A Culture of Microaggression: Jokes & Empty Apologies
By Anaïs Bricout ‘26
As a half-Asian woman, I have received my fair share of microaggressive and racist comments. While walking through the streets of Chinatown or hanging around in the Stu, these kinds of comments haven’t escaped me. Milton, like many high schools in this country, is complex; it both denounces and prohibits outright racism and encourages and fosters a community of microaggression. With a student body of a generation dominated by insensitive jokes on social media and with a faculty of a generation fearing deeply the consequences of insensitivity, Milton has fallen short of its principles of inclusion and equity.
Sometimes, I wonder what a microaggression even means; how do you aggressively offend someone minimally? The word itself teaches a mindset of ignorance; students start to think that “microaggressions” shouldn’t be responded to precisely because they are “micro.” Some people, though well-meaning and honestly kind, seem to think that by adding the words “this might be insensitive, but…” they are absolved of the responsibility to make other groups feel accepted and included at Milton. To think that a simple phrase puts one above a pattern and system of discrimination and marginalization stems out of a simple fear: that one is heard making a discriminatory and exclusionary comment rather than that one makes one at all.
As a student at Milton for the past three years, I have increasingly observed a pattern; most of the time, whenever teachers or students express feelings or “jokes” that quite explicitly target a specific race or group, they react only when they are told that what they said is wrong. People do not want to avoid discrimination; they care about avoiding its consequences. In fact, at Quadival this year, a friend of mine heard a group of freshmen, as by description supposedly “fresh” and “forward-thinking,” make a discriminatory joke. Then, one out of the group exclaimed that this was not something “you could say at an institution like this.” Similarly, Chloe Yeo ‘26, after an uncomfortable and marginalizing experience with one of her teachers who called her by the name of another Asian student, received an apology email from that same teacher. Though Yeo had not responded before that class, that teacher forgave Yeo and declared that “it matters more what [the teacher] said.”
Indeed, although Milton has shaped itself into a powerhouse of DEIJ values on a surface level, discrimination still exists at a deeper level within this community. Many students, even those Asian themselves, have made deeply racist and dehumanizing jokes about other Asians; walking in the Stu and hearing a joke about Asians eating dogs is not uncommon. When Trump cited this misinformation about an immigrant community in Ohio, everyone gasped, but few realize that members of our community have made those same jokes, playing them off “in the spirit of good fun.”
It’s in that environment that disguises microaggressions and racism as funny or as “acceptable because you belong to that race” that encourage the mentality that the words themselves don’t carry much meaning except that which we assign to them. It is then that students make jokes about Asian stereotypes then take those statements back simply because they don’t want to get in trouble, rather than because it’s wrong. That’s precisely why I find the word “microaggression” problematic; to reduce such significant and outright racism and stereotyped thinking into such a minuscule idea disregards the clearly expansive racist history behind these words.