7 Steps Toward Building an Equitable School Culture

When schools are mindful and deliberate about creating an equitable culture, they are better prepared to support everyone in the building.

The term microaggression was first coined by Dr. Chester Pierce of Harvard University in the 1970s when describing the everyday slights that non-Black Americans inflicted on Black Americans.

The term was amplified by Dr. Derald Wing Sue, now a professor of counseling psychology at Columbia University, and his coauthor, Lisa Beth Spanierman, in their book Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation; microaggressions, they wrote, are “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to individuals because of their group membership. The persons making the comments may be otherwise well-intentioned and unaware of the potential impact of their words.”