How do the stress and anxiety of dealing with prejudice contribute to domestic violence?
It’s hard to get away from what psychologists call “micro-aggressions,” these slights that you deal with everyday. Often, it’s hard to figure out whether it’s about race or gender, or nothing really, and you spend a lot of emotional energy dealing with all of it. You can’t lash out publicly, and you end up taking so much of that home with you, and causes you to lash out against people who are close to you. We see the middle class and upper middle class dealing with these micro-aggressions. I can walk into a high-end department store and they don’t see a well-educated woman: what they see is my ethnicity. So they may follow me around, and make me feel like a criminal. These experiences add another layer of stress, anxiety and frustration. When we don’t have a place to process these micro-aggressions, they end up getting acted out. Why is it important for the community to break the silence, and get these issues out? Silence is historically how we’ve coped. You think about the experience
