Nuts and Bolts: micro aggression.

Micro aggression occurs when assumptions are made about a group of people because of their inherent identity.

It doesn't have to be an derogatory assumption. It can be positive (people from your country are all so clever!) neutral (so, where do you come from, originally?) or negative (the only place you men are any use is in bed or under the kitchen sink).

(If you don't see anything wrong with the positive assumption, above, then think what it would be like to be, say, a stupid child from that country. Or a very hard-working one. Mortifying, eh?)

Another troubling aspect of micro aggression is that it positions one group as normal and another as odd. There are all sorts of other difficulties, too. For one thing, micro aggression is almost impossible to study scientifically to find out what's really going on. For another, the idea of micro aggression can encourage people to see themselves as victims, thus taking up valuable head space which might be better employed in being happy.

Yet other problem, of course, is that it's such a misleading term - being not necessarily either tiny or aggressive - that most people don't have a clue what it is.

Thing To Consider Today: micro aggression. The word aggression comes from the Latin aggrēdi, to attack. The term micro aggression was coined by Chester M Pierce in 1970.