Emma McClure, Microaffirmations, Privilege, and a Duty to Redistribute (Ethics@Noon)

Ethics at Noon

Microaffirmations, Privilege, and a Duty to Redistribute

Microaffirmations are the inverse of microaggressions: seemingly small acknowledgements that can accumulate into large positive impacts. Mary Rowe first proposed microaffirmations as a way for privileged people to consciously counter microaggressions. We could practice giving small supports to members of marginalized groups until these behaviors become habitual and replaced our propensity towards microaggressions.
Recent psychological discussions have uncritically adopted this conceptualization, but I point out the pitfalls of continuing along this path. The current discussion elides the fact that privileged people constantly receive small supports. Indeed, privilege is partially constituted by being the recipient of unceasing microaffirmations. Moreover, the feminist relational autonomy literature has shown that everyone—privileged and marginalized alike—requires social support in order to develop and maintain our autonomous capacities.
Thus, microaffirmations should not be thought of as providing vulnerable members of marginalized groups special treatment that we do not offer to anyone else. Instead, changing our microaffirmative practices would involve ending the special treatment we currently give by default to members of privileged groups. Ultimately, I argue for an imperfect moral duty to redistribute microaffirmations by supporting marginalized people and challenging privileged people’s assumed superiority.

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Emma McClureEmma McClure
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics

Wed, Oct 16, 2019
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin