interests and how it intersects with critical race theory. Dr. Solórzano recounts his discovery of microaggressions while researching critical race theory in education. This journey began with encountering Dr. Peggy Davis’s work, which led him to delve into the writings of Dr. Chester Pierce. Dr. Pérez Huber shares her experience of being introduced to the concept of microaggressions during her undergraduate studies and her subsequent engagement with the topic during her graduate studies. 

The discussion expands to explore the role of critical race theory (CRT) in understanding racial microaggressions. Dr. Solórzano delineates the five tenets of CRT, emphasizing its focus on challenging dominant frameworks, centering experiential knowledge, and advocating for racial justice. They share their journeys into studying microaggressions, the importance of understanding macro-aggressions and institutional racism, and the impact of internalized racism within communities of color.

In response to the challenges posed by racial microaggressions and internalized racism, the conversation introduces the concept of racial micro-affirmations. These are verbal and nonverbal strategies that acknowledge and affirm individuals’ dignity, integrity, and shared humanity. Finally, the discussion touches upon the possibility of conceptualizing racial macro-affirmations within educational structures. While the concept is not fully developed, these scholars acknowledge the need to institutionalize practices that promote asset-based perspectives that affirm the humanity and value of all individuals and groups within educational institutions.

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating students, particularly for those from historically marginalized communities.

Transcript

From Microaggressions to Macro-Affirmations 

with Danny Solórzano and Lindsay Pérez Huber

Berkeley School of Education: Leadership Programs 

Jabari Mahiri Host, Editor, and Producer

Brianna Luna Audio Editor and Production Specialist

Mayra Reyes External Relations and Production Specialist

Becca Minkoff Production Manager

Diana Garcia Communications Manager and External Relations

Audra Puchalski Communications Manager and Web Design

Jennifer Elemen Digitally Mediated Learning Coordinator

Jen Burke Graphic Designer

Robyn Ilten-Gee Editor and Media Consultant

Rian Whittle Sound Technician

Transcript

Brianna Luna  0:17  

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from Pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating, particularly for those who are marginalized. We complement the mission and goals of the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy, 21CSLA.

Housed in the Leadership Programs of Berkeley School of Education, we acknowledge our presence on unceded Ohlone Land. We explore innovative ideas and compelling work of educational leaders at the intersection of research, policy, and practice, to realize individual, social, and environmental justice, because our democracy depends on it.

In episode four, we delve into a conversation led by the 21CSLA Chair and Faculty Director of the Berkeley School of Education Leadership Programs, Jabari Mahiri. We will be discussing the text Racial Microaggressions: Using Critical Race Theory to Respond to Everyday Racism from the 21CSLA 2023 Spring Collective Retreat with Professors Danny Solórzano and Lindsay Pérez Huber.

Jabari Mahiri  1:36 

Danny Solórzano is a Professor of Social Science and Comparative Education and Chicanx and Central American Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Solórzano’s teaching, research, and publishing interests include critical race theory, education, racial microaggressions, critical race pedagogy and critical race spital analysis. 

Lindsay Pérez Huber is a Professor in the Equity Education and Social Justice Master’s Program in the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. Her research specializes in race, immigration and higher education, racial microaggressions and critical race gender methodologies and epistemologies. 

We're going to begin by having a question that I thought was interesting to pose because they begin the book with their own origin stories. And if you're a person of color, you can identify with those origin stories because you have your own. 

This book appears in James Banks's Multicultural Education series, which is a provocative series, with maybe 40 different publications over time, and you can literally become an expert in multicultural education if you were to just delve deeply into those texts. James Banks offers his own origin story at the beginning and his preface to the book. He talks about being an African American man in the South in the 50s. We won't go any further. But for you all, how did we How did you come to study microaggressions in the first place?

Daniel G. Solórzano  3:16  

Thank you, Jabari, really appreciate you all inviting us here to share this work with you. There's a short origin story. And then there's a much longer origin story. I'll do the short one. I'll focus mostly on microaggressions because of the focus of the talk and the book. 

