[wpietri]

One other way to look at this it through the broader system. Since America's founding, black people have been treated as inferior. How have they been kept in what white people saw as their place?

Some of it has been open violence, of course, with lynching and race massacres being the most obvious. There was also plenty of more quiet violence, the unmarked graves and the vicious but survivable beatings.

But that's relatively rare because it is backed up by a host of more subtle things. Things that might lead to violence, especially if an uppity person persisted in acting like an equal. Threats, of course, but also menacing looks, harsh words, bad attitudes, etc.

This is summed up in ADL's pyramid of hate. The top layer is built on the layers beneath: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

So we talk about microaggressions because the societal system of white supremacy uses both macroaggressions and migroaggresions as a continuum of actions that maintain the racist status quo, continuously informing both black and white people of their assigned place.