Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

The one microaggression that comes to mind is when I was at a Christmas party for my job and there were a few people dancing.  This woman named Robin walked over to me and one of my co-workers and said “You people can really dance”.  She then said “you have a lot of rhythm”.  My co-worker and I looked at each other, we are both African American then looked at Robin.  I don’t know how my co-worker felt but I felt slighted.  I felt that she was insinuating that African Americans can dance and that is about all that we did well.  The fact that she said you people made her statement even worst, because it made me feel as though African Americans are not part of the human race; we are separate and needed to be looked upon differently.  Robin was acting on a stereotype that is well known about African Americans.  This told me a lot about Robin, she was closed minded and prejudice and I did not trust her after this incident.

All week long I listened for microaggressions fortunately I did not hear any, but listening for them put on the defense.  Microaggressions are direct insults to a person, which leaves you feeling excluded, inferior and angry.  Microaggresions are the hidden feelings or stereotypes that people believe about marginalized groups of people.  These feelings are a reality to people that holds them, that is why people can easily insult a race of people unconsciously.  It is important that as educators we deal with these untrue feelings or beliefs about people of different culture or race.  We need to have the same expectations of our children despite their race, nationality, religion or economical status.   It is vital that we maintain a partnership with the families that we service biases cause us to make assumptions about families that are not realistic.  It is important that we deal with each family individually and not put them in the same category in our minds.  Prejudice is thinking that people of the same race or ethnicity are the same.  What I have learned is that stereotypes are false and people should be related to individually.