Originally posted on 1/28/2020 (reformatted).
I had the opportunity to participate in a Continuing Legal Education (“CLE”) seminar during a recent American Bar Association conference in New Orleans. The CLE was titled “Be a Culturally Competent Colleague!” The training focused on competency regarding LGBTQ clients and colleagues. The seminar was particularly informative because it addressed learning strategies for appropriately addressing LGBT discrimination, oppression, bias and indifference in the workplace.
Cultural competency is more than simply embracing diversity and promoting inclusion. Cultural competency requires the ability to adapt, work, and manage successfully in new and unfamiliar cultural settings where assumptions, values, and traditions differ from person to person.
Awareness is one of the biggest factors of success in implementing such competency. Awareness requires a self-examination of biases, feelings, assumptions, and stereotypes and a realization that preconceived opinions hinder our abilities to effectively and competently coordinate with others and provide legal services. Awareness also involves adverse racism and the recognition of racial microaggressions. The term, racial microaggressions, refers to brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.
Three forms of microaggressions can be identified: microassault, microinsult, and microinvalidation. 1) Microassaults are the conscious and intentional actions or slurs, such as using racial epithets, displaying swastikas or deliberately serving a white person before a person of color in a restaurant. 2) Microinsults involve the verbal and nonverbal communications that subtly convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person’s racial heritage or identity. An example is an employee who asks a colleague of color how she got her job, implying she may have landed it through an affirmative action or quota system and 3) Microinvalidations involve communications that subtly exclude, negate or nullify the thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of color. For instance, white people often ask Asian-Americans where they were born, conveying the message that they are perpetual foreigners in their own land.
Microaggressions hold their power because they are invisible and, therefore, they do not allow people to see how their actions and attitudes may be discriminatory. Assuming identities is a form of microaggression, thus it is important to make space for all persons to self-identify their sexual orientation and gender identities when necessary to provide competent legal services. Awareness and knowledge make the invisible visible, thereby, allowing people to become culturally competent and drive positive change in behavior. It is critical to understand that needs and terminology are constantly changing, and our awareness must change accordingly.
Angela Baldwin
The Miller Law Firm PC
Rochester, MI
Inter Alia 