Tom Slater Tom Slater

Beware the university campus microaggression monitors

Are you a student at the university of Sheffield looking for work? Do you have an incredibly thin skin and a passion for policing other people’s conversations? Are you willing to work for £9.34 per hour? Then have I got the job for you.

The university is hiring 20 students to challenge offensive language on campus. In particular, they’re going to tackle racial ‘microaggressions’, described by Sheffield as ‘subtle but offensive comments’.

The brief says new recruits will help students understand racism and its impacts by leading ‘healthy conversations’, working between two and nine hours a week around campus. Vice-chancellor Koen Lamberts says the plan aims to ‘change the way people think about racism’.

But by ‘change the way people think about racism’, he seems to mean defining racism to include innocent, off-hand comments. This is what microaggression theory, first popularised in the US, does. And in doing so, it trivialises the fight against real racism.

The central idea to microaggressions is that unthoughtful comments and questions can make minority students feel uncomfortable. Classic examples cited are asking someone from an ethnic-minority background where they’re ‘really from’ or asking a person if you can touch their hair.

Such cringey behaviour is, I’m sure, irritating. But elevating minor slights to a serious form of oppression, something that necessitates official intervention, is deeply patronising. It’s as if campus authorities think minority students are incapable of dealing with the odd numpty.

It gets worse, because policing microaggressions is about more than policing interactions; it’s about policing certain ideas, even entirely legitimate ones. Indeed, at some universities in the United States, what have been dubbed microaggressions amount to opinions that woke people dislike.

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