General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What the heck is a microaggression, anyway? [View all]Revanchist
(1,375 posts)Actual microagressions where the offending party wasn't trying to be racist or insensitive but does so unconsciously, most of this is in the form of ignorant statements like the one posted about Michelle Obama being pretty for a black woman. It's not that the speaker of the statement is trying to be offensive it's more of an insensitivity in the thought process. Another example is making a woman change seats on an airline because a man sitting next to her won't sit by a woman due to religious beliefs. If the man is offended then he should be the one who moves but the airline attendants make the woman move instead, probably because they think she will object less, that is another subconscious decision that can be classified as a microagression.
The second form is what I would classify as perceived microagression. This is the result of dealing with actual racism and oppression for so long that they start to see microagressions everywhere. An excellent example of this is an article about graduate law students at UCLA. It's a fairly long article but they got a professor suspended because of acts that they saw as microagressions that led to a "hostile and unsafe climate" but I would be hard pressed to classify them as the actual thing. These included allowing open debates in the class room, and I quote:
After each of these debates, the self-professed students of color exchanged e-mails about their treatment by the classs whites. (Asians are not considered persons of color on college campuses, presumably because they are academically successful.) Finally, on November 14, 2013, the classs five students of color, accompanied by students of color from elsewhere at UCLA, as well as by reporters and photographers from the campus newspaper, made their surprise entrance into Rusts class as a collective statement of Resistance by Graduate Students of Color. The protesters formed a circle around Rust and the remaining five students (one American, two Europeans, and two Asian nationals) and read aloud their Day of Action Statement. That statement suggests that Rusts modest efforts to help students with their writing faced obstacles too great to overcome.
The also stated that correcting their grammar (remember, these are graduate students) and making them use the Chicago Manual of Style for writing papers instead of APA, and talking about self-defense tips after a robbery near campus instead of talking about the root social causes that lead to the robber to life of crime as microagressions and racism.
The article which, although long is an interesting read, can be found here:
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_4_racial-microaggression.html