Saturday, September 29, 2012
Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions
This week's focus on microagressions truly made me look at how others interact in my workplace. I have been the victim of microassaults and even microattacks throughout my life because of my race. As a minority, I have been called names and I have been the recipient of racially biased remarks. However, this week, I was shocked to have a microassault based on my age. I was in the process of working with a colleague on a school project. She asked if I could bake some cupcakes for the PTA meeting next week. As I started to deny the request, my coworker stated that "she knows I can cook because women did all the cooking back in my day". The coworker was very young and she implied that as an older woman, I had to spend my days cooking. Even though I did cook for my family, I took this as an insult. I perceived the message that younger women are more professional whereas older women are homemakers. This shocked me because it was a harmless remark. However, I was very insulted. I denied the request to bake the cupcake and was quickly told by the coworker that she would just buy some. Because of the course work, I realized why I was offended. I was insulted, and I know that it was unintentional. However, it was offensive and I did not like it. Have any of you experienced similar situations?
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Debra,
ReplyDeleteAs I get older, I find myself in situations where people view me differently because of my age. We did an exercise in our pre-service in which we were asked what age is old. The first age was 50. Some of the younger staff stood up to say that 50 was old. Even more stood up to say 60 was old. To me, age is relative. There are some 80 and 90 year olds who are still very active.
Sometimes, I think, when people make remarks out of ignorance, I either help them to understand or just ignore their remark and move on. It would depend on what the remark was. I remember thinking that my first grade teacher was old, but she was still teaching when I finished college!!! I guess she was not as old as I thought.
Thank you for sharing this story. It was a great example of age discrimination.
I can relate to this with age. Just because we are older does not give anyone the right what we can and can't do because of our age. We may be more expereinced and it may make the younger generation jealous. I do think that people make these remarks out of pure ignorance. I enjoyed reading your post. Best of Luck to you.
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