Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

My experience with microaggressions was not a recent event. Although, I am certain there were examples in my daily life this past week, this example sticks out in my memory. My first few years teaching, one of my coworkers, was a teacher from Ghana who had come to the United States when she was 13. This coworker spoke perfect English and without asking, I would've never known that she was born outside of the states but, she shared this fact with pride and we regularly heard her speak on the phone in her native language. One day, while completing a questionnaire for our quality rating, this coworker was asked what she considered her first language. She looked at out the staff completing the survey and responded that her first language was english and she looked extremely offended. The staff member specified that she meant the language she spoke before english. My coworker answered that her first language has always been english but she also speak her native language. 

Like a few examples in the video segment this week, this staff member did not mean to be offensive in anyway but, unfortunately, that was how it was taken. Observing this microaggression was extremely awkward. I was aware of both sides of thought and that was running through my head during this interaction. We had always been a team that had fully embraced this coworkers background and celebrated it, I was a bit surprised to see her take it so offensively but, it also forced me to think about what had happened in her past that caused her to feel that way. 

This conversation really made me think about how so much has happened in our history to create so much discrimination, stereotypes, and prejudice. It's sad to see that we can't all celebrate everyone's diversity and ask questions and learn without the thought of discrimination or prejudice. I work in an agency that is extremely open to many different types of cultures, ethnicities, backgrounds, etc but, I will also say that we don't always have the knowledge we should or provide staff with an educational opportunity to gain the knowledge. I think this I show stereotypes get started, everyone just starts guessing and making up their own thoughts. We have experienced this greatly in regard to our transgender children. We have had quite a few transgender children pass through our doors and we are still striving at how to really help them through their trauma. No matter what we do, discrimination and prejudice are everywhere. This experience is at least three years old but, it has been engrained in my memory and I think about it all the time. I only speak one language so I will never truly know how this would affect me personally but, it has made me think many times how it might affect me.