It is a wednesday

Key pieces about students: 1. They are incredibly proud of their ethnic origins. Not all of them explore all of their ethnicities, this is dependent on if their parents are involved in their ethnic communities. However, in various conversation that I had with the students, they often asked questions about history and cultural information on the different cultures. 2. All of the students who participated in my project labelled themselves as multi-racial, mixed, black and white. They often admitted that what they said was contextual. One of the things many of the students dealt with on a nearly daily basis was the question "What are you?" or "Are you mixed?" This is not news to anyone who reads up on mixed identity. It is a broken refrain, because we want to categorize things. It is part of our nature as a way to make sense of the world. As I and others have said before mixed people challenge this and make people uncomfortable. 3. The students in my study the high school they attend is relatively supportive and the students did not report any experiences of overt racism and I observed none. That said, I observed teachers repeatedly single out certain minority students for behavior I observed all students regardless of race or color. Students brought this up as well. As well, I observed and heard stories of repeated micro-aggression both from students and teachers. I would even argue that the questions in point 2 above are micro-aggressions that these students experience every day. 4. Not all teachers participate in this subtle acts of institutional racism, but because micro-aggressions are so subtle and seem so innocuous, but build up over time, everyone is complicit. I think that the onslaught is so constant for most minorities that you build up a wall of tolerance and begin to not pick up on the smaller ones and only see the more overt ones. When I talked to students about how people spoke to them and gave examples, students were more able to see these occurrences, not only toward them but also toward other students. So, I am sure that some would argue, that by my bringing the issues up I am creating them. That is why these types of isms (these do not only happen to minority students although some other groups deal with much more overt discrimination) are so institutionalized, they are hard to identify. While I have been sifting through my data, I asked myself the same question, am I making mountains out of mole hills? So I set out to understand the concept better, as I saw it as something that would be integral to my thesis. The notion of micro-aggressions first came into play in the lat 1970 when a pair of academics looked at small racial assumptions in television ads. They found that these were very real and quite frequent. 5. While I was in the school I had teachers who wouldn't go on record come to me and tell me that they observed frequent and repeated acts of discrimination with minority students. I certainly observed over the course of the year that a few students I knew were punished much more harshly if they were not white, either suspended and or expelled. I also heard teacher vehemently talk about how they disliked students who had transgressed school rules, even on things that are not acceptable but incidents of typical teen boundary crossing tests.