Abstract
Microaggression complaints can be understood as a form of social control. Drawing from Donald Black’s theories of conflict and social control, Campbell and Manning explain microaggression complaints with the social conditions in which they are most likely to occur. They identify similarities between each aspect of microaggression complaints and a broader category of social control, such as reliance on third parties and campaigns to win support. They discuss social structural conditions conducive to each of these and propose that campaigns to publicize microaggressions occur when all are present in high degrees. These structural conditions also explain other elements of victimhood culture, and their growth and spread explains contemporary moral change.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Those who deem someone’s conduct deviant or offensive might deal with it in a number of ways without involving others. They could use direct aggression, verbally berating or physically assaulting the offender. They could exercise covert avoidance, quietly cutting off relations with the offender without any confrontation or complaint. Or they could treat the problem as a disruption to their relationship and seek only to restore harmony without passing judgment. There are many ways to handle conflict without having a third party actively involved. Oftentimes other people will never even know that the conflict took place (Black 1998:Chapter 5).
- 2.
Anthropologist Sally Engle Merry distinguishes private gossip from scandal—something that exists when “gossip is elevated to a public arena” (Merry 1984:275).
- 3.
Consider a description of the activities of New England Resistance, an American activist organization that campaigned against military conscription during the Vietnam War: “Demonstrations, draft card turn-ins, marches, and sanctuaries were public events which set participants (who in a sense became performers) apart from onlookers or media audiences. These events were not intended to be passively watched or consumed; they were partly staged for persuasive effect, to force people to take sides and thereby enlist them in the protest cause” (Thorne 1975:118).
- 4.
Such authorities might intervene as mediators, trying to bring about some peaceful and mutually agreeable resolution to the conflict. Police and court clerks, for instance, often handle disputes informally, attempting to pacify the disputants rather than making an arrest or arranging a formal hearing (Black 1980:Chapter 5; Greenhouse et al. 1994:55–90). Or they might respond authoritatively, subjecting offenders to punishment or forcing them to pay compensation for damages. However they ultimately end up handling the case, complaining to authorities—legal or otherwise—is a common response to conflict.
- 5.
This usage goes back to before the term was closely associated with books on self-improvement.
- 6.
For example, detailed studies of hunter-gatherer groups, stateless farming societies in New Guinea and the Amazon, and the remains found at prehistorical archeological sites all indicate that stateless societies have drastically higher rates of violent killing than state societies (Cooney 1998:Chapter 3; Diamond 2013:Chapters 2–4; Pinker 2011:Chapter 2).
- 7.
For instance, the US federal government avoided forcefully intervening on behalf of Southern blacks until activists succeeded in convincing non-Southern whites that black civil rights was a major public concern (Santoro 2008).
- 8.
Cultural closeness and distance predict partisanship as well. We can see the influence of culture on partisanship in cases where people express preference for members of their own racial or ethnic group against outsiders, even when both disputants are strangers. Consider the famous case of former football star O.J. Simpson , a black man accused of killing two white victims. During his criminal trial for murder, nine of 12 jurors were black, and the jury found him not guilty. But in a later civil trial for wrongful death, 11 of the 12 jurors were white and none were black, and Simpson was found liable for the deaths. According to Black, “The crucial difference in the two Simpson trials was the cultural location of the juries. The largely African-American jury favored the African-American, and the largely white jury favored the whites…. Public opinion polls at the time of the criminal trial also showed the same pattern of partisanship: About 90 percent of African-Americans said Simpson was not guilty, while about 70 percent of white Americans said he was guilty” (Black 2002:123). Experiments with simulated juries likewise find a pattern of racial favoritism (Ugwuegbu 1979).
- 9.
This leads to less partisanship in day-to-day conflicts. Consider the description from M.P. Baumgartner’s study of conflict in middle class suburb: “When tensions erupt, individuals are generally left to their own devices. Extended family members, who might otherwise be expected to lend assistance, are usually living some distance away and are, in any case, caught up in their own networks and concerns…. Friends, neighbors, and other associates are near at hand but are rarely intimate enough to be relied upon. Even advice is difficult to obtain from those who know little or nothing about a problem, and many people are reluctant to give it under any circumstances (believing it preferable not to get involved in other’s conflicts at all)” (Baumgartner 1988:97, quoted in Black 1998:131).
- 10.
Even violent conflicts are less likely to involve partisans: Twentieth century homicides were less likely to involve multiple offenders than the homicides of previous centuries (Cooney 2003:1385). In modernizing societies, such as the United States and France during the nineteenth century, there is also a strong rural-urban gradient: Urban settings, with their more fluid and mobile populations, produce fewer homicides with multiple offenders than did rural settings, where traditional tight-knit communities prevailed (Cooney 2003:1384).
- 11.
Note that the decline of third party involvement affects the nature of social control that occurs between disputants. For example, people may be more inclined to pursue grievances forcefully or aggressively when they have strong supporters in their corner, providing assistance or at least assuring them that they are right and encouraging them to seek justice. A decline in third party involvement thus contributes to what M.P. Baumgartner refers to as “moral minimalism”—a tendency to tolerate offenses or handle them in nonconfrontational ways (Baumgartner 1988:10). On the other hand, since third parties can also act as mediators or peacemakers, their absence can increase the severity of conflict in situations that are otherwise conducive to aggression and violence (Cooney 1998; Phillips and Cooney 2005).
- 12.
Other members of the master’s social class would have viewed any complaint as an offense in itself, as would almost all Southern whites . Other slaves might well have sympathized, but historically most of them were not willing to engage in strong partisanship against the powerful—compared to the day-to-day outrages that slaves suffered, open rebellions were quite rare. For their part, plantation owners would not have engaged in activism or consciousness-raising to convince their peers to help them put down rebellions or punish runaways. Attempts to campaign for support against the institution of slavery did eventually take place in the form of the books, pamphlets, and speeches of abolitionists. But note that these campaigns took place in the North, targeting an audience who were strangers to and culturally distinct from Southern whites. As with the civil rights movement a century later, abolitionists succeeded not by convincing the hostile, but by convincing the neutral.
- 13.
Thus, Black argues that modern legal settlement is effectively “slow partisanship” (Black 1998:139).
- 14.
Since the type of authority most likely to generate campaigns for support is one that can be convinced to intervene, but whose intervention is not automatic, the closest and most distant authorities should both be less likely to produce them. The omnipresent totalitarian state is quick to respond to any accusation of disloyalty, so such accusations are often enough to mobilize the state against an enemy even without any evidence or argument. Conversely, people at the fringes of legal protection—such as peasants living on the frontier of a weak premodern state—are unlikely to attract the attention of socially distant and high-status authorities and unlikely to campaign for it.
- 15.
For example, among the Aguaruna Jívaro, a tribal people of Peru, women “often find their relatives reluctant to defend them from abusive husbands” but “the very kinsmen who may be unwilling to intervene on a woman’s behalf when she is alive are galvanized into action when she kills herself” (Brown 1986:320). And in one case in the New Guinea Highlands, when a woman killed herself due to her husband’s abuse, her relatives hacked the abusive husband to death with axes (Counts 1987:199).
- 16.
Historian and sociologist Roberta Senechal de la Roche argues that repeat offending is one of the most important predictors of when lynch mobs will attack a member of their own community. Tight-knit communities are usually much more tolerant of insiders than outsiders, but recidivism is serious enough to merit violence: “While his fellows might ignore, excuse, or mildly rebuke a wrongful act of two, repeat offenses may eventually achieve for the recidivist what one anthropologist calls the ‘status of the finally intolerable’” (Senechal de la Roche 2001, citing Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941).
- 17.
The student population at US colleges and universities has diversified substantially over the past several decades. Between 1976 and 2008, the percent of all students who are white declined from 82 to 63 percent, while the percentages who are Asian, black, and Hispanic increased (National Center for Education Statistics 2010).
- 18.
The creation of this massive audience of potential partisans is the culmination of a process that has altered the third party structure of conflicts throughout the past century. For example, the proliferation of print media in the twentieth century allowed those with grievances against the powerful, such as corporations or state agencies, to publicly disclose their wrongdoing in a phenomenon popularly known as whistle-blowing (e.g., Westin et al. 1981). The iconic photograph of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc’ self-immolation in 1963 was seen by millions around the world, and the continued growth of media can help explain why self-immolation has become an increasingly common tactic of political protest (Biggs 2005).
References
Baumgartner, M.P. 1984. Social Control from Below. In Toward a General Theory of Social Control. Volume 1: Fundamentals, ed. Donald Black, 303–345. Orlando: Academic Press.
———. 1988. The Moral Order of a Suburb. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1992. War and Peace in Early Childhood. In Virginia Review of Sociology, Volume 1: Law and Conflict Management, ed. James Tucker, 1–38. Greenwich: JAI Press.
———. 1993. Violent Networks: The Origins and Management of Domestic Conflict. In Aggression and Violence: Social Interactionist Perspectives, ed. Richard B. Felson and James T. Tedeschi, 209–231. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Berndt, Ronald M. 1962. Excess and Restraint: Social Control Among a New Guinean Mountain People. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Biggs, Michael. 2005. Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963–2002. In Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta, 173–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Black, Donald. 1976. The Behavior of Law. San Diego: Academic Press.
