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In reply to the discussion: What the heck is a microaggression, anyway? [View all]Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)can sometimes be overused or misapplied.
To wit, I would argue that an AA person being followed around a high-end story by overly "helpful" salespeople, or being told "gee, you're so well-spoken"... those, to my mind, are "microaggressions". Maybe not actual aggressions, but clear racism with the subtext of "you might steal something" or "I'm surprised you can string together a coherent sentence".
Sometimes, however, the word IS overused or misapplied. An earlier example on DU cropped up with Adria Richards, the woman at the Python conference who had some guy thrown out (and later fired) for making jokes to his buddy about "dongles" and "forking" (not realizing, despite being at a dev conference, that those are both technical terms and not merely poorly crafted sexual slang)... She claimed that these jokes she overheard in a 3rd party conversation- whose content she herself didn't, actually, understand- were a "microagression" against her. I think her case, in that instance, was questionable.
Similarly, the term recently cropped up in a thread where someone claimed that the mere act of white people wearing dreadlocks on their own heads constitutes a "microagression". I do NOT believe that individuals exercising their own right of free choice to wear their own hair the way they want, is an inherent "aggression" against others, micro or no.