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 physical and mental health and well-being in significant ways, and literally lead to a death by a thousand cuts. In this workshop, you will learn how to recognize microaggressions and the messages that they send so that you can become more conscious and intentional in preventing yourself from committing them. In this workshop, you will also learn how to respond to microaggressions if you are a bystander and how to use microresistance and microaffirmations as ways to address microaggressions if you are a target. Come to learn more about how to prevent harm and promote healing and to create more welcoming, respectful, inclusive, and honoring spaces for our BIPOC and other marginalized siblings.