Even an instructor teaching microaggressions can perpetrate them unawares on a colleague.

Evidence

Jeff carried out a classic example of a microaggression while, ironically, teaching about microaggressions. Jeff and his African- American co-teacher, call him Robert, had created a series of improvisations (mini-skits) for students to act out some examples of microaggressions. In one, two white women are walking down the sidewalk and see two black men walking toward them. One of the women instinctively clutches her purse tightly, and the other questions her action as a microaggression. In the class, two female students came to the front of the room to act it out. Jeff figured that they needed to have someone represent the black men to get the skit going, so said to Robert “here, let’s play the black men.” Robert started to get up, then stopped and said he couldn’t play a black man. That was the first layer of microaggression—Jeff failed to realize that asking a black man to “play” a black man in a roomful of white people put him in an uncomfortable situation. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1259

Categorization

• XREF: A superb teaching vignette showing that microaggression awareness stays partial — instructors must model their own fallibility. — connects to: Learning from below requires mutual ethical responding with a compromised teacher — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2217

Broader Connections

• Learning from below requires mutual ethical responding with a compromised teacher #complicates (0.78) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2217