Microaggressions in Human Service Organizations

Abstract

Microaggressions are interpersonal communications that invalidate, tokenize, exoticize, and isolate those with nondominant group identities. The aim of this chapter is to discuss how human service organizations (HSOs), often designed to support people who live at the intersections of multiple forms of domination and marginalization, can maintain settings where microaggressions persist. This chapter provides examples of microaggressions from two distinct human service organizations and discusses how to respond to microaggressions at individual and interpersonal levels as both targets and perpetrators. This chapter also describes organizations getting In View, which means they are consistently self-correcting and seeking to disrupt the institutional power structures that support the perpetration of microaggressions. Future research, practice, and policy implications are discussed.