"Microaggressions"

"From Leviathan University's Student Modification Guidebook, 2015-16" (Intercollegiate Review, Fall, 2015):

Leviathan University prides itself on leading the fight against social maladjustment and transgressive vocables. Toward this end, we have added this new chapter on microaggressions.

Please read this carefully, as the penalties for violating the new behavioral guidelines include social-media shaming, shunning, serious threat of expulsion, quasi-expulsion, expulsion, post-expulsion I-Told-You-So, and self-financed apology tour.

Definition

A "microaggression" is unintended and unconscious discriminatory behavior resulting in emotionally, psychologically, or politically discernible marginalization. It entails the application of "known social norms" to unsuspecting victims, who suffer discriminatory-like repercussions such as bed head (due to sleep disruption), moodiness, whiny affect, and killing sprees.

Microaggressions typically manifest themselves in three ways:

• microassault: an explicit verbal/nonverbal derogation -- e.g., denying that someone is a person of color solely on the basis of color, thereby implying that race is not a social construct; speaking as if you were mentally placing "microaggression" in quotation marks, etc.
• microinsult: coded messages, subtle snubs that demean a person's identity, whether that identity is obvious or not -- e.g., telling someone to be "reasonable," a white, Western category associated with a history of slavery and overcharging for fresh produce.
• microinvalidation: expressions of negativity that make persons feel they are not worthy to feel their feelings; insisting that something didn't happen just because it didn't, etc.

Professor Hroswitha Gandersheim of Leviathan's Department of Noetic Poetics has define three further sublevels of microaggressive activity:

• mini-microaggression: an aggressive communication that only dogs can perceive; dreaming that someone you know is dreaming of you in a nonconsensual manner, etc.
• subatomic microaggressions: shifts in elementary particles that affect energy flow, resulting in unwanted changes to one's position relative to the cafeteria.
• macro-microaggressions: repeating oneself to a nondeaf person; saying "Ya know" when clearly the intended victim does not; insisting that someone is innocent until proven guilty, thereby privileging a white, Western standard of jurisprudence, etc.

How to Respond When You Are the Victim of Microaggression

1. Panic: The long-term effects of such assaults are undetectable, and thus are the more subversive in theirimpacts.
2. Take to social media: Tweeting out the nature of the offense and the name of the offender will create a "wall of susceoptibullying"
3. File a formal complaint with the Office of Hostile Gestures: It won't take more than two or three hours, and there is cake and nontactile massage.
4. Seek counseling: Leviathan offers a wide variety of treatment and exhortation options, including an app for your phone that can be programmed to confirm your self-image every fifteen minutes.

We at Leviathan University remain hopeful that one day no one will ever interact with another person in such a way that a "communication" can be proved to have taken place. Until such day, there's always university bureaucracy.