Microaggression Quotes

The concept of “microaggression” is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be “hate speech,” instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.

I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.

I understood 'microaggressions' to mean 'little bullshit acts of racism.

People who worry about microaggressions usually have never faced macroaggressions.

Sleepovers, as far as Toby could tell, consisted of the girls in her class getting together and forming alliances and lobbing microaggressions at each other in an all-night cold war, and they did this voluntarily.

The most frustrating thing in the world, even more annoying than woke students who complain about every little microaggression, is a fundamentalist who is racist, homophobic & misogynistic, but is always crying about how unjust the world is. Most people in the Middle East are in fact not politically correct at all, do not want to be, and hate the guts of anyone who is.

What feminists refer to as microaggressions, the rest of us sane adults call life....The concept of microaggressions encourages women to think that every single thing in the world is, or should be, about them. It encourages breathless levels of narcissism, solipsism and just plain delusion....Feminism encourages women to believe that they have the same reasoning and coping abilities as toddlers. No thanks.

Through it all, being demeaned and feeling disheartened and dispirited, Alice was expected to be nice. To overlook the microaggressions when they continuously rained down on her and find solidarity wherever she could. She was expected to endure in silence.

While it is easy to see how this way of thinking, when brought to a college campus, could lead to requests for safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggression training, and bias response teams, it is difficult to see how this way of thinking could produce well-educated, bold, and open-minded college graduates.

If fascism ever comes to America", Ronald Reagan told Mike Wallace in 1975, "it will come in the name of liberalism". Indeed, ideological fascism has come in place of academic freedom, waiving the banners of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces on college campuses across the land. You must submit. You must agree. You must comply with the fasces--the acceptable bundle of ideas--or you will be silenced and expelled.

Common-enemy identity politics, when combined with microaggression theory, produces a call-out culture in which almost anything anyone says or does could result in a public shaming.

Recognizing sexism is harder than it once was. Like the micro-aggressions that people of color endure daily—racism masked as subtle insults or dismissals—today’s sexism is insidious, casual, politically correct, even friendly. It

From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is a sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

She inhaled deeply—and sneezed. Stupid allergies. “Gods bless you,” Rishi said. Dimple arched an eyebrow. “Gods?” He nodded sagely. “As a Hindu, I’m a polytheist, as you well know.” Dimple laughed. “Yes, and I also know we still only say ‘God,’ not ‘gods.’ We still believe Brahma is the supreme creator.” Rishi smiled, a sneaky little thing that darted out before he could stop it. “You got me. It’s my version of microaggressing back on people.” “Explain.” “So, okay. This is how it works in the US: In the spring we’re constantly subjected to bunnies and eggs wherever we go, signifying Christ’s resurrection. Then right around October we begin to see pine trees and nativity scenes and laughing fat white men everywhere. Christian iconography is all over the place, constantly in our faces, even in casual conversation. This is the bible of comic book artists . . . He had a come to Jesus moment, all of that stuff. So this is my way of saying, Hey, maybe I believe something a little different. And every time someone asks me why ‘gods,’ I get to explain Hinduism.” Dimple chewed on this, impressed in spite of herself. He actually had a valid point. Why was Christianity always the default? “Ah.” She nodded, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “So what you’re saying is, you’re like a Jehovah’s Witness for our people.” Rishi’s mouth twitched, but he nodded seriously. “Yes. I’m Ganesha’s Witness. Has a bit of a ring to it, don’t you think?

Unfortunately, 'post racism' is also a myth, like unicorns and black people who survive to the end of a horror movie.

This is the culture of the micro-aggression, where people literally seek out opportunities to be offended....Victim status is so desirable that it's constantly faked or exaggerated, and claims that one is not a victim are met with indignation.

As a straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, first-world, middle-class white woman, she struggled to maintain a constant awareness of her privilege, and to avoid using it to silence or ignore the voices of those without the same unearned advantages, who had more of a right to speak on many, many subjects than she did. It went without saying that she was a passionate opponent of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, bullying, and microaggression in all its forms.

