Now I think it's important to point out that DiAngelo's style of engagement does not help matters. She makes careful statements of how she is using terms in her books, and those who read them carefully can see that when she calls something racist she doesn't mean that the person is a racist in the sense that most people hear that term. Most people think of that word as meaning someone hates people of other races or has explicitly and conscious views of their inferiority or lesser worth. But DiAngelo is very clear that's not how she's using the word. Racism for her is structural and systemic. When those who have influence do things that have an effect (whether intended or not) that is disproportionately negative to a group that is more marginalized or out of power, then on her usage of the term it is racist, whether the people doing it are discriminating or not, whether they are operating from animosity or hatred or whether they are as well-meaning as can be. She uses terms like "discrimination" and "prejudice" for other things, things more commonly called racism by most people. But racism is reserved for something else, something that doesn't presume any negative motive, just a negative effect.

Given the stigmatizing element of the term "racism," this is at best a very unwise tactic, because it's entirely predictable that she will be putting people on the defensive by talking that way. They understand racism to be a negative thing, and racists are bad people. Being told that something you do is racist has the effect of being told you are a  bad person. And then you get people like Matt Walsh who will completely misrepresent her. On one level, it's partly her own doing, because she chose to use words in a way that predictably confuses people. But at the same time, anyone actually reading what she says carefully should know that she's not saying the thing they accuse her of saying.

She calls that pushback white fragility. And then she absolutizes it. She says that any white person questioning something a black person is saying is engaging in white fragility. I have seen her followers make such claims many times in online conversations. I've had it said against me multiple times, merely because I wanted to see if a claim that was being put forward had evidence to support it. Or I would point out that there are multiple explanations behind a certain statement or action, and assuming racist motives is not necessarily fair to the person in question. Some of this comes from standpoint theory, which in its core claim is merely noticing that someone who experiences something has understanding of that experience that others do not have. And it seems right that I shouldn't question what someone else's experience is if I haven't had that experience myself. But many absolutize standpoint theory in a way that makes the marginalized out to be infallible, so that it is always wrong for a white person to question a black person's false empirical claims, even when all public evidence points the other way.

And then part of what is at issue here is intent vs. impact. We can and should distinguish between intent and impact. Both matter morally, in different ways. Sometimes impact is enough reason not to do something. But we see the person differently if they intend harm than we do if they don't. This is how our homicide laws work, to take one clear example. Someone who premediates murder gets first-degree murder charges. Someone who gets angry and kills someone is going to face a lesser charge. But even accidental homicide can face manslaughter charges, even if no harm was intended. Why should it be any different for lesser moral offenses than killing? If I unintentionally insult someone, isn't that bad, even if it's not morally the same as hatefully insulting them? In the end, I'm not a fan of how DiAngelo categorizes things, but I am also not fond of how many have responded to her. To call it white fragility every time someone pushes back is not fair. But to act like the phenomenon she is drawing attention to is not real also seems to me to be incompatible with the realities I have experienced in having conversations about race with real people.

I have witnessed the phenomenon she describes many, many times. I have seen white people push back against some claim that something is racially problematic in a way that demonstrates they didn't even bother to hear what the person was saying. They assume their own experiences are the only ones that matter and refuse to hear someone who has experienced something unfamiliar to them. They refuse to accept interpretations of events other than their own. They ignore facts and well-documented history to try to confirm a narrative they have always been taught. And they try hard to avoid any feeling of complicity in anything that might be bad, which is a normal part of the human condition. It threatens their sense of moral righteousness to encounter someone who thinks something they are doing is wrong. This is something that happens in many areas of moral thinking. Why would it not happen with race issues? But what DiAngelo has noticed is that with race it can be much more hostile. Again, part of that might be her own fault. But I've seen it happen without the use of DiAngelo's tactics and her particularities of language. Why might that be?

