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New resource: Building Anti-Racist Habits
Hello {{ first name | friends}},
As I've said many times before, there's nothing micro about microaggressions. They're racial harm and they feel like it, like another ones of those paper cuts from which you may eventually bleed out.
But today I want to posit another view on microaggressions: that they are not simply something that comes from "unconscious" bias or deliberate unawareness. Instead, they're a symptom of the system reasserting itself through the words and actions of individuals.
The system treats people racialised as Black as people whose presence is conditional and sometimes unwelcome, and whose excellence is an anomaly. We know different, but that's not what we're talking about today. It's that presumption of wrongness that I talked about in one of the very earliest essays in this newsletter. And microaggressions reinforce that view.
A Baker's Dozen of Othering Microaggressions
Here's a non-exhaustive list of examples: