I’m writing to correct and comment on two misleading claims in Professor Sartwell’s “A Difficult Time”: that (1) the student movement is focused on “a teenager’s Halloween costume” and that (2) feminist and anti-racist movements have come to be focused on language for no reason other than to prevent utterances of slurs and to compel people to hold “very correct political positions”.

(1) While a teenager’s Halloween costume was what incited more visible protest activity recently, it’s not what the movement is focused on. One way to recognize this is to listen to what the students have actually been saying about what they’re protesting and why. I attended a few of the discussions students organized the week after Halloween, and they didn’t talk much about Halloween costumes. They talked about a campus socially divided by race and class. They talked about threats of violence against students of color in Carlisle and police violence when they’re traveling between here and their homes. I didn’t hear anyone take it that the costume was the focus. Everyone there seemed to understand it as a symptom of and occasion to address the structural problems Professor Sartwell thinks the students ought to be focused on.

No one now would be so noxious as to say that the Civil Rights movement was focused on lunch counters or bus seats. We talk now as though we hold the civil rights protesters of the past in high regard, and so it’s hard to criticize them, just as “it’s hard to intimidate policemen or presidents” while it’s easy to pick out a contemporary student movement and “turn [it] into a scapegoat”. And it’s a common theme of that facile scapegoating that it uses the civil rights movements of the past as a weapon to undermine the movements of the present.

Indeed, just about anytime marginalized groups have protested in this country, people with privilege have jumped to tell them what they really ought to be protesting, how they should protest, which symbols, if any, they should take as contributing to oppression. But people who occupy positions of racial privilege—people like me—are, by virtue of our racial privilege, poorly positioned to recognize what contributes to racial oppression. We don’t live it as immediately. We don’t have to be attuned to it in order to avoid violence. When we have doubts about what people of color are protesting, we should take great care to listen first, consider our epistemic shortcomings, and dwell long on what’s moving us to object.

(2) It’s uncharitable to claim that the reason feminists and anti-racists started talking about how we talk (but still also about what we do, of course!) was just to change the sounds we make with our mouths, the symbols we produce. Yes, it’s quite bad that, as Professor Sartwell points out, many white people came to think the essence of racism is the slur, and so they stopped using slurs but kept voting for officials who support violent police and mass incarceration; and, yes, one can talk like a feminist or an anti-racist and still be an awful abuser of women and people of color. But why should any of us stop at those sad facts without considering what might be the idea behind the focus on language? It’s worth asking what sort of presumption of superiority would drive such an easy dismissal of what women and people of color are trying to resist.

For my part, I think the strategy that focuses on language is well-grounded. Language is one medium in which white supremacist and misogynist ideologies are perpetuated; the language-focused strategy aims to change the collectively-held ideologies that make, for example, white deaths from opioid use an epidemic that calls for treatment and prevention while black deaths from opioid use are a problem of criminality that calls for police crackdowns. The strategy came from dissatisfaction from having small changes in the law or government continually reversed by new generations who harbored ideals they didn’t recognize to be racist, sexist, etc. The changes in language for which this strategy pushes aren’t meant primarily as interventions against the individual behaviors of speakers but as interventions against public discourse, dominant conceptual framing, and commonly accepted patterns of reasoning. They aren’t meant to change, for example, just whether individuals utter slurs but the collectively-held impression that members of marginalized groups fit the stereotypes expressed by slurs.

Now, one may think this effort has failed. If it has, it’s not because it wasn’t directed at the same problems that those revered civil rights protesters of the past were focused on. And it hasn’t been helped by the easy refrain that contemporary protests are unwise and untimely.