Sorry, but it’s your fault if you’re offended all the time
I truly believe that we are the most whiney, sensitive, thin-skinned, easily offended society in the history of the world.
Nobody has ever been as prolific at getting offended as we are.
Nobody cries over insignificant nonsense as loudly and consistently as us.
It’s the one thing we seem to do better than everyone else on the planet. We corner the Offended Market, and it’s not even close. Modern Americans love to get offended more than we love eating Cinnabon or talking about our fitness goals. If it was an Olympic sport, we’d grab the gold, silver, and bronze every year. If it was a job, we’d all be millionaires. In fact, we have turned it into a job, and the people who do it professionally are millionaires (Al Sharpton, etc). It is our calling card, our national pastime. It is the battle we fight and the banner we wave.
We get offended faster and more efficiently than anyone. And it’s not just our speed that separates us from the rest — it’s our endurance. We have a limitless capacity for offendedness. Every week there are dozens of new national outrages and boycott campaigns and social media crusades to raise awareness about some offensive thing, or to get someone fired for saying some offensive thing, or to teach people that some previously non-offensive thing has now become offensive.
Most of all, I find myself positively dazzled by the dexterity and athleticism with which we get offended. We can juggle six or seven outrages all at once, and then drop them and pick up new ones in the blink of an eye.
Our creativity and meticulousness are also quite notable here. We can look at any situation and extract hundreds of offensive factors that an untrained eye probably would have overlooked. We conjure up more fabricated outrages and controversies in a month than past civilizations could have mustered in a thousand years.
Do you remember what everyone was super worked up about four weeks ago? Yeah, me neither. That’s the point. We move on to the new outrage so quickly and the old ones are buried and forgotten. Well, whatever it was way back then, I’m sure it was REALLY bad and we were REALLY upset.
It’s always something. We have located the Fountain of Eternal Indignation, and we drink it by the gallon.
So then it is no wonder that this is the climate which has given rise to a concept called microaggressions.
Have you heard about these? I was thinking about them a lot yesterday after I watched this stirring and important PSA on the subject by Andrew Klavan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjmUgjWle5w
Inspired to do my part in exposing the micro-scourge, I sent out these Tweets:
Ben 
It was not easy to confront the fact that I’ve been microaggressed upon by both my wife and the cat, but complaining about it on Twitter was deeply therapeutic. Am I a ‘hero’ for fighting these injustices via whining about them on social media? I wouldn’t use that word, but that’s only because I’m so humble.
For anyone who isn’t familiar, a microaggression is something that college students learn about because science and history are too boring. It is, according to Wikipedia, a theory that ‘describes social exchanges in which a member of a dominant culture [or gender] says or does something that belittles and alienates a member of a marginalized group.’
Wait a minute, you might think. Isn’t that just a regular aggression? Don’t we already know that you shouldn’t insult and alienate people? Why do we need a new word for it?
Well, we need a new word because the old words describe things that are objectively and explicitly offensive. Microaggressions, on the other hand, are things that are only offensive because some member of an approved victim group declared it so.
It would be, by any definition, aggressive and belittling for White Guy A to walk up to a Chinese individual and say, “Hey, I hate Chinese people! Go back to China, Chinese person!”
But, as taught by the deranged social theory promoted by nearly every public university in America, a microaggression happens when White Guy B approaches a Chinese person and says, “Hi, where are you from?” or “Hello, I’m interested in your culture. What language do they speak in your country of origin?”
Non-liberals would find those comments to be utterly innocuous, even friendly, but liberals have decided that White Guy B and White Guy A are identical, and their words and actions can be interpreted the same.
A microaggression, in other words, is what happens when someone says something inoffensive but the listener chooses to be offended by it anyway. Microaggressions are closely related to microinequities, which is when minorities, gays, and women are ‘overlooked’ or ‘singled out’ by a ‘gesture’ or a ‘tone of voice’ that manifests a ‘deeply rooted and unconscious’ bias.
The great thing about the ‘unconscious bias’ shtick is that it allows someone to infer offensive meanings in what you say, while preventing you from defending yourself by assuming that you don’t actually know what you mean or how you feel. In the bizarre world of contemporary progressivism, only the Offended Person can tell you how you really feel, even if it isn’t how you feel. Essentially, you feel however the Offended Person feels you feel. Got it?
Still confused? OK, check out this Buzzfeed post, which features a bunch of fashionably somber 20-somethings describing the times when someone microaggressively forgot their last name, complimented their hair, or asked where they’re from. (Some of the examples listed are legitimately rude, which makes them regular old straightforward insults. We don’t need any fancy new progressive buzzwords to figure out how to categorize them.)
