Businesses are not colleges.
I mean obviously the first sentence makes sense but I don't understand the relevance.
I'm not expressing anything against the point you are making, I just honestly don't understand what point you are making.
I think that honestly is valued when we are talking about other people's ideas and efforts, but not so much when we just think the other person is an idiot/jerk/psychopath, etc.
I actually agree with most of what you said; I just don't see how it is relevant in the context of the point I was trying to make.
It may be that no one is actively advocating for such an environment. Nevertheless, that is the direction that I see things trending. The road to hell being paved with good intentions and all that. I have participated in the mandatory all-staff harassment training with several employers. What I took away from it each and every time is that a person can be fired for literally anything if someone else (mis)construes his/her actions/remarks as offensive. There was never a requirement that the "offender" be warned or told to stop. In at least one jurisdiction, it did not even have to be a coworker or in a work situation. Literally, anyone on the planet could complain about you to your employer, and your employer would likely be forced to fire you. Thankfully, most people are reasonable and I have no personal knowledge of any miscarriages of justice due to these policies. My workplaces for the most part have been open and honest and respectful. However, I have encountered enough unreasonable people, read enough media reports, have enough second-hand knowledge of incidents to be nervous about the prospect of a mere allegation ruining someone's reputation, career, or even their whole life. It does have a chilling effect. In principle, I am very much in favour of "zero tolerance" policies, but I remain cautious about what that can mean in practice, especially so if I encounter a person or organization that seems to be putting an unusual amount of emphasis on it.
P.S. bonus points for using a race/gender based comment in your crusade against "micro aggression." I do hope that the irony was intentional.
But that doesn't mean being formal or faking professionalism is the best way to make money.
I am frankly disappointed with how obtuse you are being about this. I expected more from someone like you.
I don't know what to do with your last sentence. What would disturb me is if someone here believed I was sanguine about gendered hostility in the workplace.
"I like your new haircut"
"Why are you so quiet?"
"Where were you born?"
"How did you get so good at math?"
There is a huge list here: http://academicaffairs.ucsc.edu/events/documents/Microaggres...
I am not discussing harassment, or jokes about any of the groups you listed. I am not discussing verbal discrimination. I am discussing micro-aggressions, the range of which varies drastically from person to person. Having a workplace that has to narrowly define what their definition of a micro-aggression is, to the point of saying "You are not allowed to comment on the appearance of a coworker in any way, even the smallest comment about their haircut or liking their shoes" is what I am, and presumably other people in this comment thread, are against.
As you can see in the PDF I linked, it's two very dense pages of explanation. Having something like this included in a corporate policy is what I find to be a bad idea. Granted, there are very obvious things in the PDF that are just plain old harassment, but there are also plenty of things that are silly to expect to enforce in a workplace.
Don't comment on coworkers appearances. It's usually unwelcome and almost always creepy. You shouldn't need a policy document to tell you that. If you have a relationship with someone in your workplace that makes those comments kosher, you already know it.
>This is not a company where micro-aggressions will fly.
This is implying that micro-aggressions are a fireable offense. Whether it is literally printed in policy is beside the point. The point is the "micro-aggression" concept is being enforced, the extent of which is barely touched on in that dense, two page PDF I linked you. If it isn't explicitly printed, it's frankly even worse. It's impossible to know what the scale of offensive micro-aggressions is for someone, and it probably changes from day to day.
You are also conveniently ignoring the other micro-aggression examples I gave you, which are not nearly as clear-cut as commenting on appearances. I am frankly done with this discussion unless you want to actually address why asking "Where did you grow up?" during casual conversation, and without any sort of poignant tone, should be a fireable offense. It feels like you are being deliberately evasive of the actual conversation people are trying to have.
You have also missed a step. You think the policy under discussion is that if you comment on a coworker's earrings, you can be fired instantly. Nobody has said that. However, if you continually make remarks on the attire or appearance of a coworker after being asked by that coworker not to, you should be fired. That's toxic behavior.
What's embarrassing is that teams could be so obtuse that they would even need a written policy to say that. But then: as far as we know, this company doesn't have that policy written down; they may just have the common sense policy of "if you make unwelcome comments about your coworkers after being asked not to, we will escort you out of the building".
This doesn't seem at all complicated to me.
I think you are still misunderstanding what a micro-aggression is. I doubt 99% of the American population has even heard the term, and 99.999% of them don't understand it well enough to make a conscious effort to never use them. To suggest that it's "not that complicated" is simply not true.
Harassment is not a micro-aggression. Most anyone who uses the term "micro-aggression" is not referring to blatant harassment.
A micro-aggression would be asking Allison, during a discussion about something in our childhoods, "Where do you grow up?". Unknown to me, Allison actually grew up in Bolivia, and she is sensitive about discussing it because she feels people discriminate against her because she's an immigrant. I have micro-aggressed Allison. It has nothing to do with repeatedly asking this question, or similar questions, about where she grew up.
If Allison did respond in an uncomfortable manner to this question, I should be receptive enough to pick up on this and avoid asking further questions that might be related. Continuing to do so at that point is harassment and not a micro-aggression.
Policies against harassment are good. Policies against micro-aggression are a difficult subject, but the obvious answer isn't that "workplaces should definitely fire people for repeatedly and unknowingly micro-aggressing a variety of people".
Am I correct in assuming that the answer to my last question is "there is no such comment on a micro-aggressions list that is OK to make to a colleague after it has been made clear that such comments are unwelcome"? If that's the case, we have nothing to argue about.
