This is NPR's Life Kit.

A lot of people are talking about the big topics of race and racism,

police and power after the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that have come after.

You might be having conversations right now with your family or workplace or friend group

asking variations of what can I do or even how am I complicit,

which is a conversation worth having.

But it's also one that if you do it right,

we'll include either calling out how someone may have said or done something kind of messed up or

being called out on having done or said something messed up unintentionally even.

You've probably heard the term for these types of transgressions. They're called microaggressions.

Because they can occur at any given time. They can occur in workplace settings. They can occur

in conversations within families. They can occur just walking down the street.

So we have these huge systemic issues that are happening.

And then we also have these everyday sorts of interactions that are result of those systemic issues.

Kevin Nadal is a professor of psychology at John J College of Criminal Justice in New York.

He's done research and written books on the effects of microaggressions and how people can cope with them.

Everything going on right now with the protests and police violence on top of the pandemic might

seem big. But I ask Nadal why it might be important to think small.

We navigate all of these things in our lives for many of us on a daily, hourly basis and for some of us

where we might not even recognize that we are navigating them or even perpetrating them.

And that's why it's important for us to have these conversations.

I'm Andrew Limbong and this episode of Life Kid is all about identifying microaggressions

...