Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership

Microaggressions are the everyday slights, indignities, put downs, and insults that Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), women, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized communities experience in their day-to-day interactions with people. They happen casually, frequently, and often without any harm intended. They reveal people’s conscious or unconscious bias against marginalized groups and leave the targets of their comments and actions feeling uncomfortable, offended, and hurt. Microaggressions can be incessant, occurring on an almost daily basis, and cumulative. While microaggressions may seem harmless, a lifetime of microaggressions can impact a person’s mental health and well-being in significant ways. In this workshop, we will learn how to recognize microaggressions and the messages that they send so that we can become more conscious and intentional in keeping ourselves from committing them. Preventing microaggressions from happening will help create more welcoming, kind, inclusive, and honoring spaces and is a way to support and care for our BIPOC and other marginalized siblings.