“But this much I can tell you, that if ye do not watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds, and observe the commandments of God, and continue in the faith of what ye have heard concerning the coming of our Lord, even unto the end of your lives, ye must perish. And now, O man, remember, and perish not.” -Mosiah 4:30

In 2017, when Bear Ears National Monument in southern Utah was drastically reduced in size by Trump–shortly after outgoing President Obama had greatly expanded it–a friend of mine bemoaned how even our protests had become retrograde. “So far, all of the focus of conservationists has been on restoring the land’s Federally-protected status,” she explained, [Note: Biden restored Bear Ears’ expanded status as one of his first acts in office in 2021.] “However, I question whether the Federal government should be in control of these lands at all, even on a preservation level: I mean, shouldn’t we be returning these lands entirely to the Native American tribes who lived on it in the first place? Isn’t keeping all that land under Federal stewardship still violating Native American sovereignty, and continuing the campaign of microaggressions against them? But we can’t even have that conversation now, cause we’re too busy just trying to save the land from being strip-mined. We can’t talk about microaggressions because we’re having to first deal with the macroaggressions.” At the time, all I could do was just nod along with her grimly.

But now all these years later, I’ve been rethinking that old conversation–not because I think she was wrong, but rather because I think we both got the cart before the horse: it’s not that all of these macroaggressions are preventing us from addressing the microaggressions, but rather that our recurrent failure to deal with microaggressions led directly to the resurgence of the macro-aggressions.

Such, I suspect, was the warning voice in the wilderness that the Jamaican-born, Ivy-league trained poet Claudia Rankine was trying to raise in her 2014 collection Citizen: An American Lyric—the ultra-rare poetry book to became an actual New York Times best-seller in the 21st century. A mixed-media/visual-and-text collage, Citizen sought to articulate the death-by-thousand-paper-cuts that Black people in America experience on the reg, inescapable even when they’re rich and famous: Serena Williams on the tennis court, one outrageous call after another going against her; Zidane’s head butt in the 2006 World Cup after being called a slur by an Italian player; a reenactment of the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, wherein a white person bumps into black personal because they “honestly” didn’t even see them, as though that makes it better; the way the white realtor says she feels so “comfortable” around your white friend as you both tour a house together, with no one asking who’s making who uncomfortable here—because whenever the Black person responds to a micro-aggression, somehow that always gets treated worse than the original aggression.

I had grad-school classmates in the mid-2010s who taught Citizen in their composition classes, in hopes of helping our (predominantly white) undergrads to better understand and acknowledge their own unconscious racism better. If memory serves, the book was part of the front phalanx of texts that helped mainstream the term “micro-aggression” in the first place.

I sense that the term got punted back to the margins, however, once macro-aggressions made a resurgence after the 2016 election: Indeed, when literal neo-Nazis are openly waving swastikas, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans, and killing counter-protestors in Virginia—when the president himself is banning Muslim travel, complaining about immigrants from Black-majority “shithole countries” and pining for more “Nordics,” all while actively trying to deport a half-million DREAMERS—when an unarmed Black man is strangled to death on camera and there’s still millions defending the murderous cop—it can be difficult to get too worked up about mere micro-aggressions anymore.

But again, that’s putting the cart before the horse: It’s not that the micro-aggressions distracted us from the much more alarming macro-aggressions just on the horizon; it’s that the micro-aggressions were allowed to fester for so long that they couldn’t help but explode back into the open. They were the canary in the coal mine, the signs of the times for those with eyes to see.

For because white America refused to repent of its sins while the racism was still (comparatively) subdued, it came back to force our attention. “It is by the wicked that the wicked are punished” says Mormon, and we are the wicked as long as we treat repentance as something everyone else must do, not us. Our own scriptures also read “By small and simple things are great things brought to pass” (Alma 37:6), with the obvious corollary that so are horrible things, if left unintended. From micro-aggressions are macro-aggressions brought to pass.

So now, on the tenth anniversary of the publication of Citizen, I circle back to King Benjamin’s own “But this much I can tell you, that if ye do not watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds, and observe the commandments of God, and continue in the faith of what ye have heard concerning the coming of our Lord, even unto the end of your lives, ye must perish. And now, O man, remember, and perish not.” And increasingly, I am forced to conclude that the specific thoughts, words, and deeds we are specifically to watch are not just our pathetic lustful thoughts (like our seminary teachers taught us), but our thoughtless biases, our unconscious racism, our selfishness and viciousness, our thousand petty cruelties and condescensions and dismissiveness towards those less fortunate than us, lest we perish indeed.