A new study finds that microaggressions aimed at Black women online appear to harm the health of other Black women who see those microaggressions—even though the microaggressions are not aimed at them personally. Specifically, researchers found that encountering vicarious microaggressions was associated with worse sleep quality for young Black women. The paper , " Online and Offline Gendered Racial Microaggressions and Sleep Quality for Black Women ," is published the journal Health Psychology .
"A lot of people falsely treat microaggressions as a kind of joke, but they are serious and have serious consequences," says Vanessa Volpe, first author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. Microaggressions are often subtle instances of mistreatment or insulting behavior that usually revolve around negative stereotypes. But while microaggressions are often subtle, they also accrue over time.
"And because people—including Black women—often face a consistent stream of these microaggressions, there's a tremendous amount of evidence showing that these microaggressions can have a serious impact on people's health and well-being," Volpe says. "We launched this study to learn more about the extent to which Black women encounter microaggressions online and offline, as well as how these microaggressions may relate to sleep quality. We focused on sleep quality because it is a health outcome in itself—and is also well-establi.