Civil Rights Microviolations
Alissa Cooley Yonesawa et al.
Abstract
This essay is an attempt to name and define a certain kind of civil rights problem. Namely: Rights violations that are small enough that the rational thing for the victim to do might be to just cope with them, but when allowed to fester and repeat, do significant damage. We call these problems microviolations. To define them, we borrow from the idea of a microaggression, a concept that developed to understand an analogous challenge in workplace and school discrimination. We offer a...