Step 1: Introducing Micro-aggressions

Learning Objectives: Participants to distinguish between micro-aggressive comments and not micro-aggressive comments and know why (30 minutes).

• Define and give examples of each type of micro-aggression. Provide handouts of the definitions for review during the activity.
• Grouping participants into two or more teams.
• Ask the teams to determine if each statement written on the index cards is a micro-aggression or not. Each card must be matched with the corresponding poster board (i.e., not micro-aggression, microassault, microinsult, or microinvalidation).

→ In order to determine whether a comment is a micro-aggression, learners should be reminded to consider the implicit or implied meaning of each comment.

• Definitions:

1. Microassaults – are conscious, deliberate and either subtle or explicit racial, gender or sexual-orientation biased attitudes, or behaviours that are communicated to marginalized groups through environmental cues, verbalizations, or behaviours. They attack the group identity of the person or harm the intended victim through name-calling, avoidant behaviour, or purposeful discriminatory actions.
2. Microinsults  are characterized by interpersonal, or environmental communications that convey stereotypes, rudeness, and insensitivity and that demean a person´s racial, gender, or sexual orientation, heritage, or identity. Microinsults represent subtle snubs, frequently outside the conscious awareness of the Initiator, but they convey an oftentimes hidden insulting message to the recipient marginalized groups.
3. Microinvalidations – communications or environmental cues that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of certain group (people of colour, LGBTS, women). They may potentially represent the most damaging form of the three micro-aggressions, because they directly and insidiously deny the racial, cultural, gender or sexual-orientation reality of these groups.