I was working in critical race theory in about 1993. I just heard about it serendipitously actually. As I was delving into that literature, which was mostly in law, I was trying to make the connection to the field that we're in; education, social sciences, and ethnic studies, as I was looking at that literature, I came across a law review article by Peggy Davis, in the Yale Law Journal 1989 article, where the title of the article is, “Laws Microaggression”. So when I saw that article, I'd never seen the word never heard of the word microaggression. 

I came to footnote number five, and the footnote was a person named Chester Pierce. There were 10 of them cited in that piece by Peggy Davis. I read and immersed myself in everything Chester Pierce has written. I just found out lately that his co-author Wesley Profit, who is in that first citation, citation number five, Wesley Profit was his doctoral student at Harvard, in the School of Public Health. I just found that out about a couple of weeks ago, right when I got his dissertation. Now we're looking at his dissertation trying to figure out the role that Wesley Profit plays in the development of this thing called racial microaggressions. 

So that's where it started. It started with just this serendipitously finding in this article by Peggy Davis, finding that footnote by Chester Pierce, and then having Chet school us, and he continues to school us in doing this work.

Jabari Mahiri  5:21  

So you go way back in 1992, that's when I first came to Berkeley, so we're talking about 30 years ago. But Lindsay, you are a lot younger in 1992. Give us a couple, you know, sentences about how you came to this work, also.

Lindsay Pérez Huber  5:36  

Thank you, Jabari. Thank you for the invitation to be here. I really appreciate sharing the space with everyone and engaging and hearing your ideas about how you see this work play a role in the work that you're doing as leaders and educators. 

Yes, so I was quite young, in the early '90s, my story kind of starts in the late '90s, early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate student, trying to make sense of my own really difficult transition into higher education. As I think in terms of origin stories, many of us in this room probably experienced higher ed, getting disengaged for many of my classes, not seeing ourselves in my undergraduate kind of education, and then finding ethnic studies. 

I think ethnic studies, in many ways kind of changed my life in terms of changing my perspective. It got me re-engaged in higher education, and really kind of propelled me forward to want to continue in a Ph. D. program, looking at the intersections of race and racism in education. At the time, in the early 2000s, there weren't many education programs and PhD programs that were doing this work. And so the first one that I found, I found Danny's picture first, right after doing like a Yahoo search, I don't think Google was even a thing then. But after my Yahoo engine search, I found Danny doing this amazing study, which I didn't know at the time, but was the first empirical study on racial microaggressions, using critical race theory to examine the everyday racism that Chicano and Chicana scholars were experiencing as part of the Ford Foundation fellows. 

When I came to UCLA, Dr. Walter Allen, also, in the then the Graduate School of Education. Danny, were working on an amicus brief for the Bollinger case, the Michigan case, an affirmative action case. It was actually in Walters's class where it was kind of my first engagement with racial microaggressions. And then, of course, working with Danny as a graduate student, and being mentored by Danny, where I got this experience that I think was unique, to learn those tools very deeply.

Jabari Mahiri  7:46  

Well, you lead us directly into the next question, because we know critical race theory is really under attack for all kinds of problematic reasons. Talk a little bit about how you all see critical race theory illuminating the study of racial microaggressions.

Daniel G. Solórzano  8:00  

It is the work of scholars and practitioners like ourselves, who are developing an analytical framework that unapologetically centers or accounts for race and racism in education. That's the first part of the definition. And so that came as a result of immersing myself in that legal literature, these areas that I thought were important. I was learning from the law, learning from the law review articles, and the field as it was developing there, and then developing these five tenants. 

The first one centers on race and racism, right, that's the first tenant. That's the work that we do. But it looks at that intersection I said earlier, with gender, with class with immigration status, etc. The second one is it challenges dominant frameworks. In a space like this, we often talk about one of the dominant frameworks that we have to deal with on a daily basis in the space that we find ourselves in, deficit framing. Cultural deficit framing. 

