These are the dreaded microaggressions?

I've written some posts lately on events at American campuses, where left-wing activists have claimed that they are the victims of "microaggressions" that leave them unable to function, except to angrily band together to get campus administrators fired.

I was curious about what these microaggressions might actually be, so I did a search and came up with a project about microaggressions from Fordham University in New York City. Various students were photographed with little placards explaining the microaggressions that they have personally experienced.

I was gobsmacked by just how petty these microaggressions are. Mostly they just involve students being asked where they are from or what ethnicity they are. If that's a microaggression, then most of us are both victims and perpetrators, as people commonly ask this question, both out of curiosity and as a conversation starter.

So, here is a sample of the microaggression complaints:

A bit precious? I get the exact same question in the classroom, it's an abrupt way of asking for your ancestry.

The only real offense here is the lack of geographical knowledge of her classmates

I can imagine it being tiresome to field a question like this, but she really ought to just suck it up

In other words, people are guessing that she is of Chinese descent. I don't know if she's a bit tired of the assumption because she is American born or because she is of some other East Asian origin. But this stuff happens: Australians in Japan are often called "Amerikajin" because it is assumed that people with Anglo looks are from America. Not the hardest thing in life to deal with.

Someone got his name wrong. He is now a member of a club several billion strong.

Someone thought that a person who looked Chinese might possibly be able to read a kanji that looks like Chinese script. Little did they know they were committing a microaggression.

It's interesting that Asian students are jumping on the microaggression bandwagon. They are, after all, members of the most privileged group in America when it comes to career, education and income. Perhaps they realise instinctively that in a liberal system you become vulnerable if you don't strongly assert your right to be a member of a victim class. Or perhaps it is too tempting, even for intelligent people, to externalise their problems, i.e. to blame external "oppression" for your unhappiness, rather than to try to set things right in your own life.

At any rate, it's difficult to take microaggressions seriously. It seems to be more the case of people searching desperately for reasons to feel put out.