Introduction

Social oppression is enormously harmful, unfairly withholding opportunities from people because of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and so on. In a 2014 City Journal article called ‘The Microaggression Farce’, political commentator Heather Mac Donald wrote: “Becoming an adult means learning the difference between a real problem and a trivial one”. A recent New York Times story described a microaggression training session for first-year students at Clark University in Massachusetts. No surprise, then, that some people see idea of microaggression as not merely dubious, but also dangerous. But microaggression isn’t like punching someone, for at least two reasons. First, microaggression often isn’t deliberate; microaggressors frequently don’t realize that they are causing harm, or are reacting quickly without time to think. Second, each individual microaggression causes little harm by itself.