And I guess we have nothing to discuss. There is no comment that is okay to repeatedly make to the same person after it's been clear that it's uncomfortable to that particular person because that is then harassment. However, just because Allison didn't like the "Where do you grow up?" question doesn't mean it's harassment to ask that of someone else (though it could still be another micro-aggression).
I am not sure why you're specifying that this is "my" definition of a micro-aggression. This is the most common, and widely accepted, definition of "micro-aggression". It is possible the person quoted misused it.
If I see a coworker that has some cool new shoes or a new jacket, I don't see the problem telling them. How is a cool new haircut any different?
Asking someone where they are from doesn't mean I think they are not "a true American." I might just be interested to know where they are from. That could be Cleveland or Dubai. I'm from the Seattle area. Are we not allowed to know anything about our coworkers?
If I saw a coworker juggling in the break room and I asked them how they got so good at it (because I have tried for years to get it and still suck at it) then we have some good conversation about juggling. That question doesn't come loaded with a "because usually women suck at juggling" qualifier. The same is true about math.
Obviously if I tell you that wearing shorts is offensive to me, you shouldn't feel the need to stop wearing shorts. This isn't even a made-up opinion - people feel this way about women all over the globe. This means there are definitely limits to what we should accept. But the question is, where do we draw the line?
That is why implementing this in a workplace isn't feasible in 2016, because you have to explicitly define that line, which is a very difficult thing to do, and especially so for people who don't even know what a "micro-aggression" is.
The "problem" with all of your statements isn't that they are offensive, but that the person you said them to happened to have some sort of background or experience that makes it offensive to them.
As I understand it from friends and acquaintances, being asked again and again, "So where are you from?" becomes exceptionally irritating over time and can feel isolating. It might be a question that anyone can get asked, but it gets asked much more frequently of people who appear to be "foreign" in some way. It's not a big deal once or twice, but those incidents pile up over time and it can get disheartening, especially when asked of people who are from the US. When they answer, they often get the follow up question, "No, no, where are you really from?" It's a good way to unintentionally make a person feel unwelcome or like an "other" in a group, because after many repetitions, it hammers home the point, "You don't fit in, and I can plainly see it."
And the problem with the math question is that when asked of a woman or a girl, it generally does come loaded with "because usually women suck at math". Math isn't juggling, which is an uncommon talent; math is a basic, fundamental skill in STEM fields. Acting surprised or questioning how a female coworker "got so good at math" is just one more way that people accidentally perpetuate outdated, outmoded stereotypes about women in STEM fields. It's a question that almost nobody would think to ask of a male coworker. Because math skills are taken as a given in these sorts of fields.
These things don't seem like a big deal until you're on the receiving end of them again and again and again, day after day, month after month, year after year. Just like a little trickle of stream will eventually erode a valley where there wasn't one previously, over time all the little slights and knocks can wear people down.
Nobody is saying, "Don't be nice to your coworkers, and don't be social." They are saying, "Be mindful of the things you say, because they can hurt people unintentionally." Maybe you don't see the problem, personally, but if it's something that bothers a lot of people and they ask you to please cut it out, is it really that big a deal to try to cut it out? It's not like it's some kind of major encumbrance upon you.
No, what you're doing is inventing a context (bad man hurt woman, bad white man hurting good minority etc), and arguing for a lexicon that implicitly nurtures the contextual penumbra and emanations of left-wing culture warriors. And you're singing a soothing melody of how this tool (it is a tool) will be used to fight injustice. But that's not how it goes. That's never how it goes.
You can't just ignore the larger life experiences that people have. You can't treat every social interaction in some kind of hermetic isolation. Because that's not how social interactions happen. There's the context of the interpersonal relationship(s) of the people involved in an interaction, their history, their previous interactions. And, as I said, there's the context of each person's life experience that they bring to any social interaction.
Obviously, we don't think about this sort of thing on a deep level all the time. It'd short out every social interaction if we constantly tried to puzzle out every nuance of this context.
But we don't have to, we have short-hands, and we have "models" that we follow that work well most of the time. But when some large portion of a group of people says, "Hey, this part of the social interaction model is broken, and it's hurtful," there's no good reason to not at least reevaluate it and think about it. It's good to spend some time considering the nuances sometimes, even if it's not good to do it all the time.
If you really don't like the academic term "microaggression", then just think about it as "mild rudeness". Mild rudeness isn't the worst thing ever. But it's still not a way you should behave toward colleagues. You should endeavor to be polite, professional, and courteous towards those you work with. Personally, I'd want to know if I was accidentally doing something rude. I'd be a bit mortified a first, but I'd rather know so that I can curtail that behavior.
I think it's kind of absurd how negative the reaction is to, "Hey, can you please stop saying that; it's honestly a bit rude." It's not like it costs people anything. Courtesy is free, and it's no great imposition. And even when the courteousness involves more delicate matters of race, gender, marginalization, etc. it remains free.
Nobody is asking you to memorize a dictionary of "microaggressions".
Edit: The only thing I can think of is "dongle-gate" but that is likely to just go off into a tangent about what is or is not "non-harassing" and I kind of suspect we won't agree on that either so that is not going to be very productive.
Yeah it's almost like importing the lingua franca of a bunch of extremists into your organizational policy isn't necessary and that the actual sensible part of it can be easily summarised in simple and straight forward english. Hmmm...