#micro-aggression

At some point an Overwatch joke ended up on my Tumblr feed, and since my son is into Overwatch, I thought I’d share it with him.  I should note, I know very little about the game. Me: What do you call it when McCree and Genji use their ult at the same time? #1 Son: ... Me: Shanghai Noon #1 Son: *blink, blink*  That’s terrible.  Genji is samurai based, which is Japanese, not Chinese.  Don’t people realize Asian cultures are not all the same?

Review: You Can Keep That to Yourself

You Can Keep That To Yourself, Adam Smyer. New York: Akashic Books, 2020

Summary: A humorous and pointed list of “things not to say” to Black friends or colleagues.

“HELLO, WELL-INTENTIONED PERSON OF PALLOR!

“It’s Daquan–the black coworker you are referring to when you claim to have black friends.

“You are reading this book because you want to know what not to say. They get mad at…

Micro Aggression in the 21st Century

The Global Psychology Task Force has conveyed a round table, composed of professional psychologists from around the world, to focus on the powerful and often quite destructive process known as Micro-aggression. Here is a video recording of this 41 minute long round table discussion (led by Dr. Karin Bustamante):

  https://vimeo.com/449674665

  Participants in This Round Table: were:

Dr. Karin…

Are white Madison progressives making racial minorities sick?

Fighting ‘racialized micro-aggressions’ from implicitly biased progressives, one perceived slight at a time ‘Racial Battle Fatigue’

  Experts have examined the wallpaper at Stately Blaska Manor and determined it is in bad taste — even nausea-inducing — but not racially offensive..

  Madison’s terribly “woke” leaders have decided that crime is a public health issue. So, too, apparently, is…

Make note that this man is actually a writing friend (he’s problematically flawed and I still consider him such), who once examined my sci-fi piece and said having a "transgender character needs to have a better relevance to the plot."

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/vetting-for-stereotypes-meet-publishings-sensitivity-readers

“Vetting for stereotypes: meet publishing's 'sensitivity readers'

Publishers hoping to avoid offence are increasingly turning to sensitivity readers. But is this good practice, censorship, or just another way of maintaining privilege?

When reviewers first saw Keira Drake’s The Continent, this story of a teenager trapped by a war between two “native” tribes quickly found attention on social media – though not much of it was good. This young adult novel was attacked for its “white saviour narrative” and its stereotypical portrayal of people with “reddish-brown skin” or “almond-shaped eyes”. The author Justina Ireland called it a “racist garbage fire”.

Drake apologised, said she would “address concerns about the novel”, and delayed the release. Her publisher, Harlequin Teen, sent the book out to two “sensitivity readers”, who vetted the manuscript for stereotypes, biases and problematic language. Armed with a list of potential problems and possible solutions, Drake went back to the drawing board.

It’s a story that has become all too familiar in recent years as publishers and writers struggle to adapt to a new world where cultural appropriation and racial stereotyping are called out online, and where campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books push for a corrective to the lack of books featuring people of colour (POC).

(...)

According to Debbie Reese, an academic who focuses on the representation of Native Americans in children’s books, many authors aren’t as receptive as Hecker. Reese dabbled in being a sensitivity reader in 2016, charging $100 an hour, but stopped.

“I quit doing them because they were exhausting and sometimes authors wanted to argue with me,” she says. “They weren’t open to the feedback. They weren’t trying to understand the feedback. They were insisting on the rightness of what they were writing.”

Sometimes, she’d find herself highlighting problematic words or phrases such as “low man on the totem pole” – a term which is sometimes used to describe people with little status. “I’d say that was a misrepresentation of an item originating with a specific nation. That hierarchy isn’t applicable. The phrase is used a lot but it is what generally gets called ‘a 

micro-aggression’.”

And now, Bradbury’s Coda.

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Good stuff here about day-to-day resistance to oppression.

I use micro-aggression scenarios (that actually happened) in my trainings for camp staff. This piece is a nice application of scholarly research & perspectives to practitioners’ world.