In December, when they come out with the annual list of new words that people find the most annoying, “microaggression” is going to be one of them for 2014. I just learned the word Wednesday and within an hour, I already hated it.
According to a national newspaper, microaggression “is an increasingly common term on university campuses.” When I was in university, students were concerned with a “macroaggression” that was going on at the time — the Vietnam War — and Patty Hearst was running around with her urban guerrilla comrades shouting: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”
Patty Hearst is now a 60-year-old widow, by the way, and the mood is different on campus. It’s scarier. Instead of protesting big, important stuff like war, today’s unbelievably prissy students are tattling to the authorities because their feelings have been hurt by others’ perfectly innocuous behaviour.
Thus, McGill University student Brian Farnan got rapped on the knuckles for the sin of microaggression because he reposted a video from the Tonight Show featuring, among other doctored video, President Barack Obama kicking a door open as he left a news conference.
It was all part of a joke Farnan was making about mid-term exams, and of the 22,000 people who saw Farnan’s posting, just one complained. However, as a brand new member of the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Offence, Farnan could only achieve absolution by agreeing to subject himself to sensitivity training and issuing an apology because he had “unknowingly perpetuated” the “living legacy” of “people of colour ... being portrayed as violent in contemporary culture.”
Other examples of microaggression include a University of California professor who corrected spelling and grammar mistakes in minority students’ dissertations. If these students have reached a level of higher education where they are writing dissertations, there shouldn’t be any spelling and grammar mistakes in their work.
Apparently, however, for the prof to correct them was an insult to the students’ firm belief that since they belong to a minority, they should get through university without having their work criticized. They definitely sound like products of a public-school system that taught them they were special just for showing up and breathing every day.
Looks as if the cult of self-esteem, which has ruled the education system for many years now, is reaping what it has sowed. Correct a student’s paper and you’ve insulted him or her and must apologize. I’d hate to be a professor these days.
However, I’d like to cash in on the trend, too. I’d like an apology from the professor who gave me a D in Meteorology 101 in my freshman year at university. The textbook should not have been so full of mathematical equations. Didn’t the prof know that I hate math? I’m sure there’s no statute of limitations on such a crime, but since I can’t remember his name, he might get away with it after all.
Still another example from McGill is a student complaining about “gender binary,” on a survey which asked people to say whether they were male or female. Upon hearing the phrase “gender binary,” the professor committed the cardinal sin of (gasp!) laughing. He was duly reported for being a very bad boy.
I’m sure I’m microaggressing when I say: “Good for that prof for laughing. Long may he reign.”
Joey Shea, vice-president of university affairs for the Students’ Society of McGill University, said of the Obama video episode: “The fact that a complaint did come forward does prove that someone was harmed and did feel harm, and I think that there should be more apologies in society generally.” She added that: “I microaggress all the time. You microaggress all the time.”
A McGill website defines micro-aggression as “sexism, heteropatriarchy, transphobia, classism, racism, ableism.” Heteropatriarchy? That must mean anything said by a straight male. Soon, just being born a straight male could be a crime in itself.
I admit I’m suffering from an unableism. I am unable to comprehend how things on campus ever sank to this level of stupidity.
But I think if everyone just duct-tapes their mouth shut, that should solve the problem.