An even more cataclysmic collection of microaggressions can be found at this link, where members of the “LGBT community” tell harrowing tales of being assaulted with pronouns:
The New York Times explains, in a piece titled Students See Many Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions,’ that it’s also microaggressive to praise a person for being articulate, or to acknowledge that Asians are often gifted in math, science, and technological fields.
Psychology Today adds that you’ve committed a microaggression if you mistakenly think a woman is a nurse when she’s really a doctor (then again, calling that a microaggression is, itself, a microaggression against nurses because it seems to suggest that there’s something wrong with being a nurse).
With these in mind, maybe you won’t be too shocked by this example offered by a reader in an email last night:
Matt!
Love the blog, man. Thanks for it. I’m a sophomore at a college that shall go nameless. I saw your Twitter tirade tonight about micro-aggressions and I thought I’d let you know that my university has launched a “campaign” to make us all aware of our unconscious biases and microaggressions that serve to otherize minority groups…
Love the blog, man. Thanks for it. I’m a sophomore at a college that shall go nameless. I saw your Twitter tirade tonight about micro-aggressions and I thought I’d let you know that my university has launched a “campaign” to make us all aware of our unconscious biases and microaggressions that serve to otherize minority groups…
Today a girl in one of my classes suggested that pulling out a chair or opening a car door for a woman could be a microaggression because it insinuates that she is incapable of doing it herself. Lots of people INCLUDING THE PROFESSOR agreed! I feel like I’m surrounded by crazy people…
-RK
Yes, opening a car door is a microaggression.
God help us.
Does anyone else get the impression that college is somehow making a lot of people dumber (or maybe just accentuating preexisting dumbness)? I pray for this young man, that he make it through three more years of higher education without sustaining any serious brain damage. A tall order, to be sure. I’m not even taking these classes every day and I feel slightly concussed just from reading the phrase “unconscious biases and microaggresions that serve to otherize minority groups,” let alone that whole car door bit.
It’s remarkable that many in our society are so addicted to victimhood that they can’t even wait for the handful of fresh media-constructed outrages to come along in the news every week. They have to stop and snack on these infinitesimal little affronts and indignities along the way.
Everyone wants to be a martyr these days, and they’ll grasp at any straw and sob over any banal remark in order to achieve it. They will twist and torture any comment or polite exchange just to find even the faintest hint of a snub or a taunt.
We are absolutely determined to be victims, and I think there are a few reasons for that:
First, many of us have been programmed to desire pity more than anything — even above respect or love. There are a lot of profound spiritual factors at work here, and it would require a hundred different blog posts to even crack the surface. To sum up this phenomenon in a very insufficient way: our obsession with pity stems from our selfishness. Love, charity, and fraternity, in order to exist, must be both given and received. They are a great gift, but also a duty. When we love we are showered with blessings, but we are likewise called to make enormous sacrifices. Pity, on the other hand, works just one way. When a person demands pity they demand something for nothing. They want to be a recipient but not a giver. This is why love has fallen out of favor in our culture and pity has been put in its place. It’s also why many marriages fall apart. When love is extinguished often its void is filled by a lethal mixture of pity and guilt. I think it can be accurately said that some people in our society have spent their whole lives in relationships ruled only by these two forces.
Second, we have come to believe that our Victimhood grants us wisdom and insight. How many times has a constructive debate been derailed when one of the participants suddenly proclaims that only their opinion counts because they’re the only one who “knows what it feels like”? Important cultural and social issues devolve into gladiatorial duels over who can claim the title of Ultimate Victim. Whoever wins then earns the right to make even the most irrational and unintelligible assertions, and anyone who defies them will be deemed a bigot and banished from the conversation. For this reason, people collect their examples of microaggressions like chips at a casino, and then they cash them in as soon as someone mentions abortion or affirmative action on Facebook.
Second, we have come to believe that our Victimhood grants us wisdom and insight. How many times has a constructive debate been derailed when one of the participants suddenly proclaims that only their opinion counts because they’re the only one who “knows what it feels like”? Important cultural and social issues devolve into gladiatorial duels over who can claim the title of Ultimate Victim. Whoever wins then earns the right to make even the most irrational and unintelligible assertions, and anyone who defies them will be deemed a bigot and banished from the conversation. For this reason, people collect their examples of microaggressions like chips at a casino, and then they cash them in as soon as someone mentions abortion or affirmative action on Facebook.
Third, we are bored. Much of the chaos in our culture can be boiled down to this. We are simply bored. We need something to fight about, something to complain about, something to cry about. Without it, we feel like we will cease to exist. Descartes said cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. But today we’ve changed the expression slightly: I am offended therefore I am.
So that’s the diagnosis, but what’s the cure?
