Why has the war on Iran not sparked a mass protest movement?

“Why has the war on Iran not sparked a mass protest movement? Submitted by Nura Hossainzadeh on Wed, 04/29/2026 - 21:26 Subtle, everyday acts of violence surround and desensitise us, shaping how Americans respond to deportation, war and the targeting of people of colour A demonstrator holds a sign during a protest against the Trump administration in New York City, on 28 March 2026 (Neil Constantine/NurPhoto) On The world has felt more violent lately. We live in an atmosphere of uncertainty as the United States teeters on the brink of a potential continuation of the war on Iran . Wartime rhetoric has been sickeningly violent, with US President Donald Trump taking to social media, threatening to destroy bridges and power plants, and even issuing a not-so-subtle nuclear warning that "a whole civilisation will die tonight " if American demands were not met. Meanwhile, we witness Israel bombing civilian buildings in Lebanon - 100 bombs dropped on Beirut in 10 minutes , in one instance, as if the perpetrators just couldn't contain themselves - and continuing to bomb Gaza , despite the ceasefire, just more slowly now, methodically, at a steady, ever-continuing pace. Closer to home in the US, we have all witnessed the violence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - reportedly shooting Alex Pretti 10 times, shackling and deporting Amy Lucia Lopez Belloza to Honduras, a country where she has not lived since she was seven. The violence we inflict on our own people bubbles to the brim and spills over into the world. As the world has become more violent, with this country's role in driving that violence becoming more palpable, I have been asking myself: how did we get here? It would be all too easy to absolve ourselves of blame, to say that people in power - and those who elected them - are the cause of this violence, and to look away, perhaps with disgust. It is true that we are not directly committing these acts of violence. But are we closer to the violence than we think? Are there smaller, everyday acts of violence that surround us, that desensitise us, even if only slightly, to the bigger acts of violence? And since much of the violence we have been witnessing lately has been committed against people of colour in particular, have we been conditioned to feel less appalled when brown bodies are wrestled to the ground and sent out of the country, assassinated and bombed? Everyday violence Scholars have written about a subtle form of violence perpetrated against people of colour: the microaggression. The term was coined by African American psychiatrist and Harvard professor Chester Pierce in 1970 to describe "subtle" and "often automatic" put-downs directed against people of colour. According to one group of scholars , they are "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults towards people of color". Microaggressions are harmful because they are so small and subtle that they happen easily, frequently and often slip below the radar The authors further identified three forms of microaggression: verbal, such as when a non-white person is asked, "Where are you from?"; behavioural, such as when a woman holds her purse closer when a Black man approaches; and environmental, such as when a classroom is decorated with posters of mostly white historical figures. Everyday violences. Part of what makes microaggressions so harmful is their subtlety. A macroaggression would attract attention. It might be too much of a commitment for the perpetrator. Someone who yells a racial slur on the subway would have to contend with others who might respond, or with the victim who might respond. It is much easier to commit a small but piercing act of aggression. A sideways glance. Someone absorbed in their phone when a person of colour walks into the lift, friendly and outgoing a minute later when someone else walks in. We may often choose to ignore microaggressions because they are so small, so seemingly unimportant. But it is often death by a thousand tiny cuts. These subtle movements, quick words, a glance with just an ounce of hate in it - they add up. A person's world becomes full of these little things. And a world full of little acts of violence is thoroughly violent. As Chester Pierce wrote in The Black Seventies , "Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly." So microaggressions are harmful because they are so small and subtle that they occur easily and frequently, and often slip below the radar, failing to trigger an appropriate act of defence. Ambiguity and doubt But what also makes microaggressions so harmful is their ambiguity. They are ambiguous both because it is not always clear they occurred at all, and because it is often unclear whether identity played any role. We may wonder: were those sideways glances from the people dining in the restaurant when a Black man walked in? Or were they looking at something else? Did she pull her purse closer, or was she just shifting positions? Even when an act has unmistakably occurred, we cannot always be certain it had anything to do with the victim's identity. 'Boogeyman mullahs': How decades of anti-Iran hysteria set us on the path to war Read More » Was it just a case of old-fashioned rudeness? Did this individual push back aggressively against the points I made in my academic talk because I am not white, because I am clearly Muslim (my hair covered by a hijab) or because I was speaking about an Islamic scholar? Would he have done the same to a white man giving a talk on Thomas Hobbes? Could he have just been having a bad day? And all this second-guessing - was it there, did he mean it - is harmful in and of itself. Macroaggressions make their presence clear, and what remains is to confront or address the assault. But microaggressions are phantoms. They carry the additional burden of convincing others that they had even taken place, or of agonising over this fact ourselves. As philosopher Christina Friedlaender writes : "White people rarely, if ever, have the