So CRTs in the second tenant challenge those frameworks. It centers experiential knowledge and it honors experiential knowledge that people of color bring to spaces like this, bring to schools, and bring to our communities and other communities. 

The fourth is that it commits to racial justice. We're always looking for ways in which we're going to challenge the status quo, and we're going to bring about social change as we move forward. And then finally, it challenges historicism, and what we often do is that we often say that when we look at a particular issue, it has historical antecedents. We have to look for those historical antecedents. 

Jabari Mahiri  9:41  

Okay, so let's move forward then recognizing the significance of counter-storytelling and centering this work on the lived experiences. Let's accept that and then move to this other interesting area of the book where you raise a consideration not only of microaggressions but also macro-aggressions. We're leaders in this room. Help us to understand how macro and microaggressions connect to institutional racism. What are the key characteristics of how this interplays in the field of education, specifically?

Lindsay Pérez Huber  10:14  

One of the examples that we presented in the book, and you can find this, it's actually on page 57, was this photograph as we were looking for different photographs that we knew we wanted to feature in the book that would really allow folks a powerful visual that would take you through the distinction and overlapping conceptual links between the macro and the microaggression. We found this photo, this was at the lab, it was cataloged in the Library of Congress. It's called A Drinking Fountain on the County Courthouse lawn. It was taken in 1938 in Halifax County, North Carolina. This is actually the front lawn outside of a North Carolina county courthouse. You see a young African-American boy standing next to this water fountain with the sign "colored" on the tree next to him. 

So we use this photo to talk through to our readers in this chapter, that the everyday racism, the microaggression, that is illustrated in this photo, is this young boy next to this colored water fountain, right. That water fountain signifies the everyday ways that this young man had to be reminded that he was less than, had to be reminded that he was not as good as white people who would drink from a separate water fountain, right. It was the sign, the colored sign, that represented the Jim Crow Laws of the time, which was the institutionalized form of racism. Through, of course, Jim Crow law, which segregated public spaces between white folks and African Americans during that time, and other people of color. The macro aggression, we argue, is the ideologies that justify institutionalized racism, like Jim Crow law, and reinforce and reproduce everyday racism or racial microaggressions. 

Brianna Luna 12:15  

We’ll be right back with more of our discussion with Professor Solórzano and Professor Pérez Huber at the 21CSLA Collective Retreat after the break.

[Musical Break: “Hoist Up the Banner” by Eric Bibb]

Jabari Mahiri  13:03  

I really appreciate how you have given us these visual representations to help get into the depth of understanding of how complex and subtle sometimes these issues are, you might see a sign on a tree that just says colored and you walk past and realize it’s indexing a whole series of Jim Crow laws, etc. So this is very, very powerful. 

One of the most problematic aspects of the way racism operates in our country has to do with the fact that, people who are victims of it, also internalize it. I'd like to have you guys talk a little bit about and help us understand more about internalized racism, with regards to the racial hierarchies within and between communities of color.

Lindsay Pérez Huber  13:48  

We start with an excerpt from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. Many of you in this room, I'm sure you're familiar with Gloria Anzaldúa. She's a Chicana feminist, theorist, and scholar. This excerpt is from an essay that she wrote called, "La Prieta". 

She says, too bad Mijia was morena, muy prieta, so dark and different from her own fair-skinned skin children. But she loved Mijita anyway, what I lacked in whiteness, I had smartness, but it was too bad I was dark like an Indian. Don't go in the sun, my mother would tell me when I wanted to play outside. If you get any darker they'll mistake you for an Indian, and don't get dirt on your clothes. You don't want people to say that you're a dirty Mexican. 

