SO IF MICROAGGRESSIONS ARE AS BAD AS SEXUAL ASSAULT, IS SEXUAL ASSAULT NO WORSE THAN MICROAGGRESSIONS? Harvard Law dean compares microaggressions to violence, sexual assault.
In a move that should surprise no one who has been watching the utter meltdown of privileged college students this year, a Harvard Law School dean has compared “microaggressions” to sexual assault and violence.
Dean Martha L. Minow, during her winter commencement speech on injustice, asked her students to keep fighting even after they graduate. She made references to apartheid and segregated schools before making the bizarre analogy.
“Taking even seemingly small acts in one’s own school can build the culture that prevents violence, bullying, sexual assault and racial microaggressions,” she said.
Get that? Violence, bullying, sexual assault — they’re all in the same category as microaggressions. Microaggressions, for those who have been lucky enough to miss the outcries of the past year, are words and phrases that offend someone with delicate sensitivities, even when the speaker meant no harm.
For example, several schools provided lists to students of phrases that are considered microaggressions. At the University of California, the list included such debilitating and hateful phrases as “everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” and “America is the land of opportunity.”
You’d think a legal scholar of her renown would be more careful about her language.