Picture this. It’s the first day of school and your teacher is taking attendance when they get to the name of a student that is hard for them to pronounce. They take their best shot at it, but the name is butchered, and the student corrects them.

In the next class, the teacher continues to take attendance calling out names from the student list as it’s the first week and they have not yet memorized students’ names. Once again, they come across the same name they stumbled over last class. Instead of attempting to pronounce it, the teacher reads out their initials hoping the student will realize it’s their name they are struggling with and reveal themself.

Luckily, for the teacher, this student has been singled out like this in just about every classroom they have been in. They’re used to bailing out teachers and classmates. The student raises their hand and provides the teacher with a “nickname.”

“Thank God,” the teacher exclaims, “I doubt I would’ve been able to pronounce whatever your other name was supposed to sound like.”

This is a microaggression — a common one in the American classroom. It is okay for a teacher to mispronounce a name or be unfamiliar with a culture. They’ll interact with a diverse array of beautiful cultures living in America. 

However, it is not okay for a teacher to neglect their job as a school leader who sets a precedent for the way their classrooms operate. By refusing to attempt to pronounce a student’s given name, that teacher is showing the rest of the class that it’s normal to single out their classmates for being different. That teacher is defining one culture as the “familiar” and anything that deviates from this as “alien” and “inferior.”

Microaggressions like these can have a detrimental impact on a human being. Ruchika Tulshyan writes for Harvard Business Review that despite their name, “microaggressions have a macro impact” and can be just as harmful as “more overt forms of racism.” Microaggressions can be defined as the pervasive, brief and commonplace slights that occur in everyday life. 

They are intentional and unintentional, verbal and behavioral, easily reinforced and permanently damaging, and have no place in any classroom. 

Due to their frequent nature, microaggressions can be easily brushed off and overlooked compared to their macro counterparts such as systemic racism. However, it is this frequent nature that makes microaggressions so incredibly harmful in the first place.

The constant compounding of petty stereotypes being placed on one’s head from sunrise till sundown sparks a feeling of inferiority in the marginalized groups that experience them — and these stereotypes become reality to some, stretching the reach of its effects far beyond the classroom.

The masculinity associated with blackness is what makes a child wearing a hood a threat to another person’s life. That little boy, due to his race, can be perceived as a man strong enough to inflict himself on others.

It can also be attributed to the disproportionate Black maternal mortality rate that illustrates that “Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women,” according to the CDC, which also claims that “implicit bias” is partly to blame for these tragic deaths. The strength and power associated with a Black woman’s race is what makes a doctor overlook their vulnerability while giving birth.

To combat these issues, we must establish new societal norms, but it all starts in the classroom. We must be fully educated and understanding of what microaggressions really are, actively working against them and checking our subconscious prejudices. Microaggressions must be met head-on with criticism to create inclusive, positive and educational environments that will serve us all right.

Curb your microaggressions and celebrate the great diversity that makes the modern classroom so amazing.