Returning to the OP's sentiments, here are my two cents:
If I never hear the word "micro-aggression" again it will be too soon. It appears to mean an occasion where someone chooses to be offended by a word/action that clearly wasn't meant to be rude or offensive -- so trivial as to be called "micro" by the offended themselves. The world does not need this.
I am completely disdainful of the concept of "safe spaces" and "trigger words" in a college environment. Students should be attending college to learn; to stretch their minds and become acquainted with people, experiences, and philosophies they may not have encountered before. If you want to remain in your "safe space" bubble, stay the hell home. Yes, this also applies to students making colleges ban speakers they don't agree with. (Here's an idea: just don't attend the speech if you don't want to hear it. Or attend, hear them out, then respectfully challenge the speaker's views.)
My first exposure to the idea of "trigger words" was also from the college environment. The idea was that students needed to be warned about "triggering" materials that might occur as part of the course work. This strikes me as both ridiculous and impractical. College students are (mostly) legal adults and on the verge of being expected to function as adults in broader society. Expecting all others to anticipate what might upset you and to make your way smooth is going to lead to some serious disappointment in post-graduate life.
Note that I am not making a comment here against treating people equally, being civil and polite, or having the simple tact not to express obviously offensive language. I am simply expressing my own opinion that "micro-aggressions", "safe spaces" and "trigger words" in their original incarnations annoy me intensely.
I understand that the usage of these terms can be frustrating, and I've certainly seen them misused. But let me push back against the idea that these terms have no value in their modern sense.
Micro-aggression - I think the key takeaway here is meant to be behaviors of yours that seem inconsequential to you (and might actually be pretty inconsequential in isolation) can have a cumulative affect on someone. If one white person watches you extra carefully in a store, you brush it off. If every time you go to the store it happens, it has an effect on you. The hope is that by discussing it, we'll better realize better how small behaviors multiply across time and society to have big effects.
Safe-space - I don't believe the idea is that your entire life should be a safe-space, just that everyone (students on campus, for example) should all have someplace they can go to get away from whatever threats or stress they experience in the world. That doesn't really sound unreasonable, does it?
Trigger warnings - As you said, the idea of a trigger warning isn't that topics aren't discussed, just that (for example) sexual abuse survivors aren't blindsided by a discussion of rape. This to me feels like a good impulse. Like we as a society are better understanding and respecting mental health and the effects of traumatic stress. Sure, I don't feel like I need trigger warnings for anything, but my experience is not someone else's. If I had been raped, or was a soldier in a war, or whatever, I think I'd appreciate the heads up.
So none of those things bother me, apart from when they are grossly misused. I'm somewhat more worried by de-platforming, but I also think that been overblown to some degree. I'd love to hear your further thoughts, SpeedReader.
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Your explanations make sense to me, Watchmaker. But I find that I just don't like the word "micro-aggression". I think it's because to my mind, aggression involves violence or threat. Micro actions by definition don't rise to that level, so labeling them aggressions feels like an overstatement. As a scholarly term of art to categorize "deplorable behaviors on an atmospherically oppressive but not overtly threatening level", I guess it's as good a word as any. But when used to talk about an individual's behavior, it strikes my ear oddly. Seems it would be clearer to describe the person's behavior as rude/racist/sexist/annoying/etc.
College students have a safe space to get away from stress; it's called their dorm room. Or a friend's dorm room. Or a counselor's office, library, church, pub, etc. I respectfully submit that is not the meaning assigned. I stand by my previous example where students clamor for administrations to revoke speaker invitations. They are demanding to be protected from
ideas they disagree with, at an event they're not even required to attend. So no, it is not reasonable. It's in direct contravention to the principle of free speech.
Re trigger warnings: If you're going to be presenting material that's widely considered to be graphic or disturbing, yes, you should give people notice. For example, I attended a healthcare equipment sales meeting where a doctor's presentation included slides of battlefield injuries. Some people got out of that room in a hurry! Another example: in community theater we give notice to patrons when a show includes significant adult language/content.
I don't think it's as clear-cut in reference to academic materials. I've quoted a Psychology Today article that puts it better than I can:
"In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic.2 In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral therapists teach their clients to recognize and overcome. The pair argued that some campus practices—presumably intended to protect students from being harmed by words and ideas deemed offensive or distressing—seemed to be interfering with students' ability to get along with each other, and could even be having a deleterious effect on their mental health. Among those practices: training students to identify microaggressions (things people say or do, often unintentionally, that are interpreted as expressions of bigotry), turning classrooms and lecture halls into intellectual safe spaces (where students are protected from words and ideas they might find upsetting), and the issuing of trigger warnings: alerts about the potentially “triggering” content of written work, films, lectures, and other presentations. A 2018 study out of Harvard—the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience—may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings."
"In 2014, Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen published an essay in The New Yorker outlining the effects of trigger warnings on pedagogy, and how the concept of "triggers" had come to mean content that was generally upsetting, not just material that could trigger an emotional reaction from those with PTSD. In their 2015 article, Lukianoff and Haidt used examples of requests for trigger warnings for things like misogyny, classism, and even privilege, and argued that “rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control.”