She’s tied her amazingly wild, energetic, strong and voluminous Afro back because people sitting behind her in venues complain they can’t see the stage When her afro’d compatriots accuse people of racism or microaggressions for this very reason, Yazz asks them how they’d feel if an unruly topiary hedge blocked their view of the stage at a concert?

Many today have difficulty understanding how the Puritans could execute people based on something like spectral evidence. Yet modern moral panics are more like witch hunts than one might suppose.

Sleepovers, as far as Toby could tell, consisted of the girls in her class getting together and forming alliances and lobbing microaggressions at each other in an all-night cold war, and they did this voluntarily. It

One of the most critical aspects of inclusion is that it must happen actively. When we just passively think of ourselves as good people but don’t do anything to actively include others, that creates passive exclusion.

Magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offenders are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors are all integral to the microaggression program but possibly harmful to mental health.

The universe, the landscape, it is all changing. It has not changed enough-that is a given- but it is changing, and evolution is something to embrace. Racism is alive and well and we still encounter microaggressions on a regular basis, bat at least now we can go home and close the door and enjoy some entertainment, see ourselves on-screen, imagine ourselves as superheroes and goddesses. Before, you got hassled, you went home, and you had nothing. That's the difference

What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.

Outrage compounds. Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one event tips the scales and outrage spreads like wildfire.

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.

Brett proposes that perhaps, instead of bringing in an outsider, we can have Candice do the sensitivity read instead. Candice responds curtly that she is Korean American, not Chinese American, and that Brett’s assumption otherwise is a racist microaggression.

These microaggressions help hold the system of White Supremacy together, because if we didn’t have all these little ways to separate and dehumanize people, we’d empathize with them more fully, and then we’d have to really care about the system that is crushing them.

was the only one picking up on the microaggressions aimed at my younger siblings flipped something like a light switch inside of me. It was an awareness of just how vulnerable they were and a realization that I was the only one who was willing and somewhat able to protect them.

smokey eye eyeliner as defiance. eyeliner as a statement, a declaration, a fuck you to a society that shames people for expressing themselves the way they feel the most at home, the same society that labels everything from toys to toothbrushes “boy” and “girl” rather than letting individuals cultivate their own identities. eyeliner as a call to arms. eyeliner as a weapon, a raised fist, a shield from judgmental expressions and microaggressions disguised as questions, from the insults and slurs shot out of car windows like bullets in a drive-by because i dare exist in a way they don’t and refuse to understand.

More insidious than those moments of outright hostility, though, and maybe more powerful, are the constant, low-level reminders that you're different. Many of us feel different in some way, but it's really jarring when one of your differences is obvious at a glance—other people can tell you're different simply by looking at you . . . Even when you feel like you belong, other people's reactions—even stares and offhand remarks—can make you feel that you don't, startlingly often.

short term always leaves us in a place worse off than when we started. — To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape. We need to address the root causes that made us turn outside ourselves in the first place. This means getting our physical health back, finding a good therapist, ending or leaving abusive relationships, learning to reinhabit our bodies, changing our negative thought patterns, building support networks, finding meaning and connecting to something greater than ourselves, and so on. To break the cycle of addiction, we need to learn to deal with cravings, break old habits, and create new ones. To address all of this is an overwhelming task, but there is a sane, empowering, and balanced approach. But before we discuss how to implement solutions to the Two-Part Problem, we need to address one of the bigger issues that women and other historically oppressed folks need to consider, which is how patriarchal structures affect the root causes of addiction, how they dominate the recovery landscape, and what that means for how we experience recovery. If we are sick from sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, microaggressions, misogyny, ableism, American capitalism, and so on—and we are—then we need to understand how recovery frameworks that were never built with us in mind can actually work against us, further pathologizing characteristics, attributes, and behaviors that have been used to keep us out of our power for millennia. We need to examine what it means for us individually and collectively when a structure built by and for upper-class white men in the early twentieth century dominates the treatment landscape.