Well, we could start by not sending our kids to public universities. Asinine gibberish like “microaggression” can only be effectively fostered and spread in the cloistered, cutoff, sheltered environment of ‘higher education.’ Maybe if we starve the beast, it will stop infecting our kids with this kind of madness.
But that would be a merely partial solution. The full answer escapes me, but I know it requires everyone to come to terms with these five Absolute Truths:
1) If it wasn’t intended to offend you, then you shouldn’t be offended.
2) You do not get to decide someone else’s intentions. They do.
3) Being offended is a choice you make. Nobody is responsible for that choice but you.
4) Even if the slight was intended and deliberate, functioning adults understand that they must move on and not dwell over every sideways glance or rude comment.
5) You have to stop doing the trendy internet thing where you write something on a piece of paper and take a picture of yourself holding it up while frowning. It’s just annoying at this point.
You’ll never be happy or satisfied if you don’t keep these five points in mind.
But then, for the grievance mongers, I suppose happiness isn’t the goal.
If they’re happy then people might stop feeling sorry for them.
Whatever they do, they certainly can’t allow that to happen.
Read more at http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/09/16/sorry-but-its-your-fault-if-your-offended-all-the-time/#RLHlVYV8gVw0etsl.99
THE NEXT GRAND IDIOCY: 'MICROAGGRESSION'
By Lee Duigon
May 14, 2015
NewsWithViews.com
May 14, 2015
NewsWithViews.com
In their continuing search for ridiculous problems and crises that have no solution, liberals and academic pinheads have hit upon “microaggression.”
What in the world is that?
It’s “unintended discrimination,” behavior that, “without conscious choice of the user, has the same effect as conscious, intended discrimination,” according to Wikipedia.
Wow! How do you control unintended behavior that you’re not even conscious of?
The University of Washington and the United Auto Workers are busy inventing ways to control it for you. If they can work it out, the university’s student employees—teaching assistants, aides, assorted gofers—will have a contract that protects them from having their feelings hurt by “microaggression.” Why these people, who have never once laid eyes on the inside of an automotive factory, are being represented by the United Auto Workers is one of those mysteries of unionism.
They’re proposing to have the university meet three times a year to ponder the “goal” of “eliminating microaggression.” How do you stop people from saying or doing things they’re not conscious of?
Oh! But we already know that, don’t we? We have lots and lots of experience.
First you subject people to “consciousness-raising,” also known as nagging and harassment. Libs and progs have been doing that since the Sixties. And then you make glaring examples of individuals guilty of unintended discrimination. If the poor sucker steps on one of the mines in the minefield, kaboom, he’s history.
Because it’s all unconscious, virtually anything you say and anything you do may constitute microaggression and expose you to punishment. Of course, unless you already belong to a Cherished Minority, you’re already guilty of something, every day, all the time.
Says a UAW spokeswoman, setting it up so that normal people can be punished for microaggression is the coming thing—“the next level of discourse in this country around racism, sexism, and homophobia.” I grew up in a UAW household, and I can’t begin to explain what has happened to this union.
Canada has pioneered this parody of justice in its Human Rights industry. In Canada, any member of a Protected Class can drag any regular person up in front of a “human rights” tribunal and have him fricasseed for this or that offense—with the offense being defined by the offended. In these mock trials, the plaintiff’s feelings count as evidence. In Canada you can have your livelihood totally destroyed without your having broken any law. There’s no double jeopardy in the human rights funhouse, so they can try you over and over again for the same offense. Meanwhile, the government pays all the plaintiff’s legal expenses.
But we are catching up to Canada by leaps and bounds. “Microaggression” can be, and will be, defined as anything the offended party says it is. The defendant is automatically guilty. How do you even try to defend yourself when you had no idea that something you were saying or doing was wrong? According to the tentative contract proposed for the U. of Washington, union members—look for the union label!—will be able to file complaints about “everyday exchanges—including words and actions—that denigrate or exclude individuals based on their membership in a group or class.”
So you have a few friends over to play cards—uh-oh! In your haste, you forgot to invite any transgendered persons! One of them blows the whistle on you: and the college has to assuage his hurt feelings with a money reward, and ease its own hurt feelings by taking away your job. Or, even worse and much more humiliating, force you into Sensitivity Training.
Exaggeration? Not long ago, it would have been an exaggeration to suggest that the state would crush any small business owner, and hold him up to public execration, if this person’s Christian religious beliefs forbade him to take any active part in a same-sex pseudomarriage. But now it’s been established as the “gay” supremacists’ inalienable right to go Christian-hunting in the cities of America.Want to inflict deep, incurable damage on a nation?
One sure way to do it is to set up way many more colleges and universities than the country can possibly use, staff them with far-out left-wing fanatics, make sure there are plenty of Gender Studies degree programs, and fill the dorms and classrooms with not-very-bright students who are only there because they have nowhere else to go.
