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Today I'll be talking about microaggressions and how they impact us as immigrants. So, what is a microaggression? According to the Oxford dictionary, a microaggression is: A statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group.Oxford Dictionary What that means is that they usually appear harmless or even as a compliment. And they're generally related to someone's identity. Let me give you an example that just happened at my office. On International Women's Day, one of the managers sent a message that read, "happy women's day to all the ladies." Seemed harmless. I even cheered it. But, it triggered a big complaint. I even discussed this with a couple of my female colleagues, who didn't think of this as a big deal. I told them that if you think about this as a fight for women's rights, it shouldn't be a "happy" day because women are still fighting for wages and leadership positions. It's a day to recognize the fight, not to celebrate someone just because of their gender. And I gave them a couple of examples. How do you think regular, working people feel if a CEO of a Bank that makes 300 million a year sends an official message saying something like "happy labour day to all the workers." Or a random straight guy saying, "happy pride day to all gays." That doesn't sound politically correct, is it? Does this mean that my colleague meant any harm when he posted that? No, on the contrary, he just wanted to be a nice guy. But that is the root of microaggressions. Most people who do that are ordinary folks like you and me who think about us as good, decent individuals. Microaggression occurs because they're outside of our conscious awareness. At the start of the episode, I read the definition of the term. And, one thing that needs to be highlighted is the part that reads "instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination." Don't get me wrong. This is different than direct aggression. I'm not saying that people who do this are the same as a white supremacist group. Not at all. Those guys are explicitly aggressive. An example of a microaggression that I took as a compliment As an immigrant, when I moved here, I was looking to blend into the Canadian culture. I tried not to talk to people who spoke Spanish, so I could force myself to speak English as much as I could. One day, I was talking to my boss at the time. I was apologizing for a grammatical mistake I made in a presentation. Explaining that since English was my second language, it was something I usually did. Mainly because in Spanish, we use the same word for ON, IN, and AT. So it's tricky to use the correct one every single time. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that she stopped me and said, "you're right. I forget you're Mexican. I don't really see you as an immigrant because your English is excellent." I took that as a huge compliment. My goal of belonging to my new culture was almost fulfilled! But then, years later, when I started doing this podcast, I thought, "in her mind, immigrants don't speak English well. That's why she didn't see me as an immigrant." She didn't mean this as offensive. On the contrary, it was a compliment. But it showed the bias beneath it, Immigrants don't speak well. That's the stereotype we've accepted. It's like asking a first-generation immigrant, "but where are you really from?" It might be innocent curiosity, but the way the question is phrased indicates that because that person doesn't look Canadian (and I mean white Canadians), it's automatically from elsewhere. Think about all the biases we have and how they make us say things like "You people always do well in math," or "she has an exotic look." And, again, microaggressions are unintentional, but they surface our internal biases. Complaining about microaggressions is being too sensitive?