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That's exactly it. All "microaggressions" are is an attempt to put a name on and try to measure an effect ("people are more likely to be jerks to people of oth
by ajross 4y ago
That's exactly it. All "microaggressions" are is an attempt to put a name on and try to measure an effect ("people are more likely to be jerks to people of other/alien/less-privileged demographics") that we all know is real and happens all the time.
But because it involves an attempt to measure something that has partisan lean, people of one partisan group feel an instinctual need to refute it, lest they lose points or whatever. So you get this genre of right-leaning libertarian blog post that literally seems to be arguing that racism must not exist because you can't measure it precisely.
And I agree, this is in fact a really hard thing to measure rigorously and there's lots of room for improvement in the field (right up to maybe having picked a needlessly inflamatory name). But if your critique starts from a prior of rejecting the (again, really obvious) hypothesis outright, you're clearly doing worse science, not better.
- drewcoo 4y agoSome of us are neither of those partisan groups and just think it's silly.
- whimsicalism 4y agoIt's silly to say that real estate agents shouldn't deny service to people of different races or suggest different homes based on their customers race?
- grandmczeb 4y agoThat’s not a micro aggression.
- svachalek 4y agoI think it's fair to demand a certain amount of rigor; we're calling it science, after all. This blog includes demands that venture into the realm of fantasy, however, such as "Establish that an insult/slight is motivated by racism." It's hard enough to establish that a murder is motivated by racism. Let's establish that it happens for certain races and not others, that's empirical enough, and work from there.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago> But because it involves an attempt to measure something that has partisan lean, people of one partisan group feel an instinctual need to refute it, lest they lose points or whatever. I think you make a good point that partisan issues like this can lead to knee-jerk reactions. You point out how this might play out with right-leaning readers, and it seems plausible to me. Any theories for how a partisan topic like this could affect left-leaning readers?
- ajross 4y ago> Any theories for how a partisan topic like this could affect left-leaning readers? It... confirms our priors and gives us a label to call out subtle-but-still-obvious bad behavior in a way that gets results because it can be easily understood? I mean, it's true that it might not be rigorously defined. But that's what it means to the woke hippies. And it doesn't sound so awful to me.