As always, you have done a great job of enabling the clueless among us to get some experience of what microaggressions are like. I am also grateful that you have provided a test for evaluating possible microaggressions. Unfortunately when I apply that test to my own experience, it doesn’t produce the desired result.

People often say that I am articulate, and I’ve never thought of that as anything but a compliment. If any black woman ever said to me “I want to try a white guy, I heard they were good in bed”, I would have thought “I don’t know where she heard that, but I sure hope the idea spreads.” The test you are proposing is a time-honored one. It’s the basis of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. But that test only works if you share a similar range of experience with the person you are doing unto. There are, of course countless differences between the experiences of black women and white men, but these are two factors that I think are relevant here.

First of all, experiencing something multiple times is not the same thing as experiencing it once multiplied by X. Both modern neuroscience and common sense show us that each experience doesn’t stand alone as a distinct “sense datum”. Each new experience we have is conditioned and shaped by our previous experiences, and reshapes our old experiences as well. Consequently, if I apply your test to my experiences, without the addition of the countless micro- and macro- aggressions that you have endured, I don’t get the same experience that you get. It would never occur to me to think that the subtext of “You’re so articulate” is “for a member of your marginalized group”, because I’m not a member of any marginalized group. Similarly, I look back fondly on the two times my butt got pinched by a strange woman. I would feel very differently if those two pinches had been part of an ongoing gauntlet of sexual harassment.

It’s like the difference between going on a camping trip and being homeless. Both involve sleeping under the stars, and having to endure cold and rain. But the camping trip is fun because it is a break from my normal routine, and being homeless is a hardship because it IS a homeless person’s normal routine.

Secondly, generalizations about white people don’t feel like they refer to me with that much impact, because I just don’t think of myself as being White that often. I’ve been thinking about it a lot more since I started reading and writing for medium. But I never have my whiteness shoved in my face. Anytime I get sick of encountering disparaging generalizations about white people, all I have to do is turn off my computer. I know enough from reading the testimony of Black writers that society forces them to have a very different relationship with blackness. Consequently, when I hear someone make a generalization about whiteness, it just doesn’t stick to me as hard. Whiteness doesn’t seem like it’s really an identity to us, it’s more like a kind of blank slate. I started to wonder about this when I was in college. All the other kids have some sort of ethnic identity, why didn’t I get one when they were passed out? Ah, the blindness of privilege. That blindness, however, is what stops me and other white people from having the experiences you describe when we try your test.

There is a vocal and nasty minority of white people who are obsessed with their whiteness, and I would guess that those are the white people that many people of color encounter. They are the ones who would get into the face of a POC for sharing their space. But most of the white people I know simply don’t think about race very much one way or the other. Some white people don’t see color at all, and others can’t see anything else. Both kinds of people are often described as racist, and there is some justification for that. But there are two different kinds of racism here, and the differences are important. I would describe this difference by distinguishing between racism and complicity. Those of us for whom Whiteness is invisible are usually contemptuous of those people who are obsessed with it. We think of them as brain-dead rednecks who have more guns than teeth. Even back in the fifties, my parents would have washed my mouth out with soap if they heard me use the N-Word. But I was still in many ways complicit with racism, not speaking up against it when I encountered it, or doing much of anything else.

So if we can’t use your test to recognize microaggressions, what can we use? Well, practically anything else that you’ve written, for a start. You are really good at telling a story about a racially-charged situation, and enabling your readers to vividly experience what it was like for you. You know how to select exactly the right details that made the situation what it was, and you show us why those details made you feel the way you felt. If a white person wants to avoid accidentally committing micro-aggressions, I think the best strategy is to read writers like you and Jordan Peele and Spike Lee and Boots Riley etc. who tell stories about black/white interactions from each of their personal Black perspectives. We humans have special neurological software that enables us to transform those stories into skillful and compassionate behavior, if we use that software skillfully. More on that in this article of mine.

https://teedrockwell.medium.com/the-woke-revolution-in-moral-habits-5a9694abc46f