I’m grateful to learn that the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate Program is catching hold at Belchertown’s Jabish Middle School [“Change for a school’s climate,” Gazette, May 16]. I feel a personal tie to that place because I was a substitute teacher there for six years.

The Gazette reported that guidance counselor Jennifer Parker said she had noticed eighth grade girls “calling out a group of seventh grade boys for an offensive joke they made, identifying it as a microaggression.’’ I cringe when I encounter “microaggression,” a term for relatively small actions or utterances considered offensive by, as the Gazette phrases it, “marginalized groups.’’

A locally famous incident occurred in the spring of 2023, when the Easthampton public schools offered its superintendent job to Vito Perrone and then revoked its invitation after Perrone committed the microaggression of addressing two school officials as “ladies” in an email. It was a thoughtless and thin-skinned reaction.

These days we do a lot of finger-pointing, and I fear that more might be riding in over the horizon. I’m nervous that microaggression, like a virus, will “jump species’’ to no longer cover only remarks and deeds connected to social problems, but also peccadillo-level personal offenses.

Its use could preempt innumerable conversations. Expressions of hurt feelings, followed by apologies — these are healthy and necessary interactions — would become things of the past. People who forget to say please or thank you would not be considered merely rude, they would be branded as microaggressors. And that, if the aggrieved have their way, would end the conversation.

Daniel Miller

Granby