How to Easily Avoid Perpetuating Micro-Aggressions Toward Customers

What Micro-Aggressions are:

Micro-Aggressions are those common slights that people can perceive throughout the day and that appear to be the result of racial or other bias. For example, a Black, Indigenous or Person of Color may notice that they are being singled out for extra scrutiny while shopping, or that a salesperson is making assumptions about them based on their race, ethnicity or religion. Each slight may seem small, but they add up and cause great harm to an individual.

No one is immune! Even if you self-identify as the same race, ethnicity or any other descriptor of the customer, you still might be perpetuating micro-aggressions. This is true regardless of what’s in your heart and conscious mind.

Luckily, there are some simple habits that we can all develop to help avoid unintentionally inflicting pain on others.

It’s the Children, Dummy

Today at work, a wise colleague told me that the Florida children demonstrating for gun control, while impressive, “will lose.” He explained, “They don’t know what they’re up against.” I predict just the opposite. They will win. And I have history backing up my position.

Alien

I should have realized years before that I was an alien, but I was always in denial. Growing up in Southern Indiana in the 70s, I thought I didn’t fit in because I was the only Jewish kid. But it was more than how the others treated me; I didn’t like anything the other kids were into. All the other students would attend the assemblies to cheer on the football team. I’d slip into the band room office, stack plastic chairs onto a desk, push open a ceiling tile, pull myself up into the crawlspace, and sneak my way over the assembly hall to wait it out. I never got caught because no one ever noticed I was missing.

6 Reasons to Ban Homework

With the recent headlines about a school district in Florida doing away with homework, I thought it would be helpful to review some of the disturbing facts about homework that have been known for decades but still ignored by adults who want to continue to haze children with this dreaded practice:

Disconnected Thoughts

Here are some things I’ve been thinking today. If we were eating a meal together, I would probably figure out a way to inject them into the conversation. But because I have no social life, I am sharing them here, in this blog post, with random strangers, lurkers and family members checking up on me.

• Why We’re Hearing More Racist Comments in “Polite Society”
  • I believe that future social scientists will come to the conclusion that one result of Barack Obama’s presidency was a resurgence in public sphere racist dialogue. Not just as a reaction to Obama, but Obama gave racists an opportunity to say racist stuff that heretofore had been discouraged in public, under the guise of complaining about a President, and it just grew from there.

Mystery Daisy Porthole

Today, I place your fate in the Universe. Position your pointer, finger or mouse over the daisy, close your eyes and click to travel to a completely random Daisybrain post from the last 250 years, or so, of the Daisybrain blog.

Let the adventure begin….

School World Conversation

Previously on Daisybrain, I reported some funny things I overheard children say when I was teaching. I also posted, in the form of a poem called School World, some of the absurd things I heard from grown-ups working in schools. I have now combined the two lists of completely unrelated sentences and comments, into one fictitious conversation, called School World Conversation. Think of it like something you might overhear if you went to Zippy the Pinhead‘s school. It may not make literal sense, but it gives the over all impression that I got from attending and then working in public schools….

Child: “My life is over. My life has always been over. I just never realized it.”

Adult: “Please disregard the bell until it rings.”

On Retroactively Lowering School Grades

One day, at the New Hampshire middle school where I taught, a school administrator informed me that one of my students was going to have her previous quarter’s grades lowered to all Ds, due to excessive absences during the school year. I was stunned. We do that? We lower grades that students earned, after the fact, as a punishment/incentive to change behavior?