A group of current and former Google employees is suing the company for “systematic discrimination” against them, alleging that they faced “a range of microaggressions” because of their race.
This concept of “microaggressions” surfaces a lot lately in complaints of racism. A news producer at an L.A. television station accused her former employer of “microaggressions and gaslighting” for “being screamed at in front of my intern.”
A contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race was accused of “microaggression” for observing of another drag queen who is Black, “She did [her act] so elegantly. It wasn’t aggressive, it was done with taste.” The contestant meant it as a compliment, but the Black drag queen was offended because “Words like ‘aggressive’ are often used to describe people of color who are expressing themselves.”
A university student complained that her professor treated her with “microaggression” when he suspected she had plagiarized a paper. The university ended up having to put the entire academic faculty through mandatory “microaggression” training.
“Microaggression” is a term the far Left dreamed up to define racism so subtle, it might appear only in the eyes of the beholder. It originated at Harvard in the 1970s.
Accusations of microaggression became so widespread by the 2000s that compulsory courses in recognizing microaggression, unconscious bias and diversity became widespread on campuses and in police forces and corporations. As an article in Higher Education Today noted, “Many people of color, women, LGBTQ, and other ‘minoritized’ groups—social groups that may not be the minority in number but continue to be systemically oppressed and excluded—on college and university campuses experience microaggressions on a regular basis.”
Now, let’s go to the Right end of the political spectrum, where a similar phenomenon is widespread, although they don’t call it “microaggression,” they call it “discomfort.” For example, in Florida—land of the Don’t Say Gay law—the Republican legislature is pushing through “a bill…that would prohibit Florida’s public schools and private businesses from making people feel ‘discomfort’ or ‘guilt’ based on their race, sex or national origin.” The “Individual Freedom” bill stems from claims from the far right that white students are being made “uncomfortable” by being reminded of the history of slavery. In Red State Iowa, the Republican Governor recently signed a bill “that bans teaching topics that could cause a student to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.” As in Florida, the proximate cause of this bill is to prevent discussions of slavery in the schools which might cause “discomfort” among young white people. In Tennessee, a group of rightwing mothers is lobbying to bar a course called Civil Rights Heroes that details the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.
While the two sides—the extreme Left and the extreme Right—are divided on many issues, one thing they share in common is this whiney, petulant habit of finding insults everywhere they look. It’s called “victimhood culture”; people feel entitled, and if they can’t get what they want, someone, somewhere, must be denying it to them, and must be publicly shamed.
I’ve come to understand that sometimes, my feelings are hurt. That’s life; we have to get used to it. Not everybody is going to love you, even though you think they should. Some people are just going to think you’re an asshole, and that’s their right. Boo frigging hoo. So isn’t it ironic that the far Left and the far Right share this personality trait? My advice: get over it, both sides. Stop complaining. I don’t care much if somebody sees racists coming out of the woodwork, and I sure don’t care about those poor, coddled boys and girls who feel “uncomfortable” because they hear the truth about America’s racist history.
Steve Heimoff