Sheree Marlowe, the chief diversity officer at Clark University: An environmental microaggression is ' On your first day of class, you enter the chemistry building and all of the pictures on the wall are scientists who are white and male'

The New York Times reports on the Stalinists on campus:

Ms. Marlowe, a lawyer who most recently was diversity officer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, was also recruited by two other colleges this year before settling at Clark, a manicured campus of about 3,000 students an hour west of Boston in this heavily working-class city.

Her two-hour presentation on Aug. 27 aimed to help students identify microaggressions and to teach them how to intervene when they observe one. Microaggressions can be verbal, nonverbal or environmental, she said.

“What’s an environmental microaggression?” Ms. Marlowe asked the auditorium of about 525 freshmen. She gave an example. “On your first day of class, you enter the chemistry building and all of the pictures on the wall are scientists who are white and male,” she said. “If you’re a female, or you just don’t identify as a white male, that space automatically shows that you’re not represented.”

A nonverbal microaggression could be when a white woman clutches her purse as a black or Latino person approaches.

Another subset of microaggression is known as the microinvalidation, which includes comments suggesting that race plays a minor role in life’s outcomes, like “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”

Don't you laugh, that's not funny.