Theme

Micro-assumptions

The small, sincere, unspoken guesses well-meaning adults make about a student before the student has said a word.

Journal entries

Sep 16, 2026 · Dissertation thinking · a term I am trying to coin

Micro-assumptions: the guess that comes before the slight

A microaggression is something a student hears. A micro-assumption is the thing I believed a half-second before I opened my mouth. This entry is about well-meaning white adults — me included — and the daily arithmetic of small guesses that adds up to a mountain a student has to climb alone.

Open questions

live

Is "micro-assumption" a term worth coining — or does the microaggression literature already hold this ground?

Research ideas

emerging

Micro-assumptions — a second phrase I am trying to coin

Micro-assumption: the small, silent, usually unexamined inference a well-meaning adult makes about a student's ability, background, intent, or belonging before the student has supplied any evidence. The microaggression is what the student hears; the micro-assumption is what the adult believed a half-second earlier.

Reading & influences

Article · Derald Wing Sue, Christina M. Capodilupo, Gina C. Torino, et al.

Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical Practice

The foundational taxonomy — microassault, microinsult, microinvalidation — and the source of the line I cannot stop thinking about: that the perpetrators are usually well-intentioned people unaware of the harm. This is the article my micro-assumptions idea has to argue with. Sue names what is said; I am trying to name what was assumed a half-second before.

Article · Daniel Solórzano, Miguel Ceja, & Tara Yosso

Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students

Moves microaggressions out of the clinic and into the institution: focus groups showing students of color reading a racial climate through small daily slights. The methodological gift here is counter-storytelling — it is exactly the paired-account structure I want between teachers and students.

Article · Lindsay Pérez Huber & Daniel Solórzano

Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research

Insists microaggressions are not interpersonal accidents but the everyday surfacing of a racial hierarchy — structure appearing in a sentence. This is my defense against the objection that micro-assumptions are just individual bad habits. They are a system running through individual heads.

Article · Rita Kohli & Daniel Solórzano

Teachers, Please Learn Our Names! Racial Microaggressions and the K-12 Classroom

A whole article on the mispronounced name, and it is devastating. The teacher means nothing by it; the student carries it for years. This is the cleanest example of a micro-assumption I have found — the assumption that a name is too hard to be worth learning — and it is squarely in K-12, not higher ed.

Article · Quaylan Allen

Racial Microaggressions: The Schooling Experiences of Black Middle-Class Males in Arizona's Secondary Schools

High school, not college — and middle-class Black boys, which strips away the class explanation entirely. Their families' resources do not protect them from being read as a risk. Directly relevant to my private-school setting, where adults assume affluence solves belonging.

Article · Malik S. Henfield

Black Male Adolescents Navigating Microaggressions in a Traditionally White Middle School: A Qualitative Study

Boys describing the daily labor of managing other people's assumptions in a mostly white school — deciding how loud to be, how smart to seem, when to let something go. The word navigating is the point: this is unpaid work the school assigns only to some students.

Article · Jackson A. Collins & Howard C. Stevenson

Racial Climate Reform in Independent Schools: How Coping Self-Efficacy Buffers Systemic and Proximal Racial Stress for Students of Color

593 students of color in predominantly white independent schools — my exact setting, with numbers. It measures their confidence in noticing microaggressions, reframing them, and confronting them, and links school-climate perception to belonging through racial stress. The phrase "bracketed commitment to diversity" describes more independent schools than will admit it.

Article · Rosalie Rolón-Dow

At the Root of Their Stories: Black and Latinx Students' Experiences with Academic Microaggressions

Names academic microaggressions specifically — doubts about intellect, invisibility except when race is the topic, curriculum that never reflects you. This is the bridge between microaggression research and racialized rigor: the slights are not social, they are about whether you are believed to be capable.

Article · Rui Fu, Stephen S. Leff, Ian C. Carroll, Shelby Brizzolara-Dove, & Kenisha Campbell

Racial Microaggressions and Anti-Racism: A Review of the Literature with Implications for School-Based Interventions and School Psychologists

A systematic review focused on early adolescence, when racial-ethnic identity is forming and microaggressions do the most developmental damage. Useful to me as a map of what has already been measured in schools — and therefore as the place to check whether anyone has isolated the assumption rather than the act.

Article · Ashley-Marie Hanna Daftary, Debora Ortega, Ceema Samimi, & Annahita Ball

"Did I Hear That Right?": A CRT Analysis of Racial Microaggressions in K-12 Schools

Interviews faculty and staff who consider themselves anti-oppressive — and still documents the pathologizing of students' cultural and communication styles. That is the whole argument for micro-assumptions in one study: good intentions are not a control variable.

Dissertation · Asako Kurosaka-Jost

Neutral Doesn't Work: The Importance of Educators' Active Engagement in Creating Racially Inclusive Spaces for Students of Color at Predominantly-White Independent Schools

Thirty alumni of color from predominantly white independent schools describing hyper-visibility during race conversations and invisibility otherwise, inside a colorblind school culture that thinks of itself as kind. The title is the finding: neutral is a position, and students can feel it.

Book · Kevin Kumashiro

Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice

The book that says the 'commonsense' practices — the routines, the praise, the grading — are precisely where oppression hides, because they feel natural to the people they work for. My micro-assumptions idea is downstream of this: the assumption feels like common sense, which is exactly why it has to be written down and examined.

Article · Gregory M. Walton & Geoffrey L. Cohen

A Question of Belonging: Race, Social Fit, and Achievement

The belonging-uncertainty experiments: Black students' achievement was dragged down not by ability but by persistent doubt about whether they fit — and a brief, well-timed intervention closed much of the gap. This is the mechanism my micro-assumptions idea needs: small daily signals accumulate into a verdict about whether you belong, and the verdict does academic damage.