Racism in the UK takes a different form than it does in the United States, but there is no mistaking its existence and how engrained it is. A major theme of racism in the UK centers on the question of who is authentically “British.” It can come through in subtle acts of bias, micro-aggressions such as the Palace staffer who told the biracial co-author of this book, “I never expected you to speak the way you do,” or the Daily Mail headline, “Memo to Meghan: We Brits Prefer True Royalty to Fashion Royalty.” While their columnist was criticizing Meghan for her Vogue editorials, there was another way to read it, and that was that to be British meant to be born and bred in the UK—and be white.

The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism. “Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.

Much scholarship is nothing more than political activism, and much teaching nothing more than indoctrination.

Explain air. Convince a sceptic. Prove it's there. Prove what cant be seen.

A social environment that is conducive to false accusations could lead us to people being falsely accused of falsely accusing others.

But other times, a person doesn't even know that they've insulted you or your culture. You must remember: No matter how it comes at you, the impact matters more than the intent.

Haidt shows that people of different political persuasions draw on different intuitive concepts -or moral foundations- when thinking about right or wrong.

As communicators, we are complicit in the harm caused by performative communications, microaggressions, reinforcing stereotypes in our content, and contributing to damaging our brand’s reputation…. As conscious communicators, with an awareness of others’ experiences and a commitment to centering them, we are uniquely positioned to help build a truly people-centered workplace.

As communicators, we are complicit in the harm caused by performative communications, microaggressions, reinforcing stereotypes in our content, and contributing to damaging our brand’s reputation…. As conscious communicators, with an awareness of others’ experiences and a commitment to centering them, we are uniquely positioned to help build a truly people-centered workplace.

Bad social science might result from systematic bias, but to embrace blame analysis as a way of evaluating theory or to transform sociology into advocacy for the oppressed is to do something else entirely.

Remember: it’s not just this one incident. This incident is the continuation of a long history of microaggressions for people of color. Racial trauma is cumulative, and you cannot expect a person of color to react to each situation the way that you would having encountered it for the first time. It may not seem fair that you would take some of the blame for what has happened in the past, but what is truly unfair is the fact that people of color have to endure this every day.

Black people forgive because we need to survive,” Gay wrote. “We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

In my research, I came across a neuropsychologist at Emory University, Negar Fani, who studies the effects of PTSD on people of color. She did a study where she scanned the brains of Black women who had experienced continued racist microaggressions in their personal lives and at work, and found that this abuse had changed the structures of their brains.[2] What’s more, their brains had undergone similar structural changes to people who had complex PTSD. The takeaway here: Racism can cause PTSD.

For nonwhites, racial microaggressions find a way into every part of every day. Microaggressions are constant reminders that you don’t belong, that you are less than, that you are not worthy of the same respect that white people are afforded. They keep you off balance, keep you distracted, and keep you defensive. They keep you from enjoying an outing on the town or a day at the office. Microaggressions are a serious problem beyond the emotional and physical effects they have on the person they are perpetrated against. They have much broader social implications. They normalize racism.

The act of forgiveness seems a silent clause in a one-sided contract between the subordinate and the dominant. “Black people forgive because we need to survive,” Gay wrote. “We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

While Meena had been battling for her life and, later, fighting against crippling social ostracizing, Smita had been sitting in cafés in Brooklyn with her friends, sipping her cappuccinos, all of them feeling aggrieved as they talked about acts of microaggression and instances of cultural appropriation, about being ghosted by a boyfriend or being overlooked for a promotion. How trivial those concerns now seemed. How foolish she had been to join that chorus of perceived slights and insults. How American she had become to not see America for what it had been for her family—a harbor, a shelter, a refuge.