experience of having to question whether a particular slight was racially motivated, whereas people of color disproportionately engage in this second guessing." Microaggressions are harmful, then, for two reasons: they are ambiguous and cause us to question our perceptions, and they are small and eat away at us slowly. But did that woman clutch her purse more tightly? Did the man at the academic talk amplify his voice against me? Sceptics might argue that microaggressions exist only in the minds of those who expect them. If we believe that we are victims, perhaps we learn to see ourselves as such. Yet people see patterns. Though it is not possible to prove that every small indignity we experience was definitively connected to our race or another aspect of our identity, it is equally impossible to say that none of them were. Because they appear too often, in the same forms. Perhaps a Black man imagined that this woman clutched her purse more tightly. But could he have imagined all of these women doing the same? From subtle to brutal So what happens when we are surrounded by this violence? What does it do to us as individuals, as a society? Research has documented the profoundly harmful psychological and physical effects that microaggressions have on individuals, including raising stress hormones and promoting unhealthy behaviours. One could imagine the toll it eventually takes on a person to walk through the world constantly having to fend off, ignore or second-guess indignity after indignity. But the effects of this violence do not remain at the level of the individual. There are also political effects. If the almost-silent violences we experience and witness in everyday interactions, often against people of colour, become normal to us, does the screaming of a man arrested by ICE become more tolerable? Does the dropping of bombs on schoolchildren in Iran and Gaza begin to blend more easily into the ordinary course of events? After the US and Israel waged war on Iran, many observed that there was no organised anti-war movement , despite polls showing that most Americans opposed the war. There could be many reasons for this: feelings of political powerlessness and protest fatigue, especially after more than two years of genocide in Gaza ; perceptions that the Iranian government was engaged in a killing spree against its own citizens, fuelled by unverified and likely exaggerated casualty numbers ; and insufficient media coverage of the human cost of the war. But even as these factors may have contributed to dulling the impulse to resist, a quieter, perhaps not fully conscious factor may also have been present: the belief that hurting and killing people of colour is simply part of the nature of the world. Perhaps what sapped the energy of the anti-war movement, at least in part, was our desensitisation to the killing of non-white, largely Muslim people, because we encounter this violence so often around us. We are steeped in subtle, microaggressive violence, and so we feel less enraged, or more hopeless, when we recognise it across the oceans. Cycles of violence It is worth noting, too, that the causality runs in the other direction as well - that political violence makes microaggressive violence more pervasive. Racist violence may exist in a constant state of growth - feeding on itself at the micro level to grow at the macro, then at the macro to grow at the micro, over and over. Civil rights organisations such as the US Center for the Study of Organized Hate documented an uptick in "dehumanising language" directed towards Muslims online after the war on Iran began. Is it any surprise that more subtle forms of dehumanising language - always easier to get away with - would increase as the US bombed civilian infrastructure in Iran? Islamophobic rhetoric has a long history in American public discourse - among politicians, pundits, and in the media and entertainment industry - and was pervasive well before the war. Is it any surprise that this dehumanising sentiment was also expressed in more subtle, microaggressive forms? It is important for people from dominant identity groups to openly step in when they observe microaggressions... to disabuse people of the notion that microaggressions are figments of the imaginations of people of colour Of course, it is not a comfortable thought to consider that violence against certain groups is this pervasive, or that we may have, at least to a degree, become desensitised to it. But it is worth asking - each and every one of us, including people of colour - how our reactions to "big" violences may have been shaped by our exposure to the "small" ones, and how we can work against them. As others have argued , it is important for people from dominant identity groups to step in openly when they observe microaggressions, in part to disabuse people of the notion that microaggressions are figments of the imagination of people of colour. There are many reasons, of course, that our country has become so violent. Microaggressions alone cannot explain it. More obvious factors include the influence of the pro- Israel lobbying groups on US foreign policy, the explicit racism and xenophobia exacerbated by Trump but long embedded in American history, and the political apathy that leads so many Americans to live life as usual as their government commits atrocities abroad. But it is important to see violence in all its forms - explicit and subtle, near and far. Violence carried out by police officers with guns at routine traffic stops, and violence enacted more quietly in university lecture halls, subways and lifts, almost escaping our notice. Violence that helps sustain the American war machine, and violence that lives in our everyday lives, may play a greater role in shaping our sensibilities and our souls than we may have realised. Recognising these violences is the first step towards ending them. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. War on Iran Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0

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