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First, the professor neglected to entertain the notion that the history of psychology and the curriculum comes from a primarily White Eurocentric perspective that alienates and/or fails to capture the experiential reality of students of color (cultural racism). In the first edition of this book, we termed these sorts of environmental slights and indignities environmental microaggressions. In this case, the readings, lectures, and content of the course come from only one perspective and do not present the historical totality of all groups in our society or global community. In our current thinking, we now refer to these slights as environmental macroaggressions to underscore their manifestation in macrolevel institutions, structures, and cultural values. Although a biased program or policy may be a macroaggression, it is important to note that it is generally individually mediated. By this we mean that someone in authority (in this case, Professor Richardson) acts as an agent of a biased educational curriculum that potentially harms students of color.

Robert Guthrie, an African American psychologist, in the late 1970s produced the first edition of his now‐classic book Even the Rat Was White, which took psychology to task for being primarily a White Eurocentric field, neglecting the contributions of people of color in historical storytelling, and unintentionally elevating the contributions of one group (primarily White males) while denigrating Asian, African, and Latin American contributors through “benign neglect.” The hidden message to students of color was that White American psychology is universal and superior (other psychologies are inferior), and that students of color should accept this “reality.” White students are affirmed, but students of color feel that their identities are constantly assailed or ignored in the classroom. Black students are likely to expend considerable emotional energy protecting their own integrity while at the same time being distracted from fully engaging in the learning process (D. W. Sue, Lin, Torino, Capodilupo, & Rivera, 2009). Researchers documented a similar finding among South Asian Canadian undergraduate students (Poolokasingham, Spanierman, Kleiman, & Houshmand, 2014).