Colin Kohrs / Winonan

Next Monday, Sept. 12, Winona State University’s Lyceum Series will be hosting “You Mean, There’s Race in My Movies and Media?” with Frederick Gooding.

It’s a topic Nasro Abbas, a senior on the KEAP Diversity Resource Center council, said students on the university could benefit from hearing.

“I feel like living in Minnesota with ‘Minnesota nice’ micro-aggressions are like part of the fabric of our state,” she said. “They happen all the time. They’re one of those things I’ve just learned to deal with even though I shouldn’t have to learn to.”

Chuck Ripley, a professor of English at Winona State acts as the KEAP diversity resource center faculty liaison, also serves as the chair of the Human Rights Commission for Winona County. Ripley explained the causes of micro-aggressions as a social problem, and how racism can be ingrained within an individual, without that individual being actively and consciously racist.

According to the university, “this talk will focus on issues regarding race and identity, especially in the media, and how micro-racial aggressions that describe insults and dismissals regularly inflicted on African Americans and witnessed by non-African Americans, include similar aggressions directed at women.”

For Abbas, the most common insults she receives are on her English speaking skills.

“One of my favorite little back handed compliments is whenever I’m speaking English with somebody and they say ‘oh my God. You speak English so good,’ and I just want say ‘I speak English well,” Abbas said.

Abbas, born in Somalia with a brief residence in Kenya, moved to the U.S. when she was five. She is now a pre-law student studying both English and philosophy. She has taken upper level courses on everything from Chaucerian era English to modern day language.

“If you think about it, on the surface level they’re trying to give you a compliment,” she said about the English comment. “But if you look beyond that, the reason they’re saying I – me, a black Muslim woman – speak English so ‘good’ is because they don’t expect me to, because in their eyes I am not a native English speaker. They’re confused that somehow I have somehow learned their language (they’re taking ownership of that), and I have mastered it.”

“I chuckle every time I hear it,” she added.

Ripley said he can explain why certain individuals contest or deny this kind of racism.

“[People will deny racism] even if someone is not racist in the sense where they’re going to use the n-word, or they’re going to endorse segregation,” he said. “We know in the post civil rights era that’s not something that’s allowed in the public sphere anymore, but with that new status quo, people will reject implicit hidden racism.”

Ripley added, “it’s important to remember one has to be anti-racist rather than non-racist. It’s something that you have to actively unlearn.”

With the frequency of these encounters, Abbas said she has stopped trying to explain herself.

“I don’t even take the time to correct them anymore,” she said. “I honestly don’t have the time to sit there and educate every single individual who has an incorrect mindset about something. It’s not my job to educate you, a fully grown adult.”

Gooding’s event will also address the topic of representation in media, something Abbas said is important to teach people, especially at a young age.

“Representation matters, it means so much especially when you’re young and impressionable,” Abbas said. “When you see an entire world where everybody who’s hailed as beautiful and perfect an incredible is different from you, it means a lot have somebody that looks similar to you, having those same features that you have.”

While things are far from perfect, Abbas noted positive motion in media representation.

“When you see an American icon that looks like you you’re able to relate to them which is an incredible thing, and that’s happening more and more today,” she said.