Detangling Microagressions by Raven D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfq9H1mniUE

Selfie Portrait Performance - Detangling Microaggressions

For my self-portrait performance, the social-political issue I chose to focus on is the discrimination of black women. The topic relates to race, identity, and gender. Everyday black women face a form of microaggression or discrimination whether it’s from people in their workplace, friends, and even family members. An act of microaggression is when someone unintentionally discriminates against someone of a racial or ethnic minority indirectly. Black women are discriminated against for features such as their hair, attitude, and the way they carry themselves. According to John Berger in Ways Of Seeing he states “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself...From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continuously.” (Berger 46). The most common stereotypes of Black women is that they’re always strong, angry, aggressive, and promiscuous which is false and rooted in racism. Others also include being ‘considered white’ when speaking proper or having interests that don’t feed into stereotypes. This limits the value and diversity amongst Black women and what they’re capable of. Not all Black women are the same. Joanne Finklestein states in The Art of Self Invention that “Thus the lies becomes a technique for penetrating the multiple layers of social life and, in reverse, it is a constituent of those same complex layers,” (Finklestein 72). It’s toxic to enforce these stereotypical views because not only does it harm their identity but also their safety, which is viewed and handled poorly in our current society.


In the video, I’m shown sitting down wearing my hair out in a natural Afro filled with folded index cards, with a hair pick, and a small trash bin. The folded notes in my hair are several quoted micro-aggressive phrases that have been said to me or other black women. They were placed in my hair since it's considered to be a crown representing my identity as a black woman and the notes symbolize the amount of criticism black women often receive. As I take out each note, I reveal what it says and proceed to rip up, crumble and discard them in the trash bin. In throwing away each note, it’s an act of rejection of those harmful ideals used to wrongly judge who I am and make me feel less than what I am. Towards the end of the video, I successfully discarded every note and teased my hair with my hair pick which symbolized me embracing my natural identity as a black woman, not allowing those micro-aggressive messages to tear me down. The song playing throughout the video is “Don’t Touch My Hair by Solange feat. Sampha, I selected this song because it’s about embracing natural hair and it’s the personal connection to the artist’s blackness. In conceptualizing this performance, I was inspired by Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”. If I were to make this more interactive, I’d ask black women to write any microaggressions they’ve experienced on an index card and place it in my hair, then proceed to do the performance.