Ian Grice of North Carolina’s State’s Technician proposes that questions some refer to as “microaggressions” may in fact lead to a stronger appreciation of diversity:

Micro-aggressions aren’t so bad

Racial micro-aggressions are brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, communicating hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color, according to Psychology Today.

For example, when a person asks a person of color, “What are you?” or “Where are you really from?” or “Do you speak Asian?” the person has just demonstrated a racial micro-aggression by that definition. People of all races and subcultures are subject to racial generalizations, which are the root of racial micro-aggressions.

Racial micro-aggressions rise out of a change in demographics in the United States. The only way to produce multicultural, ethnically diverse environment is to include whites in the conversation, according to The New York Times article, “Students see many slights as racial ‘microaggressions.’”

People might sometimes be insensitive about racial issues; asking questions to try to understand someone’s culture is almost never a bad thing and usually is not an expression of racist attitudes. The term racial micro-aggressions implies, falsely I feel, that the conversation is racially motivated when, more often than not, they are more about subcultures.