I love your insights, Angel. They make so much sense. But they might be more easily put into practice by removing them from the DEI framework. It is steeped in anti-racist rhetoric and has an aura of contempt for white people baked into it. It sounds like the training you received was better than most, but the underlying philosophy remained, especially when it comes to microaggressions and the assumptions about who is subject to them.

I'm relieved that your HR person didn't use their power to make your life miserable when confronting your uncensored personality. But is it possible that you were handled gently because you're a person of color? We’ll never know, but I can’t help wondering.

Microaggression is an interesting topic, worth addressing. I cringe inside when I remember doing exactly what you describe: at work, I once confused two Asian women with one another. One was a long-standing employee and the other was brand new, so your solution was right on the money.

In DEI, there’s an assumption that white people can only be perpetrators, never recipients, of microaggressions. I'm a fair skinned Jew, and apparently I "look Jewish," because strangers like to remind me of that fact out of the blue. As a child, I went to a day camp where I was one of a handful of Jews, and I was sometimes mistaken for the other Jewish girls who looked nothing like me. I'm a woman, so microaggressions and actual aggressions always were and will be a problem. And I'm a lesbian, so my short hair and gender-neutral clothes have often made me a target of homophobic threats, both physical and verbal, from both men and women. None of this is going to magically go away through “training.” A range of tactics and responses are required by me to get through life. I am sometimes wary, but if I walked around offended all the time, hating the human race, I'd be miserable.

Life is a collection of microaggressions and microkindnesses both given and received. If we love our fellow humans and want to have a happier life, it’s worth it to shine a light on our unconscious biases and strive to do better. But I don’t believe that DEI is the way.