We had a workshop on microaggressions yesterday in my department. It was done in a very reasonable way and I didn't feel myself resistant or skeptical at all. I guess people have been exaggerating how oppressive the PC stuff is. A bit of the language was funny, like "target" and "agent."
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In my department this would just train the micro-agressors on how to do it better.
But it's one of the better topics and most useful.
You don't train people in an hour how to drop the racism they've been absorbing since before birth.
I was heartened that the facilitators did not love the notion of "safe space." They suggested 'brave space' instead.
... and we do have problems with this in our department, but they cannot always be reduced to "target" and "agent" roles. We have men and women, whites and Latinos, tenured and untenured, and problems occur both within and between these classifications. I can't even go into it. I wish it were as simple as telling racists and sexists to shut up.
That is the problem. I catch hell for reasons having to do with gender but people don't say it directly.
I think my micro-aggression, such as it is, is tempered mainly by the arts, which hold, as it were, a mirror up to my nature, show me my features. Workshops, not so much. But it's possible that these workshops serve that function for some people, that they provide "data for ethics," as Pound put it. I do think whether or not it's mandatory makes a difference. We're free to consume art as we please. That's part of how it works.
Another way we become less micro-aggressive is "the hard way". That is, we hurt people accidentally and regret it. Maybe there are also life experiences that make us more micro-aggressive. In any case, like "implicit bias", I think we're talking about very small things that are hard to detect accurately and therefore hard to intervene in by formal means, including explicit "training". That's another reason I like to leave it to artists. "The antennae of the race."
I much prefer Jonathan's "receptivity" to the sort of "sensitivity" that is being "trained" these days.
The examples we were given were things like "where are you from?" directed at a Latino in a way designed to make the person feel like a foreigner. "You Chinese are all good at math." "You people..." statements. Or statements that diversity would lead to a compromise with "excellence." Professions of color-blindness or belief in meritocracy are also in this category.
But actual aggressions in my experience are more in the nature of condescending to someone, bullying, or the classic ninguneo. You can treat someone very badly but never even mention race or gender. We could all sit through the workshop and know we were not guilty of these particular aggressions, but that doesn't mean we treat each other well either.
Right, and this is why I am not a fan of these workshops. Most people know about the ones you mention. So the workshop becomes an empty exercise.
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