It’s simply a slight. Not micro, not an aggression. Calling it a microaggression is passive aggressive.
In the Before Times, I worked full time at a large college, moving between buildings, doing mostly computer maintenance stuff, encountering hundreds of students and dozen of colleagues every day. Then Covid sent us to Work From Home which turned into a retirement buyout. It took me a while to realize how badly I was missing the microAFFIRMATIONS - the smiles from folks you just barely knew, the Hi-how-are-ya greetings, and doubtless many other almost imperceptible boosts that added up to making another Pretty Good Day.
No, it isn’t. It’s the accepted term. You are free to argue for changing that term to one you think fits better, but people using the accepted term is not any form of aggression, passive or otherwise.
When I hear the word “slight”, without qualifiers, I definitely assume it is intentional. It may be subtle, but the intent is for the target to realize they are being disrespected. And while they can be towards a particular group, they are usually more individual.
That isn’t the case with microaggressions. There is usually* no intent at all, and are never personal. They are subtle indications of prejudice towards a group. They seem harmless, but they add up to something that feels and functions like an aggression.
Micro-slights doesn’t work because they don’t add up to a slight. Micro-bigotry and micro-prejudice, which are arguably more accurate, would piss people off more, since so many freak out at the concept of even slight unconscious bigotry or prejudice.
*I actually have trouble thinking of anything intentional that wouldn’t be just full on (passive) aggression.
Calling something aggression which is not aggression is a kind of Newspeak. Use it if you like. One day you may get called for being aggressive when you do no such thing. You may have noticed in this thread the name ‘microaggression’ has done nothing to improve the situation.
Calling something a slight when it’s not a slight is also Newspeak. @BigT is correct, in my view, that a slight is intentional, whereas most microaggressions are not.
In any case, microaggression is now the accepted word that describes what the video was trying to convey, regardless of the roots of micro and aggression.
Aggression isn’t the label because of what the perpetrator is intending, it’s because of what the victim is experiencing.
Micro bigotry would be a more accurate term. But i don’t think it would make anyone less upset to be accused of micro-bigotry than of micro-aggression.
Yes, arguing the coining of the word is a prescriptivist sidetrack. Maybe whoever wrote the first paper on it could have picked something else to signify “casual habitual often inadvertent act or expression that perpetuates the listener experiencing being put-upon or othered”. But that didn’t happen and “microagression” it is what we’ve got for now.
I can see how in many cases of “workplace training”, especially if just done to checkmark a requirement, you may not get the necessary nuance - that yes this is a real thing that needs to be managed but no, we need not become bogged down in deconstructing every last word and gesture adversarially. Too much workplace-relations training tends to stick to checkmarking in part because its designers are aware of how much the average worker dislikes these trainings so “let’s get this over with”.
As noted before these are things that we don’t even notice ourselves doing, that even the subjected person may themselves not even consciously register in individual instances — we both lose them in the background noise, all the while they add up. A good faith and good natured collaboration between both parties to identify them when they happen and seek to steer things right is vltobeveryone’s advantage.
How dare language change without your explicit approval?
Or “one day” may never come, because he listened rather than pushing back…
This thread has shown lovely examples of pre-emptive patriarchical aggression. And the argumentum ad baculum fallacy, to boot.
And what do you call it when people refer to “microaggression” when many minor (but offensive) actions add up to a major aggression, but people keep trying to switch the talk to “aggression” when talking about a singular event? At what point does participating in habitual discrimination go from simple ignorance to lazy agression by habit?
I don’t think you know what either of those terms means.
Well, the OP posted a while ago (see posts #54 and #87) that reading the responses in this thread has lead them to understand a whole lot better. So I would say the term has improved the situation as far as they’re concerned; as well as, most likely, as far as the people they interact with are concerned.
I think that potential number of people may well outweigh the fact that according to your post just quoted it hasn’t improved anything as far as you’re concerned.
Yeah, arguing over whether a particular term is 100% accurate is a fool’s game, because the people objecting to the terminology, by and large, are actually objecting to the phenomenon being described. By changing the terms of the debate to “is this the best name for this issue,” they can pre-empt discussion of the actual issue. No matter what you call it, they’ll find a reason why that’s the wrong thing to call it, because avoiding the issue itself is the actual point.
Last week, someone in our group had to take notes. I didn’t want to, so I just sat there and waited for someone else to volunteer. I wasn’t trying to be sexist, but (as this thread shows), I was engaging in a sexist pattern of behavior according to my gender role. It just so happens that another guy did take the notes, so quite possibly my (lack of) action had no effect. That doesn’t change the fact that what I did failed to consider gender dynamics and (frankly) was inconsiderate to other people, and this thread is a good remind why that was still not okay. I think “microagression” is a perfectly accurate word for it.
I don’t like to think of myself as sexist, but the fact is, just being a guy comes with a lot of sexist behavior, and it’s on us to learn what that is rather than coast on the privilege and hope that people know we didn’t really mean anything by it.
As a gay guy, I get a lot of microaggressions from people who aren’t in the least homophobic, but just don’t think about what they’re doing. It’s the same. It’s exhausting to experience as it is exhausting to constantly police / retrain oneself, but the latter work really is worthwhile.
I think it may be that in the past you just thought “This is common shit I really can’t do anything about”, but new words come up like “microaggression” and you see others using the term and actually fighting against the now-named problem…and, just maybe, you see a little light at the end of the tunnel.
Yes indeed.
Making the background assumptions explicit can be helpful for people on both ends of the problem.
Yeah, I read that example, and was thinking, “I’d absolutely be one of the guys sitting there waiting for someone else to volunteer.” Of course, I wouldn’t be thinking, “Why isn’t one of the women volunteering for this?” nor would I hold anything against a woman who did exactly the same thing I just did. To my read of the story, problematic part is where Kimstu didn’t feel she had the same privilege to just grey rock the request, and felt obliged to step in and smooth over the awkwardness of nobody else volunteering by volunteering herself. The extent to which women are socialized/expected to act as social lubricant and prevent awkward moments like that is a product of sexist societal assumptions, and is how that situation can be sexist microaggression even if not a single man in the meeting expected or intended the job to default to a woman.
The temptation, from a position of privilege (I am a white middle aged male and my last employed role was management) is to argue that it might not be any kind of sexism at all - maybe the person heading the meeting asks a different person every time and today it’s Jane’s turn - next week it’ll be John - and so asking Jane simply to take the notes was perhaps a completely normal and run of the mill thing to do (assuming of course that expecting either Jane or John to take the notes was an appropriate act of delegation in the team structure there). That would be how it would work in a world that had always been fair and equitable from the start. Fairness would be an incidental matter.
But we’re not starting from a fair and equitable world, so you can’t do that; we’re starting from a world where it has, traditionally, been accepted that things like taking notes would commonly be regarded as ‘women’s work’ - and you can’t just jump directly to that fair and equitable world where it’s anyone’s work by simply ignoring the past and pretending that we have always shared things out fairly. It is necessary to be explicitly and deliberately fair, not incidentally so.
In the description of the video, there appear to be none of those explicitly fair steps, such as having explicit mechanisms to keep things fair and in that case the interaction might have been ‘Jane, I see you’re on rota for taking notes this time, OK?’.
No, but they sure are conveniently assumed to be there by a few people.
Perhaps we can hope that those people assumed that because they work in an environment where it is fairly dealt with like that