Science fiction creators taught me not to take the machine personally: the wear and tear, day in and day out, of microaggressions and weird looks and empty bank accounts, and off conversations and news reports and movies and some drunk guy trying to holla at me and another cop found not guilty for shooting a Black boy who wasn't even old enough to vote and our water tasting like rusty metal. While we do need to constantly unplug from the violence of the invisible machines, we aren't going to survive simply by boycotting products made in Isreali settlements or having multiracial babies. We aren't going survive by "voting with our dollars," and we aren't going to make a revolution through the purity of our lifestyles.

It is crucial to teach incoming students to be thoughtful in their interactions with one another. A portion of what is derided as "political correctness" is just an effort to promote polite and respectful interactions by discouraging the use of terms that are reasonably taken to be demeaning. But if you teach students that intention doesn't matter, and you also encourage students to find more things offensive (leading them to experience more negative impacts), and you also tell them that whoever says or does the things they find offensive are "aggressors" who have committed acts of bigotry against them, then you are probably fostering feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness in your students. They will come to see the world - and even their university - as a hostile place where things never seem to get better.

The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate. Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion - disappear!

An antiracist movement that emphasizes the *actions* of individual 'white people' with a docus on things like 'calling out' everyday racism, or holding a company 'to account' for not catering to darker skin tones, perhaps isn't up to the task of defeating a concept that our societies have been deeply invested in for centuries, and that has assumed the 'truth' status that whiteness has. The focus on microaggressions and interpersonal slights often occurs at the expense of considering 'whiteness' or as a pervasive, insidious modus operandi, a particular way of engaging with the world. It is a system that is extractive, oppositional, and binary - a dominant system, one that asserts not just that white people should be dominant over other 'races' but that, more fundamentally, sees human life as dominant over all other life forms.

Only when people feel comfortable discussing race or gender or creed or socioeconomic status honestly will true change occur. When Americans can freely talk to one another, and listen, and allow for those uncomfortable moments that happen in a free society. Such communication does not come from the position that what came before me must be wrong; that what my opponent is proposing must be wrong; that only my team’s words are correct and all others are racist, sexist, micro-aggressive, threatening…

Amber was painfully aware of the mismatch between her politics and her desires. She was an intersectional feminist, an advocate for people with disabilities, and a wholehearted ally of the LGBT community in all its glorious diversity. As a straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, first-world, middle-class white woman, she struggled to maintain a constant awareness of her privilege, and to avoid using it to silence or ignore the voices of those without the same unearned advantages, who had more of a right to speak on many, many subjects than she did. It went without saying that she was a passionate opponent of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, bullying, and microaggression in all its forms. But when it came to boys, for some reason, she only ever liked jocks. It kind of sucked ... And of course they used her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that’s what privilege is—the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you’re a good person.

The Bernie Bros looked up from the vegetarian snack bar we’d put in across from the copier. “Yeah, bro,” one of them said. “Righteous.” “You’re out of organic cashew butter,” the other one said. “Got it,” I said. “See? We’re already building a solid base of support.” “Excuse me for being a progressive,” the first Bernie Bro said, “but I threw out the cashew butter. It’s not a native plant to the Northern Hemisphere.” “So what?” the second one said. “Some of us have peanut allergies. Cashew farming is totally sustainable and supporting organic cashew cultivation supports anti-deforestation efforts in Brazil. Unless there’s something anti-progressive about the rainforest.” “Microaggression. You’re forgetting the carbon footprint of shipping cashews to North America. And the cultural appropriation issues. You could just as easily eat almond butter.” “Oh, really? Have you looked at what almond growers are doing to the ecology of central California?” “Microaggression.” “Yeah,” Polly said, “that’s a solid base of support you got there. You can really build a political movement on that.

