Bill Maher wants us all to calm down :

Sterling def. a racist,but take away his team? Clippers shldn’t have played yesterday? Calm down,being an asshole is still legal in America

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) April 28, 2014

On one count - he is right - being an asshole is not a crime. However, being an asshole is not the pinnacle of Donald Sterlings transgression against the African American community, nor our entire community as a whole.

One of the least discussed tenets of racism and bigotry is ‘microagression’. Ostensibly a factor of ‘Critical Race Theory’, that much maligned, but little understood intellectual attempt to grasp and ardor against the prevalent minutea of racism, and its larger implications.

It suggests that subtle, small infractions against self actualization and determination, such as intra-personal bigoted insults, personally held prejudices, and other seemingly harmless incidents of intolerance do much harm to society at large, when the entire picture can be studied and observed.

Far from petty, personal offences, the evidence suggests that as the world gets smaller, and individual private people have more access to the internet, and other far reaching communication systems, these seemingly small slights all contribute to a larger, shared, globally prejudiced consciousnesses.

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…the research literature reveals. Although they may appear like insignificant slights, or banal and trivial in nature, studies reveal that racial microaggressions have powerful detrimental consequences to people of color. They have been found to: (a) assail the mental health of recipients, (b) create a hostile and invalidating work or campus climate, (c) perpetuate stereotype threat, (d) create physical health problems, (e) saturate the broader society with cues that signal devaluation of social group identities, (f) lower work productivity and problem solving abilities, and (g) be partially responsible for creating inequities in education, employment and health care.

It is important to point out that there are many types of microagressions, however, I will be focused on the kind of harms direct racism like Sterling’s microagressions causes:

Health:

Studies have shown racism and bigotry do affect personal health:

In 1996, Krieger shook up the field with a study suggesting that bearing the brunt of racial discrimination raises the risk of elevated blood pressure, a partial explanation of why blacks suffer more hypertension than whites. The study showed that self-reported racial discrimination is just as harmful as any of the commonly named “lifestyle” culprits: lack of exercise, smoking, a high-fat or high-salt diet.

Traditionally, epidemiology had “adjusted” for race and class to flush out specific biological pathways behind disease. Krieger argued that racism was itself a causal exposure for disease. She went on to develop a scientifically validated research instrument for measuring people’s experiences of racial discrimination—one now used by researchers studying a wide array of health outcomes, from hypertension to tobacco use to depression.

Other HSPH faculty helped write Unequal Treatment, a landmark 2003 report on racial and ethnic disparities in American health care. Among its findings: Even after overcoming barriers to obtaining health care, African Americans and other minority populations were less likely to receive procedures such as coronary bypass operations, kidney dialysis, and kidney transplants.

A growing literature shows discrimination raises the risk of many emotional and physical problems. Discrimination has been shown to increase the risk of stress, depression, the common cold, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and mortality. Recently, two journals — The American Journal of Public Health and The Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race — dedicated entire issues to the subject. These collections push us to consider how discrimination becomes what social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger, one of the field’s leaders, terms “embodied inequality.”

A new study by Kathryn Freeman Anderson in Sociological Inquiry adds evidence to the hypothesis that racism harms health. To study the connection, Anderson analyzed the massive 2004 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which includes data for other 30,000 people. Conceptually, she proposes a simple pathway with two clear steps. First, because of the prevalence of racial discrimination, being a racial minority leads to greater stress. Not surprisingly, Anderson found that 18.2 percent of black participants experienced emotional stress and 9.8 percent experienced physical stress. Comparatively, only 3.5 and 1.6 percent of whites experienced emotional and physical stress, respectively.

It gets worse. Just the fear of racism alone should switch on the body’s stress-response systems. This makes sense — if we think our environment contains threats, then we will be on guard. But it raises a question that is prevalent in the study of the impact of discrimination on health. How can we test the relationship with experimental, rather than correlational, methods?

Pamela J. Sawyer and colleagues ran an experiment to test the link between the anticipation of prejudice and increased psychological and cardiovascular stress. Appearing in The American Journal of Public Health’s special issue on “The Science of Research on Racial/Ethnic Discrimination and Health,” their experiment paired Latina college students with white females. The white females served as confederates (that is, accomplices to the researchers). Each participant filled out attitude forms, which included questions on racial stereotypes. Some confederates answered the questions as a racist might, others did not.

And, unlike Maher’s claim, intra-personal racism, as opposed to institutional racism is harmful to children’s mental health:

Most of the racism experienced by children and teens involved discrimination by other people, as opposed to institutional or systemic racism, according to the findings.
A majority of the studies reviewed were conducted in the United States with children aged 12 to 18 years old. The three most common races detailed in the studies were Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.
“We know that children who experience poor health and well-being are less likely to engage in education, employment and other activities that support them to lead healthy and productive lives, and to participate meaningfully in the community,” Priest said.
Sometimes children make comments that are hurtful because they aren’t exposed to other children of different races and cultures. They may ask a question that seems perfectly logical to them but is hurtful or rude if you’re on the receiving end. That’s a failure on a parent’s part for not providing information on the differences of people in our multi-racial and cultural society.

