"Microaggression": The Way Today's University Students Sweat the Small Stuff

The Calgary Herald's Naomi Lakritz writes:

According to the National Post, microaggression “is an increasingly common term on university campuses ...” When I was in university, students were concerned with a “macroaggression” that was going on at the time — the Vietnam War — and Patty Hearst was running around with her urban guerrilla comrades shouting “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” Patty Hearst is now a 60-year-old widow, by the way, and the mood is quite different on campus. It’s scarier. Instead of protesting big, important stuff like war, today’s unbelievably prissy students are tattling to the authorities because their feelings have been hurt by others’ perfectly innocuous behavior. 

Thus McGill University student Brian Farnan got rapped on the knuckles for the sin of microaggression because he reposted a video from the Tonight Show featuring, among other doctored video, President Barack Obama kicking a door open as he left a news conference. It was all part of a joke Farnan was making about mid-term exams, and of the 22,000 people who saw Farnan’s posting, just one complained. However, as a brand new member of the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Offence, Farnan could only achieve absolution by agreeing to subject himself to sensitivity training and issuing an apology because he had “unknowingly perpetuated” the “living legacy” of “people of colour ... being portrayed as violent in contemporary culture.” In fact, the Post reported that Farnan is now busy planning his own ritual bludgeoning, oops, I mean sensitivity training.

The aggression may be "micro" but its effect on the "macro" is dire. To wit: a dearth of common sense and the death of freedom (a good working definition of totalitarianism, no?)


Patty Hearst in her SLA days: Macroaggressive to the max.