Abstract Training white subjects to attend to their own microaggressions against people of color has become a programmatic part of US workplaces. But this program has also evolved into an aesthetics, in the work of the contemporary Black American artists Claudia Rankine and Arthur Jafa. This article examines how their aesthetics of microaggression responds to the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops. The author argues that Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and Jafa's White Album allude to DEI exercises in compiling multimedia archives of microaggressive behavior. Even as they affirm the urgency of DEI, however, Rankine and Jafa also reveal its limitations by offering a more intimate and demanding attentional “training”—one that centers Black subjectivity and redirects white audiences toward a longer, pessimist temporality that might better support lasting social change. While DEI often fetishizes the decoding of microaggressions, it neglects what the author calls perceptual uncertainty: the ongoing doubt and instability these acts produce in people of color. In their more radical training, Citizen and The White Album illuminate both perceptual uncertainty and the failure of white attention as a reparative tool. Yet this failure holds critical potential; it not only initiates white audiences into pessimist temporality but also instructs them in the kind of endurance necessary for change—in Rankine's case, by emphasizing how Black subjects have built up resilience.
Taylor Johnston-Levy (Sun,) studied this question.