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.

Hey Honky!!!

Want to improve the quality of life in the City? Stop freaking honking. There is never any need to honk. Oh, shut up! I hear you saying idiotic things like, “What if you have to warn somebody…?” That literally never happens. There is never a toddler wandering into the street holding a kitten who will only be saved by you honking your horn and terrifying them back to the curb. The only way to save that kitten’s life is for you to stop and not hit them.

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.

“Hey Guys!”

What is with “Guys”? More specifically, why do young adults now address every group of people as “guys”? I was watching The Next Food Network Star and one of the finalists began their demo pilot show, the audition used to compete for their own show on the Food Network, with “Hey guys!” It’s as if she thought that the entire, diverse TV audience were a small group of her friends. But they weren’t.

Hippies and Punks

The punk subculture came about around 10 years after the hippy subculture and, by the 1980s, a lot of punks were actually the children of hippies. So, it makes sense that there would be animosity between the two, as punk rockers tried to make their own way, necessarily rebelling against the older generation. Of course, the two youth cultures shared a lot of values and behavior, and had music as their cohesive cores. By the time the US West Coast hardcore scene came into being, the politics of punk rock and hippies overlapped quite a bit.

Curiouser and Curiouser….

color

You don’t find ugly color combinations in nature. I think that’s because our sense of beauty comes from the natural world. But why? Why do we find sunsets beautiful? It’s probably due to the bright colors. Why do we love bright colors? One explanation would be that we love bright colors in order to be attracted to ripe fruit. The sunset is just God’s way of reminding us to eat more fruit. Pollen collecting insects are also attracted to bright colors, so we share our sense of beauty with insects.

Here’s a Concept for You

Here’s a concept for you: Our entire society is a growing child.

The Hot Dog Wars

Even as a vegetarian adult, two hotdog commercial jingles still run through my head, proving how effective they were. The songs ran during ads for Armour Hotdogs and Oscar Mayer Hotdogs. While both songs were highly catchy and memorable, the messages of the songs could not be more different, as each song seems to fundamentally define the culture of its company.

What Words Reveal

To father a child and to mother a child have very different meanings. Father is used as a verb to mean create or procreate, while mother means to take care of the child after it is born. How can we escape the legacy and expectations of patriarchy when it is so embedded in our language?

Words and expressions reveal the basic values of a culture. It’s not all bad – our culture has some good values. For example, the fact that treating people humanely means to treat them with kindness and respect implies a deep-seated belief that the nature of humanity is kindness. This belies the common assertion one hears that human beings are basically selfish and violent.