If you feel you’re experiencing “micro-aggressions” when someone asks you where you are from or “Can you help me with my math?” or offers a “God bless you” after you sneeze, or a drunken guy tries to grope you at a Christmas party, or some douche purposefully brushes against you at a valet stand in order to cop a feel, or someone merely insulted you, or the candidate you voted for wasn’t elected, or someone correctly identifies you by your gender, and you consider this a massive societal dis, and it’s triggering you and you need a safe space, then you need to seek professional help.

Sexual-patriarchal relational systems overwhelm, from media glorifying sexual connection above other forms of intimacy and interaction, to medical, economic, and legal structures that automatically privilege sexual/domestic/romantic dyadic partnerships and genetic family bonds over other chosen platonic relationships and support systems. Oppressive social structures and micro-aggressive interpersonal interactions constantly grate on us, damaging our health and maybe even pushing us to seek care, but often available formal assistance is part of the same harmful system and populated by the same privileged persons.

We experience specific traumas that affect us profoundly. And we are living amidst institutional standards, family systems and normative practices that perpetuate sexual violence, segregation and domination. A host of macro and micro-aggressions punish sexual identities and experiences outside a norm that almost no one fits inside. Neglect of our sexuality is also vigorously enforced. Most children are born into a world that disregards their sexuality and admonishes or exploits its expression. Adults typically have their sexual experiences rationed to occasional and unsatisfying exchanges. It is well past time we recognize that this neglect in itself is traumatizing. By working and playing to transform our personal neurobiology, we also look to understand and transform the social context.

He saw a boy around Hannah’s age coming down the street dribbling a basketball. He looked over at Hannah to tell her that he thought she knew this kid, but she had already seen him and her face was flushed. He had the white-toothed glow of an athlete and a rich kid. He said to Toby’s daughter, “Hey, Hannah.” Hannah smiled and said, “Hey.” And the boy dribbled on. “Who was that?” Toby asked. Hannah turned to him, angry. Her eyes were wet. “Why can’t we take cabs like regular people?” “What is it? What happened?” “I just don’t know why we have to do this walking to the park all the time like we’re babies. I don’t want to go to the park. I want to go home.” “What is the matter with you? We always go to the park.” She sounded a great big aspirated grunt of frustration and continued walking ahead of them, her arms stiff and fisted and her legs marching. Toby jogged and caught up with Solly, who had stayed obediently until Toby got to him. “Why’s she so angry?” Solly asked as he remounted his scooter. “I don’t know, kid.” More and more, Toby never knew. — HANNAH WAS INVITED to a sleepover that night. Sleepovers, as far as Toby could tell, consisted of the girls in her class getting together and forming alliances and lobbing microaggressions at each other in an all-night cold war, and they did this voluntarily. It had begun when Hannah was in fourth grade, or maybe before that, wherein the alpha girls set to work on a reliable and unyielding establishment of a food chain system—jockeying for position, submitting to a higher position. Licking your wounds when you learn you are not the absolute top; rejoicing to know you are not the absolute bottom.

Staff and faculty of color regularly play an additional role of caring for students of color who have often been the recipients of unconscious bias, racism, and microaggressions on campus.

I told that to Noah, and he said them pretending it never happened is also a microaggression,” Gavin said. “I want to fuck the shit out of him when he starts ranting about social justice. Is that normal?

It had been bad enough when the House or Senate would force legionnaires to watch holovids when their buckets booted up and then answer multiple choice questions designed to address whatever social outrage was trendy on Utopion at the moment. Special courses on the right way to show concern for natural disasters. Learning to avoid micro-aggressions such as offering good thoughts or prayers instead of monetary donations to a House of Reason–approved charity.

The theory of microaggression can’t help but seem to me mostly an indicator of how radically devoid of other threats our lives in America have become—at least in the fortunate part of the country where people go to college. But maybe I’ve grown habituated to conditions that today’s young people feel entitled to reject. And maybe I escaped the role of frightened victim by finding others to victimize.

