2014 – Year of the Microaggression
Saturday Night Card Game – Everybody must get microaggressed
Remember Microaggression Mania: McGill U. student leader apologizes for .gif of Obama kicking open door?
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Microaggression is a prime example of how the wackiest academic theories incubate and then hatch into society when the students subjected to years of indoctrination graduate.
And it’s coming to a campus and workplace near you, very soon, as The NY Times reports, Students See Many Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions’:
On a Facebook page called “Brown University Micro/Aggressions” a “dark-skinned black person” describes feeling alienated from conversations about racism on campus. A digital photo project run by a Fordham University student about “racial microaggressions” features minority students holding up signs with comments like “You’re really pretty … for a dark-skin girl.” The “St. Olaf Microaggressions” blog includes a letter asking David R. Anderson, the college’s president, to address “all of the incidents and microaggressions that go unreported on a daily basis.”
What is less clear is how much is truly aggressive and how much is pretty micro — whether the issues raised are a useful way of bringing to light often elusive slights in a world where overt prejudice is seldom tolerated, or a new form of divisive hypersensitivity, in which casual remarks are blown out of proportion.
Time Magazine has practically declared this to be Year of the Microaggression, ‘Microaggression’ Is the New Racism on Campus:
Think everyday, interpersonal racism is a thing of the past? In progressive politics, most of the action has moved on from the Civil Rights struggles of the past to a focus on societal or “structural” racism. But, wait, not so fast — there’s a new word on the street that the old-style social racism is still with us, 24/7. That word is: microaggression. And you’re about to start hearing it everywhere….
Here’s what they are: The concept of microaggression has leapt from the shadows of academic writing into the bright light of general conversation, especially in the wake of widely consulted work by professors Derald Wing Sue and Madonna Constantine over the last seven or so years. Microaggressions, as these academics describe them, are quiet, often unintended slights — racist or sexist — that make a person feel underestimated on the basis of their color or gender.
The idea is that whites should now watch out for being microaggressors, in the same way that they learned long ago not to be racist in more overt ways.
Buzzfeed has both racial and LGBT listicles of microagressions.
Even adoptive families are feeling the cold sting of microaggression, Casual Remarks That Hurt: Microaggression and Adoptive Families.
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates (of Obama Beer Summit fame) argues that white people also should be able to complain about microagressions directed at them:
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and author, said the public airing of racial microaggressions should not be limited to minorities, but should be open to whites as well. “That’s the only way that you can produce a multicultural, ethnically diverse environment,” he said.
Enough already!
I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t listen to Dave Chappelle make fun of white people (language warning) for fear of him being accused of microaggression.
Or people making fun of how “white people talk”:
And somehow, I’ll get over this video:
What a whiney, hyper-sensitive, thin-skinned nation we have become.
Get over it.
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Comments
[not directed at you Professor] Enough already! This microaggression crap is nothing but fascism. Same face, different name. Anyone who has problems with this has to be having mental problems.
I think pro-choice is an example of microaggression against what Obama describes as “a burden”, and people who do not share his faith describe as “human”. Perhaps the resistance to his microaggression is what motivated the emotional outburst directed at the door. Pro-aborts/choicers are notoriously high-strung ghouls. Perhaps a side-effect of progressive cognitive dissonance.
All this stuff has exploded into the public discourse since Obama’s election in 2008. It’s an ironic and sick legacy for the first “post-racial” president. It’s a politically-instigated red herring to obfuscate criticism of his extraordinary incompetence. Also pushback fear from the ivory tower and media diversity crowd that their callings might become obsolete.
I see this as endemic of the victimology segment of the population who can’t find enough to be victims of so they create a term where they can claim to be victims of everything. Micro-intellects creating a niche to prove their hate is warranted.
“What a whiney, hyper-sensitive, thin-skinned nation we have become.” Pussies, anyone?
Microaggression and triggers: Our society is swirling down the toilet faster and faster.
Universities are the microbrewers of microaggressions. This whole concept is crafted to perfection.
Proverb:
“A dog in a kennel barks at his fleas; a dog hunting does not notice them.”
Our first-world universities in a time of peace and relative prosperity are kennels.
I meant to say our universities are “intellectual kennels.”
Microaggressions are quiet, often unintended slights that make a person feel underestimated on the basis of their color or gender.
Is it really my problem you feel “underestimated”? Or yours?
I’ve never felt “underestimated”. Is there something wrong with me?
Actually it is in itself an act of microaggression to avoid being microagressive because of a persons color or gender.
Those who tout the horrors of ‘microaggressions’ are hypocritically and ironically the source of most of it. It’s the left’s constant lean into this crap and their ever-present slow press of guilt onto white people and men that create the most microaggressions. Traditional western religions bear it, too. Especially those with white people and men.
