Contemporary Sociological Theory for American Actualization

Don't macro my micro.

{Written December 2024.}

I’ve been vaguely or at least broadly tapping the macro/micro sign for some weeks now. Which refers to a) the reality of institutional systems. These are things working on a macro-sociological level and involve entire intentionally created but now often automated systems designed to privilege whiteness and disadvantage (at best) Blackness, Indigenousness, and Asianness (thinking specifically of early American design). We’re talking about white supremacy. The other side of the slash is b) the interpersonal realm, which is the micro. The day-to-day interactional, relational reality of an individual. When the mechanisms or institutions of the macro are employed/depended on during an interpersonal exchange between citizens, we call that a microaggression.

When someone is confident that they have the authority to question your presence in a neighborhood, for example, and they call the police with the full knowledge and expectation that this institution will uphold said authority, that’s a microaggression. It isn’t small. It’s a microcosm of the macro reality.

It is, therefore, very possible to bring the macro into the micro. To remind someone that we live in a nation intentionally designed to privilege whiteness. That’s a bad thing, mind. It’s an aggression. It’s terrorization. We all get that. (Yes. We do.)

I’ve been bringing it up a lot lately because I’m fully exhausted of the armchair macro-ing of strangers’ micro.

There’s a picture of Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland walking hand in hand, the former wearing a dress and the latter wearing an oversized suit. They’re celebrities but they’re also two people in relationship outside the public eye. They’re two people existing, with different styles and stylists. So a s***-ton of social media replies invoking the (very real) masculinization and intentionally misgendering of dark-skinned cisgender Black women and the colorist preferential feminization of light-skinned cisgender Black women is ob-f***ing-noxious and unfair. A) Because that’s real on a macro level and B) because you’re reducing two women who seem to love each other very much and exist in a micro context to a reactive obligation to choose their clothing according to someone else’s wrong. STOP.

What’s intriguing infuriating interesting is that the above is a form of over-intellectualizing. Meaning, these are typically sentiments/takes expressed by people at least somewhat involved in liberation discourse. People who are considering and identifying and intellectually active. People, in my observation, who—like myself—espouse the necessity of decolonization. So, guys. Let’s. Let’s do that. Because step one would not actually just be auto-attaching yourself to (your idea of) someone else’s beliefs, even in the case of your ancestral lineage. It would actually be confronting your own enculturation and recognizing the root of your current thought process/conclusions. Reactivity is fun and simple, but—just a heads up—if you’re actually decolonizing, you’re also gonna have to give back that social construct that is the understanding of race. (I said race, friends, not ethnicity).

And I love to be the one to tell you this: if I have to give back the concept of race, …where is my concept of “interracial relationships” coming from? It has a designated name for a reason, and it’s not a good one. When two people from the same country, born and raised and socialized in overwhelmingly similar spaces and ways, are considered an atypical couple, we’ve truly given ourselves over to white supremacist brain rot. They had to write laws prohibiting it for a reason. Because it is the custom of people groups that live together, to love together. It’s why segregation and dehumanization. Because otherwise, people interact.

The complexity is obvious. For one, the marginalized have provocation to have reactive beliefs and behaviors. When you use macro-level terrorization to violently disrupt the micro-reality of a people group based on their membership in said group, it is extremely understandable for us to macro-interpret micro-existence. To agree with your terms. (Eg, White is all people who are Euro-descended. White people cannot divest from white supremacy.) But. It isn’t fruitful. (Because neither statement is actually true, particularly not at all historical moments.)

For two, the entire point of programming and socialization is to ensure that someone is undoubtedly making micro decisions based on the adoption of/adherence to macro ills. Someone thinks whiteness is more desirable by virtue of being whiteness. Someone internalized the misogynoir directed at her or used to elevate her above her dark-skinned sisters. It obviously happens. But we would/should need micro-access and intimacy to observe beyond the application of macro-knowledge. How can we be wholly convinced of it unless we’re in micro-relationship? “I know this macro-context exists, so it must be what’s happening in this and every micro” is destructive. It’s dehumanizing. Imprisoning. The existence of society does not negate the possibility of the individual, God save us. It is possible that an alt-text-esque summary of someone’s choice is not actually enough information to know what they believe. There are no vacuums but there is deprogramming. Decolonization is possible. We can unclog the poison from the system, and the idea that we can’t only benefits the system.

Because like. Did you just wanna stay here, in the mire, where you are a distinguished critic but the world stays the same? Or did we want to give up our gavels and actually make something new? Seem like some folks don’t want postracial because race has become an area of expertise. But y’all ain’t ready for Ready or not, that’s the conversation we’re having.

Tl;dr — Dark-skinned women can wear what makes them feel beautiful without centering the ugliness levied at them. Our behaviors don’t have to answer someone else’s hate first.

Also: It takes effort to recognize the myriad ways white supremacist ideals are metabolized and integrated even into the apparently pro-Black conscious.

Bonus: Just because someone modeled—read: IMPOSED—separatism doesn’t mean we have to adopt it. (Especially not when we’re claiming to disagree with those same folks on everything else.)

Free gift: Racial consciousness is a necessary (and early) stop on the journey; it is not the destination.

There’s a feedback effect, if not a tangible order of operations to moving forward. Introspection (micro) and observation (macro) might happen quasi-simultaneously or in interchanging stages. Self-identification might beget deprogramming, can lead to intimacy and community building. Remember to make it from self to community, and not to define that by constructs imposed by the folks who tried to ruin us.

Final thought: I know social media is hellbent on fighting it but just do me this one solid: try your hardest to be a person. Have and know your socio-historical context, but don’t let it override your own fool self. Right?!

Be a person.