It is 8 a.m. and I am rushing to the office for a meeting. I enter the building, briskly walking. I hear someone talking in the background. The voice grows louder. “Excuse me, are you lost?” Now, I realize that this person is talking to me. I stop and say, “no.”
He approaches me. “Can I help you find someone?” I respond, “No thanks, I am good.” He responds, “Wait, who are you meeting with?” I finally stop and say, “I am Dr. Garcia, I am going to my office.”
A surprised look appears on his face and he responds: “Oh! You don’t look like a professor.”
My day successfully starts off with a gendered-raced microaggression and the process of undoing the pain that follows such interaction. I still must enter my office to work on a project that combats the very topic I just experienced.
Chester Pierce, a professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, first coined microaggressions in 1970 as “subtle and stunning” assaults people of color encounter based on their race, assaults that have a cumulative effect over the course of an individual’s life.
This was not the first time, nor would it be the last time, this happened to me. Unfortunately, experiencing microaggressions for women of color in institutions of higher education is nothing new.
As a professor, my research focuses on race and equity issues and student outcomes. I have the difficult task of teaching students to recognize systems of oppression and the implications of those systems on students’ educational outcomes. Microaggressions tend to be a popular topic to give name to racial incidents that occur for students of color.
