I found out yesterday that I am a serial microaggressor. That surprised me, since I’ve never considered myself much of an aggressor, micro or otherwise. Except maybe in creative conferences, where I defended our concepts vigorously and often loudly.

However, as I was reading a book entitled The Coddling of the American Mind I encountered a reference to Derald Wing Sue’s 2007 paper in which he and several of his Columbia University colleagues advanced the idea of “microaggression.” By their definition, a microaggression is “a brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignity, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicates hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” The term has since been expanded to include many more groups.

One of the examples of a microaggression cited was a white person asking an Asian person to teach him or her words in the Asian person’s “native language.” I had to stop and reread that two or three times, because suddenly this somewhat academic treatise had become personal.

I am a curious person. (I’ll stop here for a minute or two while people who know me make bad jokes agreeing with that statement.) But what I mean here is that whenever I encounter someone who knows things I don’t, I often try to learn something. I have asked people from other countries how they pronounced their names, how to say “thank you” or “hello” in their native languages. I even chased down an Asian lady in my office building to get her to teach me to say, “Welcome to our home” in Chinese to my son’s date (who became our daughter in law). She’s originally from Taiwan.

I swear I did all of this innocently, but according to the code of Microaggression, I was wrong. Although none of the people I talked to indicated in any form that I was, in fact, microaggressing them, according to Sue’s construct, I was being a microbiggot.

At the risk of sounding defensive, I find two things wrong with this concept. The first is that, as noted by the book’s authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, it totally discounts intent. This is curious since most of our society places a strong emphasis on intent. For instance, if you try to kill somebody and fail, you can get sentenced up to life in prison (with possibility of parole). If you accidentally kill somebody, the sentence is generally much less, in the range of two to 10 years. Which means that society generally places a greater emphasis on intent than impact.

The law contends that what we intend to do makes a difference. Sue and his colleagues disagree. Perhaps because even the most obvious benign intent could leave a big hole in the second part of their argument, which is that “communicates hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults” means whatever the listener thinks it communicates.

This is how we got to, “You look very nice today.” became a part of a hostile work environment.

It’s also how we got to complaints about Joe Biden invading the personal space of women, brought to light years after the invasive action.

The concept of microaggression creates an ill-defined area where any action may be judged to be offensive after the fact with penalties extracted for it. Sometimes the penalties are ridiculous.

Take, for instance, one of the examples in the book: a clash between a student named Olivia at Claremont McKenna College and the Dean of Students, Mary Spellman. Olivia wrote an essay in a student publication saying that she felt excluded and marginalized. She said (as quoted in the book) that “Our campus climate and institutional culture are primarily grounded in western, white, cishetronormative upper-middle class values.”

From my few days on Claremont’s campus, I would say she was probably right. And she was perfectly free to offer her opinion and try to bring about changes. Up to this point, it’s what college communications should be. Thoughtful. Open to discussion. Looking for change.

Then it hit the fan.

Dean Mary Spellman was evidently impressed by the essay and sent an email to Olivia, thanking her writing and sharing the article and inviting her to talk with her about “these issues.” She ended the email by saying that “we are working on how we can better serve students who don’t fit our CMC mold.”

Olivia ignored everything in the email except for the word “mold.” She posted the email to her Facebook page, along with her indignation about not “fitting the wonderful CMC mold.”  This post became a movement (including two students who went on a hunger strike, saying that they wouldn’t eat until Spellman was gone).

Spellman apologized for the wording of the email. That was not sufficient. She finally resigned. Over a word that one person saw as communicating racism.

This, in the world of people looking to be offended, is what we’ve come to, and—as the subtitle of the book puts it: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure—how we are making mental and emotional invalids of our young and not-so-young people. We have relieved them of any responsibility other than seething with perceived offense.

My suggestion is that if I inadvertently say or do something that’s offensive in any way to you, politely tell me that you perceive as offensive. I’ll make a note not to do it again.

In the meantime, people who get offended or think that others are getting offended and go for punishments that in no way fit the crime. A DJ in Chapel Hill, NC plays a song that a patron says might “trigger” someone, and the DJ is fired. A scholar receives death threats because she wrote a paper noting that Greek statues were painted, and the fact that we found them a thousand years later with the paint worn off the white marble contributed to the perceived supremacy of the white race. A Senator is encouraged to resign by his own party because of a gag photograph that, while certainly tasteless, was not sexual harassment.

I still contend that if bad taste were a crime, most of the people at the mall would be in jail.

It’s also the world where we block doors, shout down speakers, and otherwise interfere with speech that we don’t like. Another step toward becoming mental and emotional invalids.

We should keep in mind that bad ideas and hateful speech, like cockroaches, don’t like the light, and we should counter them not with silence, but with better ideas and more inclusive speech.

I’m beginning to believe that I am no longer equipped to live in this world. I still welcome opinions different from mine; I sometimes learn something, sometimes teach something, and can disengage if neither of us is learning anything. I’ve quit offering hugs (although this isn’t a really great sacrifice since I’m not much of a hugger anyway) because I don’t want to encroach on anyone’s personal space. I make every effort to address every ethnicity and gender by his, her, their preferred terms. But I really prefer a world where we assume good intentions unless there is evidence to the contrary. I prefer a world like the one I encountered recently when I sought some advice.

There is at the bank that keeps my money a very bright Black lady. I’ve known her since she first came to work at that bank years ago. Because I wanted to be politically correct when I do readings of The Sing, I went to her and asked if she preferred to be referred to as Black or African-American. At first, she thought I was joking, so I explained why I was asking the question. She shook her head and answered my question with a question: Which do you prefer: White or Caucasian?

We agreed that either term, offered with respect, was fine.