After all, as I regularly remind my students, there are many ways to be a person and everyone gets to decide what kind of person they want to be. That said, a key component to systemic racism (ironically paired with cultural appropriation) is cultural denigration — the idea that the marginalized culture is somehow inferior to the dominant culture. This denigration is manifested in a perpetual cycle of micro-aggressions children of first-generation families experience each day.