Ducking Micro-Aggressions on a Train to Siberia…

I just attended a meeting on workplace diversity. One of the topics was “emotional tax,” basically the idea that it can be exhausting being “the only one of your kind” in an environment.

In the US, I’m pretty fortunate, being an educated, native-born, upper-middle-class white man. It’s rare that I’m the only such person in the room, and even when I am, I usually get a baseline level of respect.

Also, I don’t get a lot of requests to explain my culture, my hair, my clothes, why “my people” do things a certain way, etc…

But I have experienced this: I lived in Russia on several occasions when I was younger.

Almost all of the Russians I met at the time were lovely and well-meaning people, but most had never been to the US, many had never met an American, so their experience of Americans came from propaganda or Hollywood movies / TV commercials. They had all sorts of ideas about America and Americans, and I fielded a lot of questions that sound silly to us: no, I had never met Michael Jordan, no, I had never witnessed a carjacking or bank robbery, no, I didn’t own a Cadillac, no, my dad did not wear a tuxedo to work…

It sounds funny, and it was, but it got tiring.

And there were a small number of people who were NOT well-meaning. This was after the Cold War, and some folks had an axe to grind, and I was not interested in getting berated when I just wanted to read the newspaper.

I was identifiable by my accent, my body language, my appearance as “not from here.” I couldn’t just pretend to be a Russian like everyone else, so in order to dodge the questions or criticisms about America when I was tired, I started telling people I was Canadian.

It didn’t help.

They wanted to know if I had been to the US, since it was so close, and if not, why not.

Alright, fine, I told people I was Irish. Most Russians didn’t care much about Ireland, so they’d stop asking and I could go back to reading the newspaper.

Problem solved…

In retrospect, though, the point is that I had the option to sidestep much of the “emotional tax” or “micro-aggressions” with a bit of clever bullshit.

But many people in the US today don’t have the option of “turning it off,” it comes at them whether they are “up for it” or not, and it must be exhausting.

I’m not going to say “I feel your pain.” That would be underselling your pain.

This was something I experienced for a short period of my life, far from home, and I found it annoying, but rarely threatening.

I can only imagine what it must be like to deal with it day after day, close to home, for your core identity as a human being, and you can’t “turn it off” with a bit of clever bullshit when you’re tired or not in the mood, or when someone is coming at you with an axe to grind.

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