Microaggression

Literature, 1970

Being patronising or condescending. In a small, irrelevant way.

Coined by black psychiatrist Chester Pierce in regards to the “little ways” he saw black people being spoken down to, mentioned in the 1970 section “Offensive Mechanisms” from “The Black Seventies” by Floyd Barbour. It went on to form a structural part of Critical Race Theory.

• https://oed.com/view/Entry/64098026
• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=microaggression
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=microaggression
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Middlebrook_Pierce
• https://www.amazon.com/Black-Seventies-Floyd-B-Barbour/dp/0875580599