Regular exposure to microaggressions causes a person of color to feel isolated and invalidated. The inability to predict where and when a microaggression may occur leads to hypervigilance, which can then lead to anxiety disorders and depression.
Even published academics may find it difficult to imagine real people—interested colleagues rather than pejorative judges—sitting at the other end of their sentences.Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 117
To be a successful academic, it is not enough merely to have mastered the craft of writing intelligibly. You must also be creative enough to produce original research, persuasive enough to convey the significance of your findings to others, prolific enough to feed the tenure and promotion machine, confident enough to withstand the slings and arrows of peer review, strategic enough to pick your way safely through the treacherous terrain of academic politics, well organized enough to juggle multiple roles and commitments, and persistent enough to keep on writing and publishing no matter what.Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 66
