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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

You're literally describing what microaggressions are: Small interactions, any one of which is harmless and without ill intent, which accumulate over the course of the day, week, or lifetime as an atmosphere of pervasive discrimination which is completely invisible to those responsible for creating it.

Microaggressions are insidious precisely because they're so innocuous; they let well-intentioned people participate unwittingly in systemic oppression that they would never consciously support.

If you're noticing yourself get a bit defensive about this idea, forget the word itself and just frame it like this:

You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words. So when you're around people who have really different life experiences than you, how do you make sure you don't cause harm without meaning to?

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I don't mean to be curt, but:

> harmless and without ill intent

ag·gres·sion əˈɡreSHən/ noun hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront.

Aggression is, by default, defined by intent, not perception.

> You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words. So when you're around people who have really different life experiences than you, how do you make sure you don't cause harm without meaning to?

This was my point about there existing no universal set of social rules. So when someone says "don't say X, it's offensive," I have a tendency to look at that as more a matter of latter-day Tumblr cause celebre than anything real.

As a matter of brutal honesty, when someone tells me that X is offensive to them, I respond by not doing X anymore. I don't accept wide swath rules about such things and apply them universally, unless I observe them with any frequency in the wild. If we all cast that net, communication would be extraordinarily difficult and language impossibly rigid and uninteresting.

> I don't mean to be curt

I'll repay the same courtesy: Your argument is predicted and refuted by your sibling thread of twenty minutes ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501084

Microaggression is a term of jargon, as Google would have happily informed you. Its root word, not its synonym, is "aggression". Microaggressions are by definition not intended to hurt, or they would be, you know, aggressions.

That's an important concept, because it augments your theory of mind with this fact: There are things that you do, from time to time, that hurt other people in ways too small for them to complain about. For the most part, these things are random and not worth the effort to try to predict and avoid. And no one would ever call out one of these things as offensive, because taken individually, they aren't.

But certain individuals, and certain groups of people, are "randomly" subject to that sort of thing far more often than others. Your barely-hurtful word is a barely-wet raindrop in the ocean of hurt that defines their world. And certainly you can't do anything about their ocean, but maybe, sometimes, it could be worth your effort to not participate.

Basically, I'm not trying to give you rules to follow. I'm trying to suggest that the world does have patterns, and the way to relate to patterns is with rules. So please, make your own rules, but don't reject the whole idea-- or else live in a world you understand and fit in to a little bit less.

To be fair, I responded within that sibling, even before this response.

I will reiterate, though, that it's impossible to capture or represent the feelings of a large group with a one-sized-fits-all rule. Whether I accept them or reject them depends exclusively on the reality of the situation and audience.

I apologize! I did in fact not mean to be curt, and I felt so bad about that that I edited in a more complete response that you will hopefully prefer :)

Great, and now you've edited so that I look like the crazy one...

yea. Agression implies intent. Microagression does not.

Which can actually be kinda confusing to folks not familiar with it, but this is true of many sets of jargon, not just Social Justice.

It's definitely a crappy word out of context, and the defensiveness is probably to be expected. Who are you calling aggressive!...

On the other hand, it's routinely frustrating when especially technical communities, full to bursting with misappropriations of common terms, seem especially unable to see past the letters in a word to its meaning in context. Maybe we just intrinsically don't believe that other areas of inquiry could be so complex as to need their own jargon...

One problem is that most fields accept that their jargon is in fact jargon that folks have to learn. Some chunk of SJ folks don't, which is dismaying because it ignores educational privilege.

That's a good point, though I don't think it's such an uncommon thing; think of the beginning programmer who has to be laboriously convinced that the first definition they learned for "type" or "function" is not the meaning of that word.

I'd speculate that true appreciation for jargon comes more from multidisciplinary studies than anything else, so in any field the most passionate, least experienced members are likely to make a mess of things-- and if there's one thing the activist community has in surplus it's members with a high passion:experience ratio.

Having acknowledged that issue, I'm still reluctant to excuse anyone in this case, simply because we're talking about a term that doesn't have any other meaning. If you see a word you've never heard before, and think "I can probably figure out what this refers to based on its sounds" with Google sitting right there, naah, the problem isn't the jargon.

Edit: Like, seriously, would this happen if the word was "microclimate" or "microevolution"? Yeah, on the YouTube comments, but not usually on HN.

That is a really good point about the uniqueness of the term.

Also, I had completely forgotten that "function" also means, like, cocktail parties.

Heh, love it. "Can you call that function next door and find out if it's ever going to halt?"

The word isn't really my issue, although I cannot argue it's poorly constructed.

My issue is the idea that one person or group can universally dictate that "X is offensive to Y." That's an impossible thing to do, and it has a side effect of dictating what's offensive instead of responding to what's offensive.

I have no horse in the SJW goings on, but my casual observation has been that there's as much creation of social taboos as there is attempts to raise awareness of existing ones. In either event, a one-size-fits-all approach is misguided.

> You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words.

I don't like the weaselly binary assumption here. You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not." That's an unbelievably narrow (and, honestly, childish) view of human interactivity. It also implies that you alone hold a monopoly on how "well-meaning" is defined and that it is your sacred duty to impose that doctrine on others.

You're basically attempting to confuse people into accepting your moral ethos as a candidate for common assumptions of what "well-meaning" should be.

This is underhanded and not well-meaning at all.

Perhaps you should try avoiding causing unnecessary harm with your words next time.

Huh, I don't get it. I'm being really sincere here; I want you to think seriously about what it means, to you, to be kind to others, and then change your use of language -- or not -- however you see fit.

But that message didn't even get past the firewall. Instead you decided to elaborately deconstruct what is probably the least presumptuous part of what I wrote, as a way to impute some contrived ulterior motive to me, as a way to not engage with what I was saying, at length.

I guess I don't see what you're hoping to get out of this interaction at this point. Like, okay, you don't need to think about how your words affect other people... if you really don't want to?

'You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not."'

I think that's appropriate, actually. That you've defined well-meaning to encapsulate more people than it does is probably the core of the disagreement, but I think it's fair to say that most people are well-meaning, but not all people are.

Comparing and contrasting "almost everybody" to "Ann Coulter", and I think it's easy to draw such a distinction. Most people are simply trying to communicate without deliberately pissing everybody off, while Ann Coulter gets pretty decent play out of pissing people off for the hell of it.

That said, your point on "well-meaning" being an arbitrary distinction holds, though I would assert that if more people assumed good faith until proven otherwise, we wouldn't find ourselves being offended by every little thing.

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