I think Cohen might be right. The anxiety about being seen as a terrible person is especially high in our current moment. What many call wokeness can be motivated by wanting those on the margins to be more included and welcomed, by fighting against things that disproportionately harm them or keep them being treated and seen and talked about as lesser. But the way it's often done sends signals that white people, men, straight people, cis people, political conservatives, Christians, those with greater financial means, those with attractive bodies, those who are healthier or more able, etc. are somehow problematic for being so. Language calling such groups oppressor groups serves to trigger this response. And again, this use of that term does not remotely mean in the mouths of those who talk that way anything like how it is heard. They have a systemic concept of oppression, and it's a deliberate expansion of the concept to include forces hardly anyone has any control over.

Like the deliberate expansion of the concept of racism to include systemic, structural, and institutional harms and disparities that are not always intended to harm or might be the long-term effects of a long-gone racist intent from decades ago, the expansion of the concept of oppression is meant to capture how harmful something is rather than whether it is intended to be harmful. It is meant to capture bad effects without regard to how serious those effects are. So microaggressions, even if the amount of harm from any single microaggression is small, can contribute to a systemic pattern of being unwelcoming or seeing people as outsiders, creating a kind of lack of belonging that is real. Even if it's not as severe as what most people hear when they think oppression (e.g. locking people up, burning books, torturing or executing them because of who they are), they expand the concept to include less severe things and use a morally loaded term of severity to try to wake people up to the fact that such things really are bad, even if they are not as bad as some of the things traditionally falling under those concepts. It's well-motivated effort. Characterizing that as evil misses the genuinely moral motive behind the attempt to expand that language.

But using morally loaded concepts in such ways has another effect. It feels off to many people. It seems like an attempt to fit reality to a false narrative. And people immediately see that. Calling a black person the N-word is not like calling a white person a honkey. The two are not parallel. Nevertheless, it's also not like killing them or putting them in prison or refusing to hire them or excluding them from a hospital, hotel, or restaurant. There are moral differences between different things. And telling an American-born descendant of Chinese immigrants to go home to China is cruel. It's not okay to do. But it's not the severity level of how Chinese workers were treated when the railroads were being built or on the level of laws that prevented Chinese American citizens from owning a house or coming back into this country after visiting relatives in China. Conflating these levels of severity is not all that different from when Christians in the 1980s declared that there was a war on Christmas because people were saying "Happy Holidays" in public when they didn't know if the person they were talking to celebrated Christmas or when music programs in schools preferred to have more generic songs like Jingle Bells over songs about the baby Jesus at their holiday programs. Anyone who thinks that counts as oppression and persecution of Christians should go talk to people who were locked up by the Soviet Union, executed in Saudi Arabia for their Christian faith, or thrown to the lions in Roman arenas.

It feels to many people like the same mistake if you call it oppression because someone doesn't carry skin products designed for darker skin in a pharmacy store in a very white area. We can talk about whether we should stock those products as a matter of a genuine moral question. But calling it oppression not only puts it in the same category as more severe things but immediately means anyone making decisions of what to stock on the shelf is going to be seen as an oppressor, which has the connotations in many people's minds of slavery, unjustified imprisonment, and torture. And then people who are assigned the categories that are labeled oppressor categories will internalize that there is a stereotype about them of being a bad person. If I'm assigned to an oppressor category because I'm a white, straight, cis male with affiliations on the political right and identification as a Christian, then I am conscious that I'm being categorized in a way that triggers stereotypes of oppressiveness. I'm going to be anxious about being labeled an oppressor. I'm going to be facing identity threat when I know conversations about those topics are going to come up. So I will be primed going into a mandatory diversity training to face accusations of being a terrible person. I'm facing identity threat in a way that has some parallels to a black student who is told that black people are stupid and that school is for white kids having to take a standardized test, and then their anxiety leads them to perform less well on the test than they would if they had been told that it wasn't an evaluation of them but an evaluation of the test (and empirical studies show such different results do occur).

