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Dr. Derald Wing-Sue examines the demeaning meta-communications or hidden messages in comments addressed to people of color. Though it should be noted that microaggressions can also be levied at white people, e.g. when Hawaii born-and-raised whites are asked "Where are you from?", and then when told "Here", persist: "No, I meant originally." ;-)

Hey Lara, thanks for remembering me ;-)

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

Interesting article on racialized "microaggressions" directed towards gaijin living in Japan.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American's ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino's ability to speak English without an accent.This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour - microaggressions - used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.

A few of the words recently added to Dictionary.com Deep web: the portion of the Internet that is hidden from conventional search engines, as by encryption; the aggregate of unindexed websites: Dox: Slang. to publish the private personal information of (another person) without the consent of that individual Haptics: the branch of psychology that investigates sensory data and sensation derived from the sense of touch and localized on the skin. Glanceable: noting or relating to information on an electronic screen that can be understood quickly or at a glance:

In this NPR interview, Trinidadian-American Lyiscott reflects on a moment where she'd been termed "articulate," a loaded term that got Lysicott reflecting on the ways certain varieties of language are privileged over others, and also the way "articulate" also suggests a perceived mismatch between the appearance/race of the person and their use of langugage, also how people judge others' intellect and capacity, based on how they speak.