Michael Bogdanos - Microagressions

Racially charged stereotypes have slowly but surely made their way into our society’s mindset, ingraining themselves in the minds of adults and children alike. And once there, they spread. Be it through an adult’s well-intentioned joke or a child’s ignorant insult, the stereotypes, and the microagressions they represent, have spread and festered throughout our world like a disease. And like a disease, they are fatal. They cripple our social advancement and prove fatal to our social tolerance. There is an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And therein lies the essence of the problem with microagressions. They are well-intentioned (or at least not badly intentioned). Thus they are spread throughout our society, and their constant utterance leads to a constant invalidation of heritage and self-worth. Therefore, microagressions have a very real weight. However, this is not true for many of the smaller slights we only perceive to be microagressions upon our long road to political correctness. For example, many times when a child asks “what are you?” it is merely an innocent curiosity as to your ethnicity, not a raging microagressions that invalidates your culture. While the weight of microagressions is very real, many times actions which we perceive to be microagressions are not.