———. 1980. The Manners and Customs of the Police. New York: Academic Press.
———. 1989. Sociological Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1995. The Epistemology of Pure Sociology. Law and Social Inquiry 20 (3): 829–870.
———. 1998. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. Rev ed. San Diego: Academic Press.
———. 2002. The Geometry of Law: An Interview with Donald Black. International Journal of Sociology of Law 32 (2): 101–129.
———. 2004. Violent Structures. In Violence: From Theory to Research, ed. Margaret A. Zahn, Henry H. Brownstein, and Shelly L. Jackson, 145–158. Newark: LexisNexis/Anderson Publishing.
———. 2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press.
Black, Donald, and M.P. Baumgartner. 1983. Toward a Theory of the Third Party. In Empirical Theories About Courts, ed. Keith O. Boyum and Lynn Mather, 84–114. New York: Longman.
Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Michael F. 1986. Power, Gender, and the Social Meaning of Aguaruna Suicide. Man 21 (2): 311–328.
Christakis, Erika. 2015. ‘Dressing Yourselves,’ Email to Silliman College (Yale) Students on Halloween Costumes. Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), October 30. https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing-yourselves-email-to-silliman-college-yale-students-on-halloween-costumes/.
Christie, Nils. 1977. Conflicts as Property. British Journal of Criminology 17 (1): 1–15.
Conley, Dalton. 1999. Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cooney, Mark. 1994. Evidence as Partisanship. Law and Society Review 28 (8): 833–855.
———. 1998. Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence. New York: New York University Press.
———. 2003. The Privatization of Violence. Criminology 41 (4): 1377–1406.
———. 2009. Is Killing Wrong?: A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Counts, Dorothy Ayers. 1980. Fighting Back Is Not the Way: Suicide and the Women of Kaliai. American Ethnologist 7 (2): 332–351.
———. 1987. Female Suicide and Wife Abuse in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Suicide and Life-threatening Behavior 17 (3): 194–204.
Decker, Scott H., and Barrik Van Winkle. 1996. Life in the Gang: Family, Friends, and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diamond, Jared. 2013. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? New York: Penguin Books.
Eder, Donna, and Janet Lynne Enke. 1991. The Structure of Gossip: Opportunities and Constraints on Collective Expression Among Adolescents. American Sociological Review 56: 494–508.
Elias, Norbert. [1939] 1982. The Civilizing Process, Volume II, Power and Civility. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon Books.
Feeley, Malcolm M. 1979. The Process Is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Fenno, Nathan, Kim Christensen, and James Rainey. 2014. Donald Sterling Built an Empire and an Image; Words Were His Undoing. Los Angeles Times, August 2. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-donald-sterling-20140803-story.html#page=1
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1996. Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s. The Journal of Modern History 68 (4): 831–866.
Friedman, Lawrence M. 1985. Total Justice. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Gibbs, Jack A. 1989. Conceptualization of Terrorism. American Sociological Review 54 (3): 329–340.
Gluckman, Max. 1963. Gossip and Scandal. Current Anthropology 4 (3): 307–316.
Greenhouse, Carol J., Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel. 1994. Law and Community in Three American Towns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gross, Jan T. 1982. A Note on the Nature of Soviet Totalitarianism. Soviet Studies 34 (3): 367–376.
———. 1984. Social Control Under Totalitarianism. In Toward a General Theory of Social Control. Volume 2: Selected Problems, ed. Donald Black, 59–77. Orlando: Academic Press.
Gulliver, P.H. 1963. Social Control in an African Society: A Study of the Arusha, Agricultural Masai of Northern Tanganyika. Boston: Boston University Press.
Haidt, Jonathan, Lee Jussim, and Chris Martin. n.d. The Problem. Heterodox Academy. http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1967. Gossip, Networks and Culture in a Black American Ghetto. Ethnos 32: 35–60.
Hindin, Michelle J. 2003. Understanding Women’s Attitudes Towards Wife Beating in Zimbabwe. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 81 (7): 501–508.
Johnson, Patricia Lyons. 1981. When Dying Is Better Than Living: Female Suicide Among the Gainj of Papua New Guinea. Ethnology 20 (4): 325–334.
Kim, Hyojoung. 2008. Micromobilization and Suicide Protest in South Korea, 1970–2004. Social Research 75 (2): 543–578.
