I was pleased to see someone push back against a "microaggressions" session in a recent meeting at work. It wasn't an in-person session, so I couldn't see people's faces or gauge their reactions. It felt extremely uncomfortable initially, but a number of other participants chimed in in support of the push-back.
The person leading the session wasn't being rude or laying on the material especially thick. It was, as far as I can tell, a pretty standard introduction to the concept of microaggressions. She gave the examples of 1) the only woman in the meeting being assigned the task of note-taker and 2) a colleague using a heavy accent when impersonating the voice of another (who was Indian...more on this later).
A brave person piped up with some comments. It was, after all, supposed to be an interactive session. He wasn't rude. He stated his point very respectfully, which the organizer of the session acknowledged. He started by saying, yes, we should all be respectful of each other and avoid giving offense. We should give some thought as to how our actions and unthinking biases might be affecting our behavior. That much is common sense. But what does this "microaggressions" concept add to that? And what is the limiting principle on this concept? Do minor grievances really "pile up" in the minds of those who are micro-aggressed against? Isn't there some threshold below which these events just cease to register? Or become quickly forgotten? Don't we have a duty to charitably interpret the behavior of those around us, rather than assume a sinister thought motivated them? (Not his exact language; these are my own paraphrases and my expounding on what I heard.) In explaining how we should be forgiving of minor or unintended slights, he repeatedly used the word "grace," which has almost religious overtones. I'm not particularly religious, but I thought there was something classy (you might say graceful) about this use of language. It's perfectly fine to say, "Hey, this behavior bothers me" or "This thing is really a pet peeve of mine." But let's not invent this concept of a growing ledger of microscopic slights that add up to a substantial whole. Everyone experiences these. The typical reaction is to round the off, truncating them to zero. (Computationally speaking, you might refer to this as setting a high tolerance.)
Specifically he riffed on the organizer's example, asking if it was never okay to ask a woman to take notes. The organizer said of course that wasn't her intended take-away, you'd expect a task to sometimes be assigned to a woman by sheer chance. If it's a pattern, if it's always a woman, and more to the point the woman tends to be chosen even if there are more junior employees in the room, then maybe there's an unhidden assumption that "this is women's work" or "women don't mind doing these menial administrative tasks." Point well taken, but I don't know if you need the concept of microaggressions to get there. She also said that until recently, it's been the majority group who got the privilege of defining what is and isn't offensive. What we're seeing now is that other voices are recognized in that space. Again, this is a totally valid point to make, but I don't know if it requires the concept of microaggressions or if this is just common sense decency. Taking offense that your ethnicity is the butt of many jokes seems like a different thing entirely from minor perceived slights piling up over time.
The person who spoke up was a white male. (I assume hetero white male, because he mentioned needing to be understanding of one's wife to successfully communicate and navigate relationships. It sounded like he was speaking from first person experience. He was pointing out that we're all dealing with different kinds of people all the time, and we're somehow navigating that space without microaggression seminars.) But several people with heavy foreign accents joined in and seconded his point. My employer has a worldwide presence, and even among American collogues the foreign-born are heavily represented. Very cosmopolitan in terms of demographics, and I was pleased to hear that many of them had a cosmopolitan worldview.
I've heard about cases of wokeness infiltrating HR departments and inflicting terrible "training sessions" on employees. Racially segregated training, humiliating struggle sessions, instructions to "be less white" (note that Coca Cola denies using those training materials, though it was accused of doing so to much furor), explicit indoctrination with CRT. The session I attended was much milder in intent, and yet there was firm but polite pushback. I have no doubt there are some committed fanatics trying to infiltrate the culture by inserting themselves into the bureaucracy layer of society. I'm just not sure how far they will get. The person who spoke up in that meeting was exceptionally brave. Maybe you can't always count on having one of those guys around. (I, for one, have no such inclination to speak up in front of a crowd.) Then again, for all I know there is some kind of punishment in store for him, explicit or perhaps subtle. And certainly there are companies that have a more woke monoculture, where such "outbursts" would not be tolerated. Apropos of my previous post, maybe this is a case of "They would be causing havoc if they could, but they are being held in check by forces outside of their control." Maybe all it takes is some respectfully worded pushback. It certainly changed the tone of the meeting from "We're all on the same page here" to "Some of us aren't buying into this paradigm."
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We'll see how it plays out, but there seems to be a kind of "diversity and inclusion" power play happening at the professional organization that I'm a member of, see here. I got a long, strongly-worded e-mail with more details on Friday, which was responding to an earlier e-mail from the CAS (which had barely registered with me). I count it as another example of pushback, not so gentle in this case.
On the example of doing an Indian accent for an Indian colleague. I have no idea what actually happened, so I'll take the lady's word for it. But I can't let this go without saying something. I had a lot of Indian friends and teachers in grad school. I would sometimes do their voices, as would everyone. No, I was not doing a generic Indian accent. I was doing the distinct voice of my friends and colleagues, trying to accurately capture their actual mannerisms and voices. Just as I would often do for my white colleagues, just as we all did all the time. (Guys like to mock each other. Sometimes this took the form of impersonating voices and accentuating the distinct features of their speech. "Matt Damon.") One Indian friend had a very slow voice, and if I were "doing" him you might think I was doing the voice of a native American rather than an Asian Indian. There was an Indian girl who had a kind of breathy, melodic voice. Another friend of mine was always doing her voice, and there was nothing obviously Indian about it. But there were some colleagues whose voices were decidedly more Indian. If I were to "do" one of them in isolation, it might sound racist. But what if I were reciting a conversation between these people, afterwards to an audience who wasn't present? Would I do an accurate impression of everyone's voice, but suddenly stop when I get to the guy with an Indian-sounding accent? Would I have to suddenly drop the voice acting and make him sound like a white guy? If the person who did the voice heard this HR lady talking about him, I wonder if he'd respond with something like, "I wasn't doing a generic Indian accent, I was 'doing' Samir! What, do they all sound the same to you or something? Seems all the HR training has worked on you. It's actually made you incapable of discriminating."
I also have to recall an early season of The Ultimate Fighter in which one of the contestants was a deaf guy (Matt Hamill). The other guys were doing his voice. At one point, one of them turns to the camera and says, "It might sound mean, like we're making fun of deaf people. But we're really just 'doing' Matt." I think it would be more offensive if the guys left Matt out of this male ritual of gentle teasing and hazing. Like, if they didn't want to seem mean in front of the cameras, so instead they just left the deaf guy out of the game. Still, I see how this looks to an outsider who lacks the full context or can't imagine the counterfactual. If you picked this out and showed a bunch of guys mocking a deaf guy's voice in isolation, I understand that this would look bad.
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