If microaggression (or the perception of microagression, i.e. guessing about someone’s unclear words or behaviors) exists, then it exists because of PC stifling of speech and thought. It is the seeping out of what someone actually thinks.
When people are uninhibited about speaking out what they think, that is easier to address. PCness, however, says that certain kinds of “offensive speech” are wrong, discourteous, sometimes even illegal.
So this now is the campaign that is not about words or behaviors, but thought policing.
It’s all about the “n-word.”
From the moment it became acceptable to consider use of the “n-word” by whites the worst of possible offenses but absolutely fine for use by blacks, it was inevitable that offense would be taken by “subtle cues” and “facial expressions” and other things that sane people would consider innocuous or at worst ambiguous.
It’s about allowing a single group to define speech and conduct codes for everyone based on what they don’t like. It’s un-American. And in allowing it to persist, we guarantee that eventually even mentioning Shakespeare will be “micro-aggressive” cause for being fired from your job.
And do not be fooled for a minute by Gates’ “inclusive” suggestion, which will never be taken seriously.
Next thing you know, Othello can’t be read or taught anymore.
I spent many a year in academia without feeling “microaggressed”. During that time, I had a prof laugh in my face and tell me do a regular paper, instead of a play. Another prof said that’s not how you do an academic paper, no “microaggression” there. Another one liberally sprinkled a paper with red ink blathering on about run-ons. Again, no “microaggression”. Each check and correction provided impetus for research and remembrance of secondary school instruction. What these hypersensitive and lazy young people perceive as “microaggression” produced a better writer leaving college than going in.
It would be nice to live in a world where people of any color could make jokes about the quirks and foibles of each other without somebody squawking aggrievedly about “microaggression”.
We’ve lost our way as a nation. Nobody can be instructed, nobody corrected, nobody scolded, nobody upset. We’re on our way to being islands, contrary to what Donne said.
The entirety of nature is laughing its ass off.
thousands of years of man and this is what its come to.
Feelings.
If white men are dancing there is probably a good reason for it – the burden of carrying their world has been lifted off their shoulders for a time.
The DSM should be updated to include Microaggression, at least for therapists, so they can bill the fifty minutes of their client’s constant whining: OCMD Obsessive Compulsive Micro-obsessive Disorder
Is it me or has the academe turned into a behavior modification institution? The creation of this imaginary action call microaggression is just the latest example for perhaps the ‘arts’ or ‘liberal arts’ or ‘social arts’. But the sciences have been engaged in the same behavior modification since the first time “climate science” slipped over the line to start becoming a political action. It is now all about politics and behavior modification, having to distort “science” and data in order to ‘survive’.
Everything about “higher” learning seems focused entirely on a progressive ideal of forcing people to behave the way you want. Some go so far as to admit they want to use law to create that perfectly behaving society, without regard to natural rights. Sound familiar?
The kids graduating college now are the “Me! Me! Generation.” They received participation awards every time they took a dump as a child. They learned to play baseball without keeping score lest anyone be forced the indignity of losing. They’ve graduated through an education system that has been dumbed down, and now all they know is that they simply cannot stand the discomfort of, well, any type of discomfort. Any perceived slight or insult is cause for government intervention. What a bunch of pansies.
So, it is now microaggression to say, “You’re pretty smart – for a blond girl” or “Of course I’m intellegent – I wasn’t born a blondie!”
That used to be funny, as dumb blond jokes can be quite hilarious. As always, good humor is rooted in truth.
Get over it, indeed!! Get over yourselves! It is NOT all about you all the time! Stop being a grievance-monger. Or does it pay too much for you to quit (Rev Al, Jessie J, or all you Leftist-Bush-is-to-blame-navel-gazers, I’m looking at you)?
I’ve read some of Professor Sue’s work. The most frustrating thing about the micro-aggression concept is that he flat-out says if you mention a person’s race, you are engaging in microaggression, but not acknowledging their race (e.g., “I don’t see color”) is ALSO a micro-aggression! Under micro-aggression theory, this is because you’re not acknowledging an important part of their identity.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
This is the paradox of interacting with liberals. There is no conduct which will ever meet their ever-shifting and encompassing codes of propriety.
I find all of this sanctimonious Leftist hand-wringing and sermonizing over “microaggressions” to be incredibly bossy in nature. Whoops — can I still use that word, LOL?
The whole concept of microaggression is, itself, microaggression. The whole concept is dumb, dumb, dumb. So, what we have is the situation where no normal person would see aggression, it is getting relabeled as microaggression so someone could still complain about it.
Every single thing they’ve branded as “microaggression” was previously addressed over the past few centuries by etiquette.
Except, of course, that the rules of etiquette dictate that you do not get to call out the boors, for doing do makes one a boor.