On Microaggressions

    My brother, who's in middle school, recently received a report card which mentioned that he sometimes fails to notice that his "microaggressions" hurt others' feelings. This was apparently discussed in class and my brother reportedly understood why he might have hurt someone, but he insisted that since he didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, it shouldn't count against him that he did.
    (Now, I don't know what exactly he said that was considered a microaggression--I'm guessing it was probably race-related, maybe gender-related, but I can't be sure. I don't know that it matters.)
    My mother was a bit upset that this incident, whatever it was, had been explicitly referred to in the report card, and it fell to me to explain microaggressions and the damage they do.
    My examples came from an online graphic I saw which portrayed people's interactions with/reactions to a white woman versus a black woman. In one panel, a college admissions officer asks the white woman if her family's a legacy at the college. The admissions officer asks the black woman if she's the first in her family to go to college. In another panel, the white woman is walking with a young girl and is asked if the girl is her sister. The black woman, in the same scenario, is asked if the girl is her daughter. 
    The experiences of the black woman are examples of racial microaggressions--insidiously offensive comments that don't necessarily mean badly but clearly make assumptions that perpetuate stereotypes and demean the black woman, while making positive assumptions were it a white person instead.
    This is significant because although these exchanges shown in my examples may seem like social faux pas, or meaningless stupid assumptions, they are contributing to ongoing stereotypes, hurtful and demeaning to receive, devaluing of people of color through negative assumptions, and revealing that these negative subconscious judgments are very, very common and easily overlooked.
    My mother initially defended my brother's point that if you don't mean it, you shouldn't be held accountable.
    But the hurt people experience is not contingent on whether it was intended. A stereotype or an assumption doesn't have to be maliciously intended for it to do damage. The point of calling them microaggressions is that they aren't overt examples of racism and may easily be made by people who would never believe they harbor racist tendencies.
    The message I was trying to impart to my family is that well-intentioned or not, the microaggressions in question are often assumptions that would not be made were the recipient white. And therein lies the problem--not that the microaggressor meant to insult, but that their assumption would have been more positive had it been directed at a white person. That my brother didn't mean to offend anyone, but he judged someone based on a trait like race which made his comment or reaction to them insulting instead of complimentary. That he is unknowingly operating on stereotypes. That anti-microaggressions rhetoric may seem like a nitpicky hallmark of political correctness--as my brother probably wrote it off as--but that it is necessary to understand why it is hurtful, since people believe that to not intend harm is as good as not committing it. It means, of course, that we still have a long way to go towards open minds and societies, and that curtailing more overt prejudice is not enough.

Iran Peace Deal

    I woke up yesterday to find about sixty emails in my inbox declaring peace ensured and nuclear holocaust averted--we have made a deal with Iran!
    (As a side note, I would be curious to know how this deal is being reported in Iran--considering what enormous concessions Iran made versus the US--but my Farsi is very, very minimal, so I can't read any Iranian sources yet; I'm working on my language skills, but it's slow.) 
    I read the articles and newsflashes carefully, to see who gave more ground, what the terms of the deal are, who's holding the strings, etc. Seems so far, to me, like a pretty good template of everything we asked for--freeze centrifuges, dilute and get rid of uranium, allow hyper-intrusive inspections. The sanctions relief bit seems fairly murky, but I can only assume--hope--that there's a definite path to lifting them fully and soon, otherwise Iran wouldn't have capitulated.
    I'm also still unclear as to how much, exactly, did Iran capitulate--all this downsizing of centrifuge stockpiles and prevention of Iran's producing nuclear weapon-grade uranium makes me wonder if this will infringe on Iran's ability to even produce nuclear energy. I'm not a fan of nuclear energy--it's far to risky to be offered as a nice alternative alongside renewables--but the 1968 NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty), which Iran is a party to, guarantees all non-nuclear-weapons states the right to enrich uranium for energy. For some time that was all Iran did and professed to do, and Bush still made threats against even that. So I'm hoping that this so-called peace deal doesn't gouge deeper than is necessary.
    Also, one thing I noticed about the emails I was getting, was that though a lot of them acknowledged that the threat hasn't run its course, and urged me to keep signing petitions to Congress supporting peace, a lot of others simply asked me to sign a thank-you card to Obama. Which rings a little wrong with me--Obama gets all the credit for this deal? I was appreciative of his State of the Union statement that he would veto any anti-Iran-deal legislation he saw, but he's also promised not to take the military options off the table (I interpreted this as trying to appease the war hawks--"don't worry, there's still a chance we can use military force..."). Obama isn't really the one--or at least not the only one--who deserves commemmoration and praise for this deal, as I see it.
    Even with this supposed victory and proof of diplomacy's fruits, we have to assign credit to the Americans, not the Iranians. As if it was solely our powers of persuasion and guileless commitment to world peace that led Iran to pledge against its nuclear aspirations.
    Perhaps, ought we to send thank-you cards to Ayatollah Khameini and President Rouhani and all the Iranian negotiators? What about the rest of the P5+1 countries who participated?
    The point of diplomacy isn't that somebody wins--it's that nobody loses. And maybe everyone wins. But in this case, in this fear-saturated country, we can't say that we only negotiated our way to peace--we have to have triumphed. We have to have extracted a harsh price from Iran and given up almost nothing ourselves. We have to have won. And they have to have lost.