“If we
hire an East Coast person, that means were going to make them do all the office
work because that’s what they do over there.
Sound familiar? Probably not, but
anyway, this is a type of, what sociology majors call—micro-aggression. Micro-aggression is similar to
discrimination, however, it is different.
It deals with committing settle attempts of discrimination and
prejudice. Micro-aggression usually
consists of non-physical actions taken against another person in an attempt to
discriminate them from something.
Going
back to the example of that “East Coast” person, we can see that there is a
prejudice out there stating that East Coast people are good at doing just
business work and aren’t able to do field work well. If the job on the line involves working at a
police department, the East Coast person is going to be sitting in front of a
computer all day instead of being on the road.
This is a micro-aggression because the East Coast person will be forced
to work in the office instead of doing other work outside of the office. This person is also facing
discrimination.
A strength
of the micro-aggression concept is that it combines, in a way, prejudice and
discrimination. The term assumes that
you have an untested stereotype against another person which can lead to
discrimination. A weakness of this term
is that it can be easily seen as another form of discrimination. Micro-aggression requires actions based off
of prejudices like giving someone an office only job because they grew up on
the east coast where office work thrives.
An example of discrimination would be giving an east coast person an office
only job solely on the fact that they grew up on the east coast. Micro-aggression is better used to define attempts
of discrimination based on prejudice.
http://www.apa.org/Images/2011-10-microaggressions_tcm7-124342.jpg
I chose this picture because it
shows how one person’s words can impact another person. The big person could be using a
micro-aggression requiring the other person to do extra work because the little
person is a minority. The big person is
also causing the little person more problems than they should have and that is
represented by the rain storm.
I enjoyed your post because you really go across the point what micro-agression is and how people are affected by it. I honestly don't know how this can be a real thing. It is kind of like someone saying they are a homophobe. Okay, no you're not. You are just narrow minded and unacceptable of people different than themselves. I have strong feelings toward these kind of things because I just think it is bulls***. If you are going to have a strong opinion like that and degrade people, then own up to it, don't blame it on something genetically.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing! I really liked the picture you chose to post with this entry because it demonstrates how what some people see as little non aggressive comments are, others see as aggressive and impact their lives much more than they could ever understand.
ReplyDelete