2. Guidelines
Participate at your own comfort level!
Speak from personal experience-you cannot speak
for others.
Respect and maintain privacy.
Listen respectfully & share air time!
Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!”
– Miss Frizzle, The Magic Schoolbus
3. What is a Microaggression?
“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 towards
people of color.”
Those who inflict racial microaggressions are often unaware
that they have done anything to harm another person.
Source: Sue, D.W., Capodilupo, C., Torino, G, Bucceri, J., Holder, A., Nadal, K., &
Equin, M. (2007). Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical
Practice. The American Psychologist , 62 (4) 271-286.
4. Microaggression
“Microaggressions are similar to carbon monoxide
– ‘invisible, but potentially lethal’ - continuous
exposure to these type of interactions ‘can be a sort
of death by a thousand cuts to the victim.’”
- Dr. Derald Wing Sue
5. Types of Microaggressions
• Microinsult: “Verbal, nonverbal, and environmental
communications that subtly convey rudeness and insensitivity that
demean a person's racial heritage or identity.
▫ An example is an employee who asks a co-worker of color how he/she
got his/her job, implying he/she may have landed it through an
affirmative action or quota system.”
• Microassault: “Conscious and intentional discriminatory actions.”
▫ Examples: “using racial epithets, displaying White supremacist symbols -
swastikas, or preventing one's son or daughter from dating outside of
their race.”
• Microinvalidation: “Communications that subtly exclude negate or
nullify the thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of
color.”
▫ Example: “White people often ask Latinos where they were born,
conveying the message that they are perpetual foreigners in their own
land.”
Reference: Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual
Orientation. (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).
7. What kind of Asian are you?
• Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWynJkN5
HbQ
8. What kinds of microaggressions do you
encounter on a day to day basis?
Are there any you can think of that you
see on your campus?
9. Real Life Examples
• Vandalism – genitilia
• Men wearing pink & getting
mocked.
• Posters of naked women in the
bathroom.
• “Diverse people”
• “He broke up with me. I’m just
going to be a lesbian.”
• “Racism is only a problem now
because minorities continue to
think they’re oppressed.”
• Use of words like “retarded”
• “But you seem normal!”
• “You are an asset to your
race/gender/etc”
• “You’re gay?! I have the perfect
person for you.”
• “I can’t comb my hair, I’m
black.”
• “Oh, all people are equal. I like
to think that I am colorblind.”
10. What Would You Do?
• Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuN
Rg
11. How might similar situations come up while on duty?
Within the residence halls on a day-to-day basis?
How would you react to something like this before
becoming an RA vs. how you react now?
12.
13. What to do…
• Ask a question.
• Assume that they don’t mean to be offensive.
• Explain how it may come across to others.
• Emphasize the community and its effect on it.
• Make it individual
▫ “Who are you referring to when you say that?”
• Say “ouch.”