And so here we see Anzaldúa talking to us about the painful memory and perception of being less than because of colorism, right, within our communities. So in this context, Saldura was talking about the perceptions of her dark skin compared to her lighter-skinned siblings, from both her mother and her grandmother who were very important people in her life. If you read more of this essay and you read more of her work, especially Borderlands, you'll see her talk about the pain that's caused by internalized racism and by colorism when ideologies of white supremacy are internalized within and among communities of color. 

Daniel G. Solórzano  15:11  

We've defined it in the book as internalized racism, as the conscious or unconscious acceptance of a racial hierarchy, and its related ideologies and structures that positions and privileges whites above people of color. That's how we start the definition. We continue by saying that internalized racism goes beyond the internalization of stereotypes imposed by the white majority about people of color. It is the internalization of the beliefs, values, the worldviews inherent in white supremacy, ie the cultural deficiency theory that I mentioned earlier, that can result in negative self and/or racial group perceptions. 

One example, another visual that we use, and this is one of the photos we really wanted to use, the Kenneth and  Mamie Clark's doll study, as an example. Some of you probably know that this work really originated with Mamie Clark's Master's Thesis, and eventually her dissertation. But really, what we are looking at is how this young, three, four-year-old was able to internalize the racism of the time, he was able to internalize the colorism of the time. 

Mamie would ask the young boy, show me the good doll. He would inevitably, always pick the white doll.  She would ask him, show me the nice doll, and he would pick the white doll. We shouldn't be talking about race to young people, they're already experiencing it.

Jabari Mahiri  16:46  

Do you mind if I throw a fastball? 

Daniel G. Solórzano  16:48  

Oh, sure. 

Jabari Mahiri  16:50  

Because what you just said reminds me, and you all began with a discussion of Friere also as one of the key theorists to think about some of these issues of oppression and victimization. One of his key points is the notion of sub-oppression, that people not only internalize the hierarchies of oppression but in some cases, when they gain power, they actually replicate those so they help people of color in positions of power, oppressing other people of color. So I just want to throw that little fastball out there to see how your work on microaggressions and internalized racism will help us think about that particular aspect of the problem. 

Lindsay Pérez Huber  17:32  

Friere is you know, certainly influential in our theorizing about racism and systems of oppression, someone else that was important, particularly in the theorizing around racist native nativism was Albert Memmi, he calls it the pyramid of petty tyrants, when people of color begin to internalize whiteness and white supremacy, and begin to harm each other. 

One of the things that I was struck by that Rebecca mentioned earlier, was that this group of leaders of color is being intentional about the work to reflect on your healing, and right, to do this work. And that's so important because of the harm of everyday racism that has been experienced within the broader society, right, among white folks, but also the harm that's caused within communities. 

Jabari Mahiri  18:25  

I think it's so important that your book doesn't back away from dealing with this internalized racism. And it's also important that you don't leave us hanging. You don't leave us in the abyss of all of the problems that microaggressions internalized racism and racism in some systems of white supremacy can cause. You offer some hope in the way of racial micro-affirmations. So what are racial micro-affirmations, and what are their roles in responding to disrupting or ameliorating racial microaggressions?

Daniel G. Solórzano  18:55  

It began, again, it has an origin story, Jabari. And for me, it was this letter. If you've read Henry Louis Gates's autobiographical memoir Colored People in 1994, which I used in my seminar, I was just amazed by his story, but he starts the book by writing a letter to his two daughters, Maggie and Liza. It's this section, a six-page letter. I pulled out the sections that I remembered a couple of decades and a half later when Lindsey and I and others were trying to figure out what this thing called micro-affirmations looks like. Who's talked about it? And so, I'll read a portion of the letter.

He said, Dear Maggie, and Liza, I have written this book for another reason as well. I remember that once we were walking in Washington DC heading for the National Zoo and you asked me if I had known the man to whom I had just spoken. I said no. And Liza, you volunteered that you found it embarrassing that I would speak to a complete stranger on the street. 