So what should we expect to happen when someone so primed then encounters a discussion about one of these social issues? One thing that is well-recognized in the literature on stereotypes is that people who regularly experience being stereotyped have their radar turned way up. This has consequences in two directions. One is that they are more sensitive toward seeing things that are there but that others don't see. This is one reason why standpoint theory, which says that marginalized groups have greater access to certain truths than those in the mainstream, has something undeniably right at its very foundations. A black man who has been treated as if he's a thug on a number of occasions, without any evidence, is more likely to notice others being treated the same way, and other people might not even see it. Women are more likely to notice that their ideas are not taken seriously when men are dominating a conversation. This isn't a lot different psychologically from how I started to notice pregnancy all around me when our first child was still in utero. My radar was simply more attuned to seeing something that was there all along. It wasn't that more people were pregnant, but I was noticing it more. And those not attuned to that are less likely to see it when it's there.

But another thing that is well-documented to happen when you have your sensitivity increased is that you are also more likely to think something is an example of what you have experienced even when it is not. Someone who has experienced racism is more likely to see something as racist even when something other than race is the explanation. Someone who has their radar attuned to spotting ableist practices in schools will see ableism even when something else is really what's going on. You are more likely to perceive bad treatment as coming from whatever identity you experience anxiety about, even when it's not coming from that identity. You might see a nasty attitude as being about race when it's actually coming from indigestion or just a generally nasty person. You might expect that your lack of being promoted is because of gender when someone else is actually more qualified. And those not attuned to that will see it as people looking for something that's not there. Their sense that accusations are mostly imagined or elevated in severity will be reinforced. So you have one group more easily able to spot genuine problems and also more likely to see them when they are not present, and then you have another group less able to see them when they are there but more likely to get it right and not see it when it is not there.

Cohen's Belonging book points to actual studies demonstrating aspects of this overall phenomenon. Both seeing discrimination it when it's there and seeing it when it's not there are increased by someone's being a member of the group being discriminated against. How does this apply to the case I'm discussing? White people who have seen the word "racism" applied to things that they know are explained by something other than race will see false accusations of racism all over the place, even when race really is what's going on. When you have Michael Brown being given as a case of a racist assassination of a kid who had his hands up, even though that is not what happened, you begin to form a narrative of race activists inventing fictional stories about race that are not the best examples of racism. Then you see George Zimmerman, who was undoubtedly a racist in his reasons for approaching Trayvon Martin, successfully defending himself with a self-defense justification for why he, in that moment, thought Martin was going to kill him, with forensic evidence to back up his claim that Martin was bashing his head against the pavement. And then the left continues to frame it as if Zimmerman simply killed Martin because he was a black kid in a neighborhood where he shouldn't have been. The case is more complex than that, and the right could see that. So we have yet another narrative that needed more nuance. The narrative of the left wanted to see everything as racism, and the narrative of the right wanted to see it as not racism. Neither was correct. But when the left is dishonest in both cases, and a movement begins to form that reinforces that dishonesty, the right begins to distrust anyone claiming racism as part of a pattern of inventing fictional stories about events that are more complex. And the distrust becomes animosity when the narrative starts treating all white people as part of a conspiracy to engage in oppression, with the particular building blocks being used coming from fairly minor things comparatively, such as microaggressions, or complex scenarios that are obviously being spun to fit the narrative, such as the cases of Martin  and Brown.

You then have people's sensitivities turned way up to look for false charges of racism all over the place. And this is furthered by the feeling that one's moral status is being threatened by the accusation of being racist. Cognitive processing is diminished when anxiety about how one is being evaluated kicks in. Executive function isn't what it should be when you have your hostility expectations turned way up expecting to be accused of all sorts of things. Just as Eminem couldn't perform when facing the anxiety of a marginalized identity within hip-hop (even if it's a majority identity within society at large), so too do white people underperform when showing up at mandatory diversity trainings expecting to be harangued for being racists. They don't listen charitably. They misinterpret what's being said. They can't hear the truths being talked about, because their ability to do so is hampered by what they have perceived as an identity threat. But they also spot ways that they are being thought of in a morally downward way when the people doing the trainings can't even see that their language implies that, at least when ordinarily understood in its usual meanings. They are getting something right, at least in terms of the ordinary meaning of those terms. But they are not getting the actual people's motives and views right. They are not hearing what's even being said.

