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As psychoanalysis teaches, things are rarely what they seem to be. Micro-aggressions are complex enactments illustrating how we embody race in psychoanalysis, history defining the future in fleeting moments that endure. Through my own personal story, as well as, being deeply familiar with analytic institute life, a deconstruction of the micro-aggressive moment is offered, revealing it to be anything but “micro” and fundamentally paradoxical. The familiar surprise of micro-aggression is made up of contemporaneous self-state switches forged from unconscious trans-generational trauma and lived history, and shaped by the structural context of an institute. After describing the many ways dissociated micro-aggressive experiences author an individual’s and an institute’s narrative, suggestions to increase racial safety in institutes are offered, including: antidotes to the inevitability of micro-aggression and shame in analytic training, guidelines for more open communication about race, the necessity for historical self-disclosure to discover hidden similarities of difference, the shared burden of only-ness and the need for kinship networks to encourage differentiation of the self as well as systemic change. Finally, a proposal is offered for how analytic institutes might ally to create more balanced racial representation.