Examples Of Canadian Racial Microaggressions

1260 Words3 Pages

Canadian Racial Microaggressions: Synthesis and Suggestion through Examples of International Students in Canada During the last decade, the awareness of racial discrimination, in some extent, happening every day in North America has been aroused, which is called racial microaggression —“a brief and commonplace verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities that communicate negative racial insults to people of colour” (Sue, Capodilupo, et al., 2007). This problem even hit Canada — a multicultural nation — and was widely discussed in Canada after a forced apology. In February 2014, a student, studied at McGill University, was obliged to apologize for an email involved in racial microaggression (Hamilton, 2014). Subsequently, McGill struggled …show more content…

They believe that students union or groups are using this expression to pursue success in their movements. There might be some evidences that can prove this theory, but there are more evidences that indicate the harm of microaggression to international students on campus. Referring to Tafarodi’s study (2014), they initially interview 129 international students in a Canadian university and all of them indicate that they have experienced or felt some extent of racial microaggression. Hence, racial microaggression is not an exceptional case; instead, racial microaggression is fully filled within educational institutions. People should recognized this situation first and then they can firmly face this problem. To sum up, racial microaggression is composed of microassault, microinsult and microinvalidation. With in those three, microassault appears only when people mean to be racism; fortunately, it also appears the least in Canada. The other two, microinsult and microinvalidation, appears accidentally; they often appear when people lack of comprehension and consideration of other racial groups. Moreover, because people often do not mean to be microaggression, this social problem becomes hard to evaluate, compensate, control and …show more content…

So far, I have made two suggestion to deal with racial microaggression. First, international students need to correctly respond racial microaggressions. Taking whatever microaggression addressed obviously is not an effective way to eliminate microaggression. Instead, students who suffer microaggressions should talk to those who discriminate against them, point out the problem and ask for apology. This can address the awareness of microagressions among native-speaker groups; and hopefully, more and more people will be careful at this accidental racism and eliminate microaggressions on campus. Second, helps from native-speaker friends would be helpful. On the one hand, seeking help from friends would placate people who experience racial microaggressions. On the other hand, this behaviour can also highlight the harm of racial microaggressions among native-speaker groups. Through the word of mouth, racial microaggressions would be advised widely and more and more people could be aware of this social problem.

Open Document