He continues, last summer, I sat at a sidewalk cafe in Milan Italy, and three or four black Italianos, black Italians, walked casually by, each spoke to me. Rather each nodded his head slightly or acknowledged me with a glance ever so subtly. When growing up, we always did this with each other passing boats in a sea of white folk, which is why I still nod or speak to black people on the street, and why it felt so good to be acknowledged by the afro- Italians who passed my table at that cafe in Milan. Above all, I enjoy the unselfconscious moments of shared cultural intimacy, whatever form they take, when no one else is watching and when no white people are around, and I hope you'll understand why I continue to speak to colored people I pass on the streets. Love daddy. 

So it was that letter when we were starting to think about this thing called micro-affirmation, racial micro-affirmations. I went back to this letter, you know when you read something, it's in the back of your brain somewhere, it's wherever it's at, but it suddenly surfaces. This is one of the definitions. We say that racial micro-affirmations are verbal and nonverbal strategies, or what Gates calls, "moments of a shared culture and intimacy that people of color use to acknowledge and affirm each other's dignity, their integrity, and shared humanity, and that makes people feel seen and valued. The second part is their verbal and nonverbal responses to racial microaggressions. 

For me, and I think for Lindsay, as well, for many, many of you in this room, affirmation often begins in our homes, in our families. For Me, it also began when I first read Malcolm X in 1968, in a World Civilizations class, and how that was the first time I read a book, where a person of color was talking to me.

Lindsay Pérez Huber  22:03  

Danny mentioned that this is a definition that has taken an evolutionary trajectory over almost a decade now. We actually first started talking about micro-affirmations in an article that was about my daughter here up in the front, Leila, she's a first-year college student now, but when she was around eight years old, talking about, you know, she said she called it the opposite of a microaggression. Right, how can we talk? How can we be more hopeful in these conversations, just like you said, Jabari, is that it's important to hold on to that hope. Particularly when we are engaging in these discussions with youth, as educators, we have a responsibility to acknowledge that hopefulness, right, for our students and for our youth because of how difficult the conversations around everyday racism can be. 

Our most recent study that we've done has been with graduate students of color talking with them about examples of micro-affirmations that they've experienced throughout their trajectories from K-12 to undergrad to their graduate school experiences. What we found using some CRT, of course, but also Chicana feminist tools, is that micro-affirmations are felt in the body, right? Our bodies are our sites of knowledge production. Micro-affirmations can be seen and heard and smelled and felt. So part of the definition that we're we're thinking about when we talk about protection, many of our participants in this study talked about micro-affirmations as healing and as restorative. It's particularly when those micro-affirmations are these moments of shared cultural intimacy, it's that shared cultural intimacy that allows for that healing.

Jabari Mahiri  23:50  

You've given a good definition of racial micro-affirmations, and you know that I threw a question out to you that you said you had to think a little bit more about, so I'd like to go there as we bring things to a close. Is there a concept of racial, and macro affirmations, and if so, what would that look like? And if not, why doesn't it exist?

Lindsay Pérez Huber  24:11  

I remember telling Danny, like, I want to think about this when I'm not so tired because it's such a great question, about the macro affirmation. When we think about how micro-affirmations can have an ideology, right? So we're thinking about what are those ideologies. They're, of course, asset-based and asset-informed versus deficit. They are grounded in ideologies of humanity, of a value, of integrity, dignity, all those, you know all of those components of our definition, and then thinking about how they can be institutionalized. So how can we think about providing spaces of macro-affirmations as schooling structures?

Jabari Mahiri 25:02  

As we draw to a close, we’d like to thank Professor Danny and Professor Lindsay for sharing their insights and expertise with us today, and for equipping out leaders with the necessary tools to confront and dismantle systemic injustice in education.

Mayra Reyes  25:29  

Our podcast team includes Jennifer Elemen, Robyn Ilten-Gee, Andrea Lampros, Brianna

Luna, Jabari Mahiri, Audra Puchalski, Mayra Reyes, Dara Tom, and Ryan Whittle.

Transcript by Brianna Luna