None of this is surprising to sociologists, who have long held that one major way community cohesion is promoted is by defining it against out-groups—and that there is a strong psychological tendency to attribute positive adjectives to an in-group and negatives on to the outsiders. In short, it’s part—not a pretty part—of human nature, or at least social nature. Choose any group and you will find its members griping about all the others.

I hence urge those who are troubled by the ways others talk about them to use Carolyn’s findings as a baseline. That is, not to ignore slurs and insults, and most certainly not racial, ethnic, or any other kind of prejudices, but merely to “deduct” from them what seems to be standard noise, the normal sounds of human rambling. We may wish for a world in which people say only kind things about each other, but until we get there, we should not take umbrage at every negative note or adjective that is employed. For now, that is something most of us do—yes, I suspect even those who rail against microaggression.

What is normal and what we should not ignore is hard to define. But surely when one does not see the insult unless one carefully parses words, we best pretend we did not hear the slight. Thus, when an Asian student does not get an A, and his fellow students respond with a mock shock, he may overlook the stereotype. This should be treated as the kind of bantering that is normal and tolerable. We all learn to clean up our language and watch for the ‘N’ word, ‘B’ word (it rhymes with witch), and many others. What we are seeing is a return to the peak of political correctness. While sensitivity is warranted, that movement had gone too far by the time a major newspaper's list of prohibited words numbered 5,000, including “going Dutch” and “welshing” on one’s commitments. The current vogue for microaggressions is not more sensible.

A leading authority on microaggression, Professor Derald Sue of Columbia University’s Psychology Department, suggests that we leave it to the victims of microaggression to tell us whether a turn of phrase is or is not an act of aggression. They will let us know that when we slip up and talk about “him” instead of “him or her,” we engage in gender microaggression, and that when we use the term “father and mother” we reveal our homophobic tendencies. When you cannot tell if you are aggressive before the other person responds, and anybody can declare he or she has been abused by anything we say, communion between members of different groups becomes even more difficult. What we need is more contact and fewer grounds for mutual accusations and sense of being victimized.

Instead, let’s focus on acts of aggression that are far from micro. Where? See tomorrow’s headlines. People are killing each other because they belong to the “wrong” confessional group, race, or country—in many parts of the world. At home the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, which should insult us more than poor word choice. And people shoot good people, children included, because (among other things) a lobby prevents the Congress from passing legislation that is supported by 90 percent of the public. Such behavior should trouble us more than anything anybody could possibly say.