Being accused of microaggression can be a harrowing experience. Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald relates in City Journal how an incident got out of hand at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2013. Professor Emeritus Val Rust taught a dissertation preparation seminar in which arguments often erupted among students, such as over which victim ideologies deserved precedence. In one such discussion, white feminists were criticized for making "testimonial-style" claims of oppression to which Chicana feminists felt they were not entitled. In another, arguments over the political implications of word capitalization got out of hand. In a paper he returned to a student, Rust had changed the capitalization of "indigenous" to lowercase as called for in the Chicago Manual Style. The student felt this showed disrespect for her point of view. During the heated discussion that followed, Professor Rust leaned over and touched an agitated student's arm in a manner, Rust claims, that was meant to reassure and calm him down. It ignited a firestorm instead. The student, Kenjus Watston, jerked his arm away from Rust as if highly offended. Later, he and other "students of color", accompanied by reporters and photographers from UCLA's campus newspaper, made a surprise visit to Rust's classroom and confronted him with a "collective statement of Resistance by Graduate Students of Color". Then the college administration got involved. Dean Marcelo Suarez-Orozco sent out an e-mail citing "a series of troubling racial climate incidents" on campus, "most recently associated with [Rust's class]". Administrative justice was swift. Professor Rust was forced to teach the remainder of his class with three other professors, signaling that he was no longer trusted to teach "students of color". When Rust tried to smooth things over with another student who had criticized him for not apologizing to Watson, he reached out and touched him in a gesture of reconciliation. Again it backfired. That student filed criminal charges against Rust, who was suspended for the remainder of the academic year. As if to punctuate the students' victory and seal the professor's humiliation, UCLA appointed Watson as a "student researcher" to the committee investigating the incident. Watson turned the publicity from these events into a career, going on to codirect the Intergroup Dialogue Program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. As for the committee report, it recommended that UCLA create a new associate dean for equity and enhance the faculty's diversity training program. It was a total victory for the few students who had acted like bullies and the humiliating end of a career for a highly respected professor. It happened because the university could not appear to be unsympathetic to students who were, in the administration's worldview, merely following the university's official policies of diversity and multiculturalism.

So-called micro-aggressions — tiny perceived slights that may imply a broader insult — are now the talk of university campuses across America and are a concern to everyone from the newest freshman, woman or nongender aligned student to the President of the United States.

microaggression occurs when you ask for feedback and it is not given. A

In my research, I came across a neuropsychologist at Emory University, Negar Fani, who studies the effects of PTSD on people of color. She did a study where she scanned the brains of Black women who had experienced continued racist microaggressions in their personal lives and at work and found that this abuse had changed the structures of their brains. What’s more, their brains had undergone similar structural changes to people who had complex PTSD. The takeaway here: Racism can cause PTSD. Even Negar herself told me that her work was inspired by the slights and microaggressions she’d endured from her older, white male colleagues in academia. On top of those findings, there have also been a number of studies showing that consuming racist or threatening media can be harmful to one’s mental health. Black people who have watched videos of unarmed Black men being shot by police have reported anxiety and depression. I’m sure the same could be said for Latinx people watching videos of dead-eyed children separated from their parents at the border.

The report stated that “Systemwide P&T [Promotion and Tenure] has been concerned about low level discriminatory actions that occur over a long period of time—things such as undervaluation, microaggression, and marginalization—that never as a single instance reach the threshold for filing a formal grievance

While online abuse can happen to anyone, it is by no means an equal-opportunity occurrence. We're dragged the same sort of cultural baggage that we live with offline into online spaces like a gross piece of toilet paper stuck to our shoes.

I often make the statement that liberalism is a symptom of remarkable privilege. In times of true injustice, no one debates gender pronouns and microaggressions. In times of real conflict, no one demands the government come take their guns.

microaggression,” by which they mean one of those many sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions that mar the days of women and folks of color.

A microaggression. A comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a racial minority or otherwise marginalized group.

