I've had this conversation dozens of times with white friends and colleagues. It is, I would argue, one of the major epistemological fault lines in our political culture today. tl;dr--structures/systems are, to some extent, comprised of grooved or patterned human behavior. https://twitter.com/conor64/status/1290803896479125504

Consider this anonymized story. Prof A is a beloved scientist, an older white liberal with anti-war stickers covering his office door. As the historically white campus has diversified, students of color have noticed that Prof. A has difficulty remembering their names.

10 weeks into Intro to X, Mike and Hector, the only 2 Mexican-American students in the class, finally get fed up with being confused for each other. Prof A has no problem telling Brittany, Bethany, and Becca apart. How should we respond to Mike & Hector's complaint?

The STEM disciplines face the structural problem of being disproportionately white. It's clearly not that white ppl are genetically predisposed to be better at physics or math than non-whites, so there must be mechanisms at work that perpetuate a racially-distorted STEM pipeline.

The common experience of not being seen as individuals, an experience students of color like Mike & Hector encounter with regularity, is just one, small cog in the complex machinery that reproduces a STEM world that is disproportionately white.

Like an earlier generation of women in the sciences who got tired of being seen as sexual objects by male professors who would "jokingly" comment on their clothing or looks, Mike & Hector don't want to be "that Latino guy." They are distinct, different people.

Mike & Hector aren't asking for Prof A to be fired or shamed, they just want him to stop doing this one, seemingly minor act of confusing them for each other. They already feel like outsiders on this historically white campus, and the prof's "forgetfulness" just reinforces that.

When Prof A has a few summer research opportunities to dole out and Mike & Hector, both good students, get passed over, it's understandable that they might wonder if the prof who [nervously giggling] "can't tell them apart" failed to identify their distinctive abilities.

And it is precisely those gatekeeping functions, when exercised by "well-meaning" people like Prof A, that reproduce the structural inequities in STEM that some insist are the "real" problem that activists would be tackling if they stopped focusing on "little" microaggressions.

People do politics where they are and in the situations they find themselves in. Mike & Hector have access to a great college education that their parents didn't. That matters. And also, they are encountering a subtle, unconscious but real form of racism. Why not name it?

By naming it they are engaging in politics in a space & in a way they can. They are saying "hey profs, how about if you work on seeing us not as interchangeable members of a group as your socialization has taught you to, but instead to see us as distinctive ppl?" Is that so bad?

Could Prof A write a long piece about how the woke mob came for him & how he will be put in language Gitmo now for one small mistake after decades of effective teaching? And will we hear stories of Mike & Hector, the shock troops for Robin DiAngelo's Maoist thought police? Yes.

Another option is for Prof A to say, "Thanks Mike & Hector, I'll make it a point not to do that anymore because my job is to educate each of my students. I now see how that seemingly innocent habit of mine prevented me from doing that in your case as well as I could have."

The story where the Prof makes this adjustment and learns something from it is the usual story, but it does not make for salacious copy. "Mike & Hector, the scary and irrational Jacobins who want to cut off the heads of all white professors" bleeds, and so it leads.

In the grand scheme of things, a white Prof who can't tell Mike & Hector apart is a small thing, but every big thing is comprised of a million little things and change has to start somewhere. Working to change one little thing doesn't mean one doesn't care about big things.

Dismissing talk of "microaggressions" as "a distraction from real structural change" is a failure to see the connection between culture & politics--a failure to see how arguments about little things (like a gas station bathroom for whites only) are also arguments about big things

Take this one story about one prof at one campus, and now multiply it times every college in the US where this same thing happens. How many Mikes and Hectors are there out there, ambitious and smart people whose ambitions and smarts don't get recognized and supported?

Now think about all of the talent and capacity that we as a society lose because people like Mike and Hector just get exhausted over the years from having to work twice as hard to be recognized for doing the same or higher quality work as others.