Confronting microaggressions: Developing innovative strategies to challenge and prevent harm

Abstract

Psychological research has consistently found that microaggressions are associated with a multiplicity of harmful outcomes on the psychological and physical health of culturally diverse people. Thus, there is a need for interventions and strategies to confront, minimize, prevent, and mitigate the harms caused by microaggression experiences. This special issue presents a number of novel contributions that extend microaggression theory, including proposing an interactional model of how microaggression theory intersects with imposter syndrome and stereotype threat (Nadal et al., this issue), and the proposal of macrointervention (Awad et al., this issue) and microaffirmation frameworks (Solórzano et al., this issue) to promote cultural resilience and help drive transformative organizational change. Additional contributions include the development of a tool to measure allyship behaviors that confront microaggressions (Williams and Sharif, this issue), and qualitative investigations to understand how people of color engage in self-protective strategies to build resilience in the face of microaggression experiences (DeLapp & Williams, this issue; Houshmand & Spanierman, this issue). Finally, this issue includes several contributions that focus on the promise of organizational-level interventions to interrupt and prevent microaggressions in order to work towards a vision of organizational and workplace settings that are free of microaggression experiences (Metinyurt et al., this issue; Bryant et al., this issue, Haynes-Baratz et al., this issue). These papers highlight knowledge and tools that may be used to confront and address microaggressions in educational, therapeutic, and organizational settings to prevent harm and promote the wellbeing and resilience of culturally diverse people.