Kiiiinda. I can see missing a person with dark skin and clothes against a dark background and remarking on it in a self-deprecating way, but there’d still be an apology immediately afterwards, and if the person was clearly not amused, I would definitely not double down by insisting that she was literally the exact same color as the black furniture.
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I believe she’s 24, so that isn’t particularly surprising.
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Fair point, although I’ve found age doesn’t automatically convey maturity, and young people can be wise beyond their peers. Mainly I think she’d benefit most from real mentors that would give her the opportunity to grow into her own. It’s sad because companies that operate this way squander their own investment in their employees. It’s not beneficial for anyone.
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Dingdingdingdingding! We have a winner. I’ve often felt like this as a brown guy working with mainly white people. (Never 100% sure whether to capitalize “black,” “white,” or "brown.) It’s not like people did things to make me feel like they were all secretly hateful. It was mostly that I people clipped their speech at weird moments, or corrected themselves around me in weird ways, or even just said things they felt couldn’t be construed as offensive. I’ve never complained about it, and looking back on it, I doubt I would given the chance again. But there’s definitely a weird sense of. “Something racial may have just happened, and it may have not even been a bad thing.” Nothing ever crossed the line, and in my case people have generally liked me well enough as a coworker or at least tolerated me to where I only worried about it on occasion. But if I had a boss who remarked on my skin tone in that way, which let’s be honest, is incredibly belittling. It would get a lot easier to feel more and more stressed out about these occasional bouts of “is this racism?”
Every entry-level or low level employee is going to feel like they’re not getting enough intellectual compensation out of the work. It’s dues-paying and everyone learns to deal with it one way or another, but managers and employers generally handle it a certain way because it’s incredibly common, and getting angry at a specific employee who voices concerns like that is a troubling sign. I’m sure she wasn’t the only employee to do this. This is why I’m not so quick to dismiss it as drama. There’s no reason to get angry and weird about employees who have concerns this typical. In her shoes, I’d absolutely connect the many little many little instances of “maybe” racism with bigger ones which were clearly inappropriate.
This is one of those cases where I don’t mind the concept, but I hate the coinage. Microaggression implies something I don’t think holds in all cases: Aggression. People are generally aware of their aggressions, and “microagressions” also encompasses a set of behaviors where the person acting is unaware they’re doing anything of emotional significance. I suppose it can be considered aggressive, but it just doesn’t jive with how most people experience aggression as an act they are engaged in. It also implies something else: smallness. If it’s a microagression, then surely it’s at worst a microsin? And it is small, but it’s more complex than that. There’s so much front-loaded into the terminology that I think it actually obfuscates rather than clarifies anything. The reality is that I think the concept is somewhat doomed to be forever misunderstood with the current coinage.
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Thanks, good points about “microaggression”! It’s true that not only do I rarely hear white people respond well to the concept – the term itself is likely a big part of that kind of white-pattern deafness.
Anyway, even if microaggressions did catch on with white folks, then I suppose that would be one more thing they’d be paying attention to instead of bigger “structural” manifestations of racism – “microaggression” seems limited to the personal level. You’d think white liberals would love it!
Has any better term for the realities that term describes occured to you, or have you heard one?
Oh, I know, how about – racism! (or sexism, etc.)
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As an old white straight dude, I gotta say, get out of the house occasionally. Read some Jane Austen. Watch daytime soaps. Read some primatology, de Waal or Goodall. Because you’re way out of touch with your fellow primates, you’re missing some really basic stuff.
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On the other hand, there’s not much interesting stuff out there. And there are people there. And the weather.
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How speciesist of you!
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Based on nothing more than my own experience… so only my opinion, which is worth what it is worth. I’ve just experienced explanations and exculpations like this before which were only tenuously attached to reality. I’m not saying she is a liar, and I’m not making a statement of fact, just my opinion based upon experience with others. But in order to say Kelly’s conduct was as depicted (and I agree it wasn’t acceptable) we have to accept that we have all the context. I can easily imagine scenarios where the comment was merely stupid, not malicious or hateful. So, if the comment wasn’t as bad as presented, then maybe the finance VPs reaction wasn’t so bad… but look, I’m painting myself into a corner here by stretching to imagine all possibilities. According to the only version of events that we have Kelly and the VP (band name?) acted like idiots or children.
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Well, coming late to the party, I couldn’t help but notice something I found glaring: within the first 5 comments, 1 tried dismiss the problem because of form (“drama”), and tried to find some excuse to defend the racist woman.
I find it very telling. For historical reasons, racism has been deeply ingrained in the US psyche and even to this day it is far from being uprooted. Of course, a lot of people still try to get over that, but it feels like it still is an uphill battle.
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Since I have a Wikipedia entry, I find that conclusion a little hard to take seriously 
That is not to say that I’m right about this, or anything, ever. I imagine it’d be quite difficult to accomplish anything of significance in the real world if one was actually “way out of touch with your fellow primates, missing some really basic stuff.”
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I think those two axes are orthogonal to each other. Does “accomplishment” necessarily have anything to do with knowing how human beings work?
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I’ve got a doctorate, a decent publication record in both popular and scientific press and a Bacon number of 3.
“Way out of touch with your fellow primates, missing some really basic stuff” is fairly indisputable for me.
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It does when you are in that directory because you build social software, like the very software you’re using, say, right now.
It is true that I do not build dating software which would have perhaps been more relevant to this essay.
And yet…
So, do you understand people, or don’t you? Make your mind up.
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Why do these discussions always turn into arguments about tone?
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Judge: Why do you people call yourselves black? You look more brown than black.
Steve Biko: Why do you call yourselves white? You look more pink than white.
You’d think we’d have started to learn by now.
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I cannot, but I appreciate your honest answer. Everyone is of course entitled to their opinion.
I would hope for a less racist America in the future, but I recently played a few sessions of online gaming and learned to my dismay that at least one new generation of Trump voters is on the way 
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I honestly can’t discern what this guy’s motivation was. I do know that I have worked with some people who are just unable to not say things, and sometimes some very weird things would emerge from their mouths. Uncomfortable.
