Guest column by Steven Sun | Discussions over Disgust and Diatribe

As a student once active in minority politics at Penn, I often encountered discussions of micro-aggressions and privilege. Before I share my exact thoughts, I must acknowledge that many forms of unjustified privilege exist, and that many institutions continue to perpetuate them. We should have meaningful discourse about its role in our lives, and how we can reduce the impact that circumstances outside of our control have, while maximizing the impact of our efforts and achievements.

Acknowledging this, I fear that we are beginning to mistake the genuine empathy and opportunities for discussion that words such as micro-aggression and privilege were originally intended for, and instead using them to justify hatred.

In my experience, nothing embodies this change from empathy to hatred more than the shift in definition of “micro-aggression.” Originally coined by professor Chester Pierce, the word was used “to describe insults and dismissals he regularly witnessed non-black Americans inflict on African Americans.” Since then, I believe “micro-aggression” is more aptly described as “everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership,” but which “are different from overt, deliberate acts of bigotry ... because the people perpetrating microaggressions intend no offense and are unaware that they are causing harm.”

For me, however, that intent makes all the difference. This was made viscerally clear to me when I once was asked the question “Are you Chinese?” by a Caucasian acquaintance, and was later reprimanded by another friend for allowing such a question to pass unchecked. To her, it was clear that the question was a micro-aggression, and that the acquaintance in question should have been informed that my specific ethnic background was no business of theirs. To me, however, it was simply a question, fundamentally lacking any kind of “denigration” or “aggression.” It demonstrated interest in who I was and led to a fascinating opinion on the impact of culture on personal experience that I would have otherwise never heard.

It frightens me that it has recently become fashionable among a large number of my minority group peers to actively reduce the number of interactions they have with Caucasians, because they cannot stand the thought of interacting meaningfully with someone who benefits in any way from “the heteronormative cisgender white capitalist patriarchy” for fear of encountering a micro-aggression. Doubly so if they are not “woke,” and have not vehemently apologized for a lack of understanding because of their privileges.

I fear that that my minority peers are becoming precisely what they have so constantly decried: people who judge others on what they had no control over. A cisgender, heterosexual white male born into generations of wealth had no more control over his birth than a transgender, asexual female of color born into poverty. He should not have to apologize for it more than she.

Here, I acknowledge that the privileged have certainly not been forthcoming in coming to learn about the experiences of the unprivileged either. I have no trouble calling out the fact that some institutions, notably many fraternities and sororities, are condoned forms of self-segregation that promote ignorance of genuinely different experience. The nature of privilege is that it is very often blind to itself and self-perpetuating.

These facts, however, neither excuse nor allow minority groups to reject genuine opportunities to inform others of their experiences. Nor does it permit minorities to actively avoid informing those who they deem are “the unwoken,” and then suddenly cry foul when they believe the unwoken have committed an offense of which they were never informed. Doing so is almost certainly detrimental to everyone’s cause, as it perpetuates the fear among those with privilege that attempting to “check their privilege” is a political correctness minefield waiting to pounce, rather than an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of diverse experience.

Indeed, I find it disturbing that instead of actively informing and engaging their more privileged peers in discussions on the full range of human experience, we — as minority organizations — have chosen more than once to create communities of isolation, where hatred of the ambiguous majority who oppresses us is allowed to fester without ever even actively meeting the oppressors. This becomes especially clear in the Catch-22 of recent efforts to cultivate discussion on the importance of diversity, where attendants’ thoughts on diversity are remarkably developed, but those who fail to see its value continue to remain apathetic and absent. Rather than true opportunities for diverse thought, these events become services to preach to an almost entirely converted choir.

There is undoubtedly comfort in finding a community that can genuinely understand the injustice of your circumstances. But I hope we begin, as minority groups, to more actively engage those that perpetuate them, rather than simply seethe against them from the safety of our enclaves.

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