Lee, Richard B. 1979. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lenski, Gerhard, Patrick Nolan, and Jean Lenski. 1995. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
LePoer, Barbara Leitch. 1989. Vietnam: A Country Study, ed. Richard J. Cima. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division.
Leung, Angela K.-Y., and Dov Cohen. 2011. Within- and Between-Culture Variation: Individual Differences and the Cultural Logics of Honor, Face, and Dignity Cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100 (3): 507–526.
Lieberman, Jethro K. 1981. The Litigious Society. New York: Basic Books.
Llewellyn, K.N., and E.A. Hoebel. 1941. The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Liu, Meng. 2002. Rebellion and Revenge: The Meaning of Suicide of Women in Rural China. International Journal of Social Welfare 11 (4): 300–309.
Lukianoff, Greg. 2014. Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. New York: Encounter Books.
Lynch, Rene. 2013. Paula Deen Lawsuit Dismissed, but Not Before It Destroyed Career. Los Angeles Times, August 23. http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-paula-deen-lawsuit-dismissed-20130823-story.html.
Mackey, Robert. 2014. Can Hashtag Activism Save Kidnapped Nigerian Girls? The New York Times New Blog, May 7. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0/07/can-hashtag-activism-save-kidnapped-nigerian-girls/.
Manning, Jason. 2012. Suicide as Social Control. Sociological Forum 27 (1): 207–227.
———. 2015. Aggressive Suicide. International Journal of Law, Crime, and Justice 43 (3): 326–341.
Merry, Sally Engle. 1984. Rethinking Gossip and Scandal. In Toward a General Theory of Social Control. Volume 1: Fundamentals, ed. Donald Black, 271–302. Orlando: Academic Press.
———. 1990. Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Microaggressions: Power, Privilege, and Everyday Life (blog). 2014. http://microaggressions.tumblr.com/about.
Murphy, Robert F., and Leonard Kasdan. 1959. The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage. American Anthropologist 61 (1): 17–29.
National Center for Education Statistics. 2010. Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015/indicator6_24.asp.
Owens, Eric. 2013. Dartmouth Student Who Spoke ‘Mock Chinese’ Remains on the Lam. The Daily Caller, February 7. http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/07/dartmouth-student-who-spoke-mock-chinese-remains-on-the-lam/.
Phillips, Scott, and Mark Cooney. 2005. Aiding Peace, Abetting Violence: Third Parties and the Management of Conflict. American Sociological Review 70 (2): 334–354.
Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.
Pizzi, William T. 1999. Trials Without Truth: Why Our System of Criminal Trials Has Become an Expensive Failure and What We Need to Do to Rebuild It. New York: New York University Press.
Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rani, Manju, Sekhar Bonu, and Nafissatou Diop-Sidibe. 2004. An Empirical Investigation of Attitudes Towards Wife-Beating Among Men and Women in Seven Sub-Saharan African Countries. African Journal of Reproductive Health 8 (3): 116–136.
Reiss, Matthias. 2007. Introduction. In The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Matthias Reiss, 1–21. London: Oxford University Press.
Rosen, Michael. 2012. Dignity: Its History and Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Santoro, Wayne A. 2008. The Civil Rights Movement and the Right to Vote: Black Protest, Segregationist Violence and the Audience. Social Forces 86 (4): 1391–1414.
Seitz, Don C. 1929. Famous American Duels. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
Senechal de la Roche, Roberta. 2001. Why Is Collective Violence Collective? Sociological Theory 19 (2): 126–144.
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E., and W. van Wetering. 1960. Residence, Power Groups and Intra-Societal Aggression: An Enquiry into Conditions Leading to Peacefulness Within Non-stratified Societies. International Archives of Ethnography 49: 169–200.
Thorne, Barrie. 1975. Protest and the Problem of Credibility: Uses of Knowledge and Risk-Taking in the Draft Resistance Movement of the 1960’s. Social Problems 23 (2): 111–123.
Tuchman, Barbara W. 1978. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Balantine Books.
Ugwuegbu, Denis Chimaeze E. 1979. Racial and Evidential Factors in Juror Attribution of Legal Responsibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 15 (2): 133–146.
Vidich, Arthur J., and Joseph Bensman. 1958. Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community. Garden City: Anchor Books.
Westin, Alan F., Henry I. Kurtz, and Albert Robbins. 1981. Whistle Blowing: Loyalty and Dissent in the Corporation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Yngvesson, Barbara. 1989. Inventing Law in Local Settings: Rethinking Popular Legal Culture. The Yale Law Journal 98 (8): 1694–1689.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Campbell, B., Manning, J. (2018). Microaggression and the Structure of Victimhood. In: The Rise of Victimhood Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70328-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70329-9
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)