Crime:

In a their book, ‘The harms of Crime Media’, Dennis Bissler and Joan Conners lay out how microagressions in crime reporting shape perceptions of racial groups and how that creates a circular system where crime reporting begets crime

It has also been observed in the UK:

Cohen (1972) found that minor fights between Mods and Rockers in beachside resorts were very much sensationalised by the media. One headline was “Wild ones invade seaside town - 97 arrests”. In fact there were only 24 arrests. Cohen found that the media reporting led to increased policing which actually intensified the problem. More recently moral panics and consequent amplification have occurred about raves, football hooligans, girl gangs and terrorist threats.

Leonard Baynes goes further in his study ‘Racial Profiling, September 11th and the Media: a Critical Race Theory Analysis - I. A Critical Race Theory Approach’

In the article If It’s Not Black Anymore, Why Does Darkness Cast A Longer Discriminatory Shadow than Lightness? An Investigation and Analysis of the Color Hierarchy, I posit that the black-white paradigm in the United States is transforming gradually into a dark-light paradigm. With an increase in the number of Latinos and biracial Americans, the United States’ social construction of race is shifting from the exclusive provinces of black-white to the newer realm of dark-light. The article predicts that society will ultimately lump most people of color in the middle of the pyramid irrespective of race, while “unmixed” African Americans will probably stay at the bottom. People of color with lighter complexions will face discrimination of a lesser magnitude than both unmixed blacks and dark-skinned people.

Economy:

Bigotry costs us a lot

According to the World Bank, homophobia costs a country the same as a financial crisis: on average, 0.1-1.7% of GDP. The data, which was presented at a recent conference, examined four areas in detail: discrimination in the workplace; disparity in health mainly regarding HIV; suicide and depression. The research concludes that these behaviours can cost society billions of dollars each year.

What we didn’t know: Bias based on race costs the United States a shade under $2 trillion a year.

A more complete accounting of the toll taken by race-based chauvinism has arrived in the form of a W.K. Kellogg Foundation study that shows fallout from racism slashing the country’s wealth. The study, released in October, posits that an income gap resulting in part from racism costs the country $1.9 trillion dollars each year.

Addressing factors such as health care inequities, unjustified incarceration disparities, and lesser employment and education opportunities would generate 12 percent more annual U.S. earnings, the study found.

Among the more striking findings cited are a U.S. Department of Commerce study estimating that minority purchasing power would increase from $4.3 trillion to $6.1 trillion in 2045 if income inequalities were eliminated. Research also indicated that “businesses with a more diverse workforce have more customers, higher revenues and profits, greater market share, less absenteeism and turnover, and a higher level of commitment to their organization.”

By closing the earnings gap through higher productivity, the nation’s gross domestic product would improve substantially.

“…disparities in health cost the U.S. an estimated $60 billion in excess medical costs and $22 billion in lost productivity in 2009.”

We found that, if the average incomes of minorities were raised to the average incomes of whites, total U.S. earnings would increase by 12%, representing nearly $1 trillion today. By closing the earnings gap through higher productivity, gross domestic product (GDP) would increase by a comparable percentage, for an increase of $1.9 trillion today. The earnings gain would translate into $180 billion in additional corporate profits, $290 billion in additional federal tax revenues, and a potential reduction in the federal deficit of $350 billion, or 2.3% of GDP.

Education:

Racism is the overarching societal paradigm that tolerates, accepts, and reinforces racial inequalities, and is associated with racially unequal opportunities for children to learn and thrive. Racial inequalities result in the discriminatory treatment of people of minority status. For instance, individuals from historically marginalized racial groups may be perceived as less worthy or less intelligent than those from the majority culture. At the same time, children or communities from the majority culture are allowed to maintain their established privileged and valued status. This privilege can result in better treatment and opportunities than are afforded to others within educational systems and other social institutions. The presence of racism in educational settings harms everyone, but has the most negative and lasting impact on racial minority groups (Pollock, 2008).

and with that I leave you with this:

Race is variable and shaped by societal forces. Michael Omni and Harold Winant have written “Race is indeed a pre-eminently sociohistorical concept. Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded. Racial meanings have varied tremendously over time and between different societies.” In the United States, society has rigidly enforced a black/white paradigm with African Americans on the bottom and whites on top. Historically, the United States has followed the principle of hypo-descent, or, the “one-drop” rule—if a person has any African American ancestor, regardless of any white heritage, society categorizes that person’s race as black, regardless of his or her appearance. In addition to black-white race integration issues, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, race concepts of what was considered white began to change due to influence from other groups. Initially, in the United States, the term “white” encompassed only those of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. With the immigration of many people from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe, the notion of “whiteness” grudgingly expanded to include these immigrants.