Microaggressions

What are microaggressions?

"Racial microaggressions are 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,” explains Dr. Derals W. Sue in his book Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.

In a recent New York Times article, Students See Many Slights as Racial 'Microaggressions,' (3/21/2014), Dr. Sue attributes

"the increased use of the term to the rapidly changing demographics in which minorities are expected to outnumber whites in the United States by 2042. 'As more and more of us are around, we talk to each other and we know we’re not crazy,' Dr. Sue said. Once, he said, minorities kept silent about perceived slights. 'I feel like people of color are less inclined to do that now,' he said..."

Vivian Lu, co-creator of The Microaggressions Project, a blog which seeks to provide visual representation of everyday microaggressions, attributes

"the growing popularity of the term to its value in helping to give people a way to name something that may not be so obvious. 'It gives people the vocabulary to talk about these everyday incidents that are quite difficult to put your finger on,' she said."

Read the full article here.

Photo via NYTimes.com, Credit Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

Caption: A student gave a monologue this month during a performance in Cambridge, Mass., of the play I, Too, Am Harvard in which he described being mistaken for a waiter at a formal university function.