Chelsea, if I spoke up every time someone at this school said a micro-aggression against me, I’d always be saying something. Sometimes for my own sanity, it’s just better to walk away.

In my clinical experience, always trusting your feelings or jumping to conclusions that you know what others are thinking, without any supporting evidence, are seen as examples of cognitive distortions.

I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide. What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies holding these abusers accountable what they are: antiracist. To be racist is to shy away from the R-word, steeped in denial.

The logic of victimhood culture means no speech is clearly protected.

It is only when faced with deep differences, with cultural miscommunication and moral conflict, that we become aware that our way of seeing the world is not universally shared.

Kenny, you don’t think I’ve had things thrown in my hair? Or been the butt of jokes? Or was told how I’m very articulate or very pretty for a dark-skinned girl? Or accused of being too aggressive for simply stating an opinion? Do you know how many times I’ve been sent to the main office since kindergarten, just for asking a question? I’ve had a thousand microaggressions to Maddy’s one, and yet everyone has jumped to coddle her. She gets to be upset and cry, but ME? I gotta be in control and strong but not too strong or I’ll—how did you put it?—‘make people uncomfortable.’ Must be nice to just exist. So yeah, I ain’t worrying about Maddy cause Maddy ain’t ever been worried about us. Bottom line—when she had to choose, she chose to be white.

The same progressive activists who campaign against microaggressions might also call for the banning of conservative speakers, for the forbidding of displays of support for certain political candidates, and for the creation of safe spaces where progressive ideas can go unchallenged by opposing views.

Sensitive to slight, they police even unintentional verbal offenses; concerned with the oppressed, they champion minorities and vilify the privileged; reliant on help, they publicly air lists of grievances. The university is the epicenter of victimhood culture. As such it is the epicenter of microaggression complaints, as well as trigger warnings, safe spaces, and hate crime hoaxes.

Magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offender are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors are all integral to the microaggression program but possibly harmful to mental health.

Microaggression complaints arise from a culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display a high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to authorities and other third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.

Sociology and social justice each have potential only when operating within their limits. The promise that a science of social life could aid social justice efforts was reasonable, but when social justice becomes an ideology unmoored from empirical reality, it needs no science.

Victimhood culture makes it hard to avoid wrongdoing. If you have any kind of privilege, the social world is full of peril; you always risk giving offense. Engage in small talk and you might be guilty of a microaggression. Cook a new dish or adopt a new hairstyle and you might be guilty of cultural appropiation. Teach about something unpleasant and you might be guilty of triggering someone. Express your religions or political beliefs and you might be guilty of violence. Whatever you do, you must do it in a way that is supportive of victims and reproachful of their oppressors.

The cumulative effects of microaggressions are thought to contribute to health disparities affecting people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people over the life span (Sue 2010).

A white person can date a Black person and still be racist. Because there’s levels to that sh*t. Like a lasagna.” I frown but Shu says, “Stay with me. So, on the top, that cheesy layer, that’s what you can see clearly. Hate speech, mad looks, and violence. Obvious stuff you can’t ignore. But all them layers underneath, the ones that are harder to see, microaggression and unconscious bias? Giving your white “girlfriend jewelry, boat rides, and meet-and-greets with the family, but your Black girlfriend pasta in your house? Racism, hun.

[...] The social justice warriors paved the way for a Trump government through accusing people of wrongdoing for trivial reasons. This lets actual bad guys slip past. When everyone is bad, who is really bad? If every white person is guilty of racism and white supremacy, what makes Trump worse than any other white person? Or if all men are sexist, what makes Trump more sexist than any other man? When we are constantly hearing about microaggressions, and subtle sexism and racism, it gets hard to know if to take public accusations seriously anymore.

Microaggression is an example of the emotional violence of contempt.

Because they watch (us). They're taught how to, from school. They are taught to view our bodies (selves) as objects.