And don’t forget to involve the labor unions.
© 2015 Lee Duigon - All Rights Reserved
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by KATHERINE TIMPF May 12, 2015 6:14 PM Apparently, just being in certain rooms is a microaggression. According to a new report released by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, just “walking into or sitting in” a classroom full of white people is a microaggression in itself. “Students of color reported feeling uncomfortable and unwelcomed just walking into or sitting in the classroom, especially if they were the only person of color, or one of a few,” stated the report, which designated the experience a microaggression. “People do not necessarily say I do not belong, but I feel as if I do not when I am in a classroom and I am the one non-White person,” said one student, identified as a Latina female, who is quoted in the report. The report, titled “Racial Microaggressions,” was based on an online survey of more than 4,800 students of color during the 2011–12 academic year, and it found more than 800 examples of such microaggressions on campus. Now, that may seem like a lot — but it’s important to recognize that this high number could signify the prevalence of a tendency to assume that almost anything is racist rather than the prevalence of racism itself. Don’t get me wrong — some of the examples are totally unacceptable and definitely racist. One Asian student reported having “been told to go back to running a Laundromat,” and a multiracial student reported that she once “overheard other White students discussing admissions and laughing about how the only reason stupid Mexicans could get into this school was due to affirmative action.” Those things are definitely racist and offensive. There’s no doubt about that. A lot of the report’s “most commonly described” racial microaggressions could also be interpreted as having nothing to do with racism at all. But a lot of the report’s “most commonly described” racial microaggressions could also be interpreted as having nothing to do with racism at all. “Being the only student of color in the classroom” was on that list, as was “being discouraged during meetings with one’s academic advisor” (one student determined that her adviser had questioned her choice of major only because “she realized I was African American,” and therefore, “in her mind, I wasn’t able to successfully complete the major”); “being dismissed or ignored by the instructor before or after class” (an African-American male stated, “when I raise my hand, I am often not called upon”); “receiving hostile reactions to participation in the classroom discussion” (one student said she has “witnessed and felt that when a minority student tries to correct [a] comment . . . they are then viewed as angry or defensive when in reality they are simply trying to inform others of what is true”); and “being excluded from participating in a group project” (one student says he keeps quiet in these situations because “I feel as though what I have to say often doesn’t matter to the rest of the group members.”) But don’t advisers question students’ major choices all the time? Isn’t that actually their entire job? Hasn’t every participation-eager student had a professor that he feels doesn’t call on him enough? Isn’t it possible that people who act annoyed or upset about being publicly corrected are just upset about being publicly corrected in general rather than because they were corrected by a minority student specifically? Doesn’t the group-project example sound more like the kind of general shyness/self-doubt/social anxiety that anyone can experience rather than a sign of institutional racism? Despite the fact that so many of these “microaggressions” are designated as such based on questionable assumptions, the study still recommends that the school take drastic measures to stop them: requiring that all students complete a “General Education requirement about race, White privilege, and inequality in the United States” as well as “both a non-Western culture and a US people of color cultural course”; fundamentally altering the curriculum to ensure that a third of all college 101 classes “include diversity and inclusion”; providing workshops, trainings, campaigns, and brochures “to help students identify when racial microaggressions are occurring”; creating a “slogan or language” — such as the phrase “Racism Alert” — to use when they identify one; and developing a “mechanism for students to report perceived racial microaggressions.” MORE P.C. CULTURE PETITION: ‘WALK ONLY’ SIGNS IN PEDESTRIAN AREAS ARE INSENSITIVE TO DISABLED PEOPLE RAVEN SYMONE VERBALLY ABUSED FOR WANTING ROSA PARKS ON $20 BILL INSTEAD OF HARRIET TUBMAN UNIVERSITY LAUNCHES INSULT-REPORTING SYSTEM THAT RECORDS OFFENDERS’ SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS Call me cynical, but I have a lot of doubts about these suggestions. First of all, I could see college students mocking a phrase like “Racism Alert!” rather than taking it seriously, which could just create further discomfort for everyone involved. Furthermore, what material specifically is the report suggesting that the school eliminate in order to make room for this kind of widespread anti-microaggression curriculum? Some of these policies could even create tangible disadvantages for minority students. For example, picking the right major is a crucial decision, and experienced advisers definitely have the ability to help students pick one that’s going to benefit them most — but putting advisers at risk of being branded racists forever in a campus-reporting system for offering this kind of advice to students of color might discourage them from doing so. No doubt, racism and sexism exist. But it’s important to carefully examine problems before jumping to do something to try and solve them just so you can say that you’re trying — especially when some of the ideas run the risk of making things worse. — Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418273/university-report-room-full-white-people-microaggression-katherine-timpf
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