On Microagressions

The weight of microaggressions is tremendous– but there isn't much that we can do about it. It is the unique background of everyone that creates microagressions, their biases, their skin color, their culture, their class. There is no way to erase these unique traits, thus there is no way to get rid of microagressions. Although this may be true, showing compassion towards other people can prevent microagressions from becoming a big problem. We can do this by catching ourselves as we notice that we are making insensitive comments and assumptions about other people. For this to happen we need to educate each other on different cultures and rid their minds of stereotypes; there is no way to know that we are doing something wrong if we don’t know what the right thing is supposed to be. I feel that this is the only way to cushion the blow that microaggressions make on people.

Microagressions continue to thrive because of the media. The media promotes stereotypes in TV shows and a white-dominant society by portraying whites as upper class citizens while other people as inferior to them. Stereotypes in the media assign roles to certain ethnicities, latching on to people’s minds, influencing them subtlety in their actions.