Microaggressions are not trivial and insignificant but have a continuing and oftentimes harmful macro impact. Those in the majority group, those with power and privilege, and those who do not experience microaggressions are privileged to enjoy the luxury of availing for proof. Meanwhile, people of color, LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and other socially devalued groups continue to be harmed and oppressed. To ask them to wait for individual, institutional, and societal change is to ask them to continue to suffer in silence and to maintain the status quo of power and privilege.

This, with the kid gloves of gentility white libs always use when they want to make your annoyance feel unreasonable. The flop-sweating jargon invoked to signal their literacy on the subject of your existence. That fart holding wince when they sense their good intentions going unrewarded.

In the face of microaggressions, whether in the workplace, classroom, or other public forums, the emotional toll for people of color can be great (Sue, 2010). Three large categories of emotional reactions were identified.

Third, many describe an emotional exhaustion of having to constantly deal with a never-ending onslaught of microaggressions and being placed in a no-win, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation.

1. GRIT noun \'grit\ (1.) mental toughness and courage —Merriam-Webster’s definition (1.) an archaic descriptor denoting male-chauvinist microaggression in the form of an oppressive, traditionalist/individualist approach to adversity (2.) a hardness of character that renders individuals unsuitable members of a progressive, collectivist society —A Leftist’s definition

Major offenses like this one, as well as minor indignities, or what psychologist Chester Pierce (1995) referred to as micro-aggressions, are so common and pervasive that for many parents, preparing their Black sons for the likelihood of an

microaggressions, detailing

Your life is ultimately your responsibility, and the consequences of your actions cannot be casted on anyone else, no matter their skin tone. Safe Spaces and Microaggressions Over time Sambos have shifted their attention from discriminatory laws and institutions to the mental apparitions of White people.

Microaggressions: The Triumph of Impact Over Intent A prime example of how some professors (and some administrators) encourage mental habits similar to the cognitive distortions is their promotion of the concept of “microaggressions,” popularized in a 2007 article13 by Derald Wing Sue, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Sue and several colleagues defined microaggressions as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” (The term was first applied to people of color but is now applied much more broadly.)

Intersectionality is a popular intellectual framework on campuses today; certain versions of it teach students to see multiple axes of privilege and oppression that intersect. While there are merits to the theory, the way it is interpreted and practiced on campus can sometimes amplify tribal thinking and encourage students to endorse the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Common-enemy identity politics, when combined with microaggression theory, produces a call-out culture in which almost anything one says or does could result in a public shaming. This can engender a sense of “walking on eggshells,” and it teaches students habits of self-censorship. Call-out cultures are detrimental to students’ education and bad for their mental health. Call-out cultures and us-versus-them thinking are incompatible with the educational and research missions of universities, which require free inquiry, dissent, evidence-based argument, and intellectual honesty.

The term “microaggressions” refers to a way of thinking about brief and commonplace indignities and slights communicated to people of color (and others). Small acts of aggression are real, so the term could be useful, but because the definition includes accidental and unintentional offenses, the word “aggression” is misleading. Using the lens of microaggressions may amplify the pain experienced and the conflict that ensues. (On the other hand, there is nothing “micro” about intentional acts of aggression and bigotry.) By encouraging students to interpret the actions of others in the least generous way possible, schools that teach students about microaggressions may be encouraging students to engage in emotional reasoning and other distortions while setting themselves up for higher levels of distrust and conflict. Karith Foster offers an example of using empathy to reappraise actions that could be interpreted as microaggressions. When she interpreted those actions as innocent (albeit insensitive) misunderstandings, it led to a better outcome for everyone. The number of efforts to “disinvite” speakers from giving talks on campus has increased in the last few years; such efforts are often justified by the claim that the speaker in question will cause harm to students. But discomfort is not danger. Students, professors, and administrators should understand the concept of antifragility and keep in mind Hanna Holborn Gray’s principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.