So I think Cohen's thesis has plausibility. It fits with what I have directly witnessed many times. And it should give us pause in how we approach these issues, so as not to trigger this kind of response. It doesn't serve the goal of educating people about problematic racial realities if we create conditions where they simply stop listening. And this does happen among well-meaning people who value diversity and want everyone included. It's not just the people who don't want those who are different around who have this kind of response. Those in favor of DEI need to take that seriously and rethink how they do things. That's the reason behind the anti-DEI backlash. There is something there that people are responding to, and it needs to be reevaluated. I happen to think a lot of the anti-DEI response is also unhealthy and does not accomplish what it intends to do very well. It makes some of the same mistakes as those it is responding to are making, which is why it's becoming popular now to talk about the Woke Right as a way of engaging in the same ways as the Woke Left but with all the roles reversed. It's white, straight, men who are oppressed rather than black, gay, women, etc. I have a second post to follow up on this that will focus on the issue of what in DEI is worth preserving and how that can be done in a healthy and helpful way, but this is long enough as it is that I'll leave that for a second post.

Take the abortion debate. If you look at the motives of pro-life critics of abortion, you will generally not find people who just want to control women, despite what pro-choice activists like to say about them. Might there be the occasional politician who really does just want to control women? Sure, but most pro-lifers genuinely care about the unborn. They believe them to have rights on the same level as infants and do not think it's okay to end their lives without the same kinds of unusual circumstances that would make it okay to end the life of an older human being. On pro-choice assumptions, such a person is wrong. But should pro-choicers conceive of them as evil? Not if they pay heed to Inazu's distinction between good motives and bad motives. This is someone who, on pro-choice assumptions, has a view that needlessly restricts women's reproductive choices and ends up controlling women, but that's not the goal. The motive is concern about needlessly ending the life of someone with full human rights to life. If that's wrong, it is not evil.

Now go the other direction. To the pro-lifer, the pro-choice position is wrong. Not only that, it's very wrong. The pro-choice view is tantamount to saying that murder is okay as long as the person being killed hasn't been born yet. (And there are even pro-choice positions that see infanticide as not intrinsically wrong.) So should a pro-lifer see defenders of the pro-choice position as evil? That's certainly what I see many pro-lifers doing. But that sort of take is actually falling afoul of this distinction and confusing wrongness with evil. On Inazu's distinction, a pro-lifer should indeed see the pro-choice view as very wrong. But it is not evil, as he is using this term, because evil requires wanting what's bad for someone. A pro-choice view does not necessarily require that. It does not require wanting the death of human fetuses. It does not even require not caring about those deaths. Pro-choicers can grieve the loss of life that abortion involves. What distinguishes their view is that they place a higher value on women's autonomy than they do on the life of a fetus, and that comes in some cases from having  a lower view of the moral status of a fetus than an infant, but it does not require not caring about the fetus's well-being. It only requires having a higher moral principles than life in this particular case.

The reality is that both pro-life and pro-choice positions care about women's autonomy and about fetal life. Or at least they are compatible with valuing both things. Where they disagree is the relative importance of the two moral principles. One places autonomy higher, and the other places life higher. Anyone familiar with me will know that I side with life on this question. I think abortion is wrong in far more cases than most pro-lifers do, in fact. Only in cases where something akin to self-defense is involved will I think abortion is ever okay. Nevertheless, I don't think people who sort out the issue differently than I do are evil, in the sense Inazu means. I just think they are very wrong.

I would say similar things about some of the big debates going on right now about President Trump's use of DOGE to shut down lots of government-funded work indiscriminately and without regard to which ones are actually wasteful. I disagree with using a sledgehammer to do the work of a scalpel, and many of the particular ways this is happening might well be unconstitutional. Certainly some are illegal, and several judges have said so, issuing orders that the administration has simply ignored and kept on doing what they wanted to do, even posting stuff to social media about being above the law. It's clear that I think what DOGE is doing is wrong. But the motivation here among people who support DOGE is to reduce government waste and save taxpayers money. There is no motive to try to harm people. There is no motive to want people to lose jobs, to want food being wasted sitting in warehouses and not being allowed to get to people who need it. There is no motive to prevent projects that are 90% complete from being completed, thus creating more waste. That is all happening, and it is the effect of what the government is currently doing, but it's not the motive. Or at least it's not the motive of many of the people who support these measures. So I cannot call those people evil, even if I think they are supporting something that is wrong.

At the same time, those who oppose what is going on here are in fact opposing something that will do away with a good amount of government waste in the long run. I see people posting on social media in ways that feel like they think anyone opposing DOGE is evil for wanting a wasteful government. It's pretty obvious from what I said above that you can oppose what they are doing without wanting the government to be wasteful. In fact, several arguments I just gave are recognizing that the behavior of DOGE is in fact wasteful itself. In neither case does anyone in this debate have to count as evil even if their view might be wrong. As with abortion, maybe there are grifters and manipulators involved whose motives truly are evil, but with most of those cases we can't really perceive someone's motives, so we have to be hesitant in applying such criticisms without really strong evidence of such motives. Maybe that can be done. But certainly the vast majority of people on either side of this question do not count as evil the way Inazu is using the term.

I would say the same of the majority of opponents and proponents of Trump's immigration policies. Those who support it care about the law being followed. It is not a bad thing to hate laws being consistently broken with no consequences, especially because it's an insult to those who follows those laws. Legal immigrants have led the charge in pushing for the kinds of efforts that Trump is engaging in. Even if you think Trump is very wrong in how he is doing this (and I am very much among that group), it's hard to say that there aren't good motives for wanting to increase border control. There are. Similarly, those who want open borders certainly have good motives, even if they are favoring a policy with terrible consequences, as many on the other side believe. They want to care for the needy, and who is needier than those who are trying to escape from terrible circumstances, which is true of most border crossers? Now there are terrible ways to defend either side. Some of those might involve genuine evil. But I'm talking here about the ordinary person who has a view on the question. Most who disagree about this issue are not evil, as Inazu means that term.

I can imagine someone objecting to this by pointing to the distinction between intent and impact. That distinction lies at the heart of a big difference between the approach of the left and the right on a number of social issues, and it's my contention that both sides are wrong in how they try to put those things together, but they are wrong in opposite ways. And the ways they are wrong do involve Inazu's distinction between being wrong and evil.

I was discussing Elon Musk's recent supposed Nazi salute with my class a few weeks ago. This discussion was before we had gotten to Inazu's chapter on being wrong and being evil, also, so we didn't have that terminology to describe anything. I was amazed to see every point I would have wanted to make being raised by the students as they talked about the case. And by the end of the conversation, I felt like they were all kind of on the same page about the incident, too, which was even more amazing to me. Several students raised the difficulty of knowing his intent. One pointed to his probable autism or other neurodiverse characteristics, whatever that might be in his case. Others pointed to the fact that he should know how it would be perceived, even if he didn't intend it that way. In other words, they pointed to the impact even if the intent was not there. There are a number of features there to think through as we evaluate the entire incident.

The same issues come up with discussions of microaggressions in general. The whole point of a microaggression is that it is not actually an aggression at all. It's a pretty bad misnomer. Microaggressions are not even micro aggressions, because they are simply not aggressions. They don't count as aggressions, because they are not intended to harm, and aggressions are. But no one thinks the problem with microaggressions is the intent. Those who criticize them are pointing to the impact.  There is often a response to that, completely lacking in empathy, which asserts that people just need to learn to deal with things that offend them. On one level, that's true. Each incident like this is worth very little. I can't let everything someone might say about me harm me, to the extent that I can move past it and get on with my life. Maturity does require that. At the same time, solid research shows