> What I'm getting at is maybe we need to teach people how to grow thicker skin? To become immune to microagressions?
What do you think most people on the receiving end of it do? Do you think they get into fights everytime this happens to them?
People already do have thick skins. Most people just accept this as part of being who they are. However we have studies showing that even just being on the receiving end of this can have major issues on one’s health. So the goal here is to identify these issues and try to prevent them from happening.
> What I'm getting at is maybe we need to teach people how to grow thicker skin?
Do you mean "thicker skin" as in teaching people to be more tolerant of casual bigotry, or teaching people to be more open to learning that there's a cultural subtext to the words they aren't aware of? Because I've seen a whole bunch of people get unreasonably upset, dare I say offended, that they unintentionally offended somebody.
Interesting, it's a recurrent debate. I believe we'd all be better if we all grew thicker skin. Even if, on paper, an ideal society were everybody is nice is better.. I don't think it's stable (reminds me of experiment in absolutely bacteria free environment that made people even more frail at the end). A blend of self sufficiency and strength is my natural answer most of the time, yet I can't be sure it's right.
One of the biggest contributions to medical science was the idea of washing your hands before performing surgery.
Should patients grow a thicker skin to deal with dirty-handed surgeons (perhaps they should stop being so sensitive to broken bones or cancer so they don’t need surgery in the first place?), or should surgeons take on the practise of washing their hands, wearing hair nets and masks and autoclaving their tools?
Some of these microagressions are not so micro - such as real estate agents being documented discriminating against black people ~50% of the time (assuming we can generalize from NY)
What I'm getting at is maybe we need to teach people how to grow thicker skin? To become immune to microagressions?