Universities in recent years have embraced teachings on “micro-aggressions,” alerting students that many phrases they may consider innocuous actually bear harmful racist undertones. Through trainings and orientations and classroom lectures, students are taught to avoid repeating sentiments such as, “You speak good English,” “When I look at you I don’t see color,” and “America is a melting pot” so as not to “communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons.”
Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf compared one popular educational sheet on micro-aggressions circulated by several major universities (and referenced above) to a recent Cato/YouGov poll that gauged how minorities actually feel about sentiments many academics would deem offensive.
