MICROAGGRESSION IN NURSING KNOWLEDGE GENERATION AND DEVELOPMENT

"Microaggression," contemporary racism, is a term that was relatively recently introduced to nursing. Racial microaggression refers to "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group."1^(p271) According to Sue et al,1 racism has been changed into vague forms in recent years, which are called modern racism, symbolic racism, and aversive racism. Sue et al1 also asserted that all these types of contemporary racism would be deceptive and covert while the "old-fashioned" form could have obvious display of racial hatred and bigotry. Thus, it could be sometimes difficult to detect and prevent contemporary racism compared with the old-fashioned racism.

All different types of microaggression could affect nursing knowledge generation and development. For instance, because of microinsult, some great research ideas from racial/ethnic minority scholars might have been killed because they were afraid to pursue the ideas after experiencing microinsult during their presentations to their mentors or peers in the academia. Although we have witnessed all types of microaggression in the academia, we have rarely addressed the issues. Also, we have rarely considered the impact on nursing knowledge generation and development. Indeed, in my personal experience as an Asian American nursing scholar during the past 3 decades, nursing has not been devoid of this lingering societal issue at all. When I was a PhD student in early 1990s, our nursing community began to talk about diversity, cultural competence, and ethnocentric approaches in nursing knowledge development and generation. After 30 years, we are still talking about the same things without a clear resolution. In reality, we may be heading back to the old days within the current political situations.

While working on several leadership projects with leaders from Asian countries, I frequently found that our nursing knowledge has mainly been generated and developed from Western perspectives, which may be a form of Western (or Eurocentric) microaggression in nursing knowledge generation and development (eg, microinvalidation). I frequently heard from racial/ethnic minority researchers that National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant reviews would be biased toward racial/ethnic minority nurse researchers (eg, microinsult, microinvalidation). Some of them joked that they would change their names to sound like White male researchers so that their proposals could be fairly reviewed. Indeed, the NIH's data on their funded researchers clearly showed racial/ethnic disparities among the NIH-funded researchers.2 For instance, only 2.6% of the NIH-funded researchers were Black. Also, I often heard from our international colleagues that journal reviewers were particularly harsh in their reviews of their manuscripts. Although they hired a professional editor, they often got harsh comments on grammatical and spelling errors rather than on the content of the manuscripts. I also heard from colleagues about their difficulties in getting funding for their research among transgender populations and in publishing their research findings.

Recent public attention on racial/ethnic conflicts in the United States has made many nursing scholars to give their thoughts on microaggression as a nursing phenomenon.3,4 With an increasing influx of racial/ethnic minorities in nursing, microaggression became a buzzword among nursing scholars. Indeed, there is an imminent necessity for nursing scholars to carefully consider microaggression in nursing. In nursing, the concept of microaggression was first introduced to our literature by Hall and Fields.3 Since their first article, a slowly increasing number of nursing articles related to microaggression have been published in the literature but have rarely addressed the issues in its impact on nursing knowledge generation and development.

Throughout its history, Advances in Nursing Science (ANS) has published the articles related to social justice, racism, and microaggression, which have been frequently used by many nursing scholars. Indeed, the first article on the concept of microaggression in nursing was published in ANS. I hope that nurse scholars will give careful attention to this seemingly never-changing phenomenon in nursing, especially its impact on nursing knowledge generation and development, and will move forward with some feasible and tangible strategies to tackle the issues.

-Eun-Ok Im, PhD, MPH, RN, CNS, FAAN

Editor

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