Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

Microaggressions occur on a daily basis and are usually brief slights, insults, or indignities of messages which can happen verbally or non verbally to people of different races, cultures, or genders. I feel that it can be a form of aversive racism. Microaggressions usually happen outside the level of awareness of people (Sue, 2011).

Unfortunately, I see and hear microaggressions everyday from both adults and children. The one I am going to write about happened several years ago when my daughter was about sixteen or seventeen years of age. We were traveling to a small county in Wichita and stopped at the only gas station we could find for gas and snacks. We are white, and the lady at the register was from Iran, as I overheard her tell a customer who just left the store. My daughter and I were the only customers left and we walked around the small store picking up junk food and pop. When we sat our snacks down on the counter, the lady coldly informed us that she does not take Vision cards. Vision cards in Kansas are cards that help people pay for food. I simply stated, before I could stop my mouth, "That's nice because I do not have a Vision card. Do you have a Vision card?" She simply said no and I paid her in cash. I was so angry because she pegged me as someone who did not have any money and that was not the case. Sure, my daughter and I were wearing "seen better days" shorts and tee shirts, but still, she did not have to say anything to me about a Vision card implying that I need help to pay for food. My daughter, on the other hand, played devil's advocate saying that maybe because we were dressed "down" and did not look like we had money, or maybe people had tried to use Vision cards there before us is the reason she made this statement up front. Regardless, I felt this was a microinsult and microinvalidation to me, and still have not forgotten about it.

In my center, I see microaggressions in the classrooms when African American children tell mixed children that they can not play with them because their skin is not dark enough. Hurt feelings are one of the hardest issues to overcome, as you can tell in my microaggression from above. The older I become, the more tolerant I am of most everything, including the "isms." Disregarding or downplaying the feelings, beliefs, or opinions of others is one of the main contributing factors to microaggressions. As long as people feel they are superior to others, and vice versa, they will have tendencies to react negatively to those they consider different from their own standpoint in the power structure of hierarchy.

Laureate education (Producer). (2011). Microaggressions in everyday life. [Video file].
     Retrieved from http://class,walden.edu