Keeping Race in Place: Racial Microaggressions and Campus Racial Climate at the University of California, Berkeley

In order to understand why so many Students and Faculty of Color experience MEES, it is important to better understand why so many of us accept negative stereotypes of non-White race/ethnic groups who are at the bottom of this society's color hierarchy. History provides a partial explanation. Over time, structural and institutional arrangements such as racial slavery, racial conquest, racial segregation and racial discrimination produced a racial hierarchy where Whites or Europeans were at the pinnacle and Blacks and other non-Whites were pushed to the bottom. 10 However, racist ideologues like "White Supremacy," "Manifest Destiny" and "Yellow Scourge" were necessary to defend these racial inequities." An extensive body of research documents the coordination in America between structural racism and racist ideology. Substantially less developed is the literature that seeks to explain how racial hierarchy is reproduced at the interpersonal level in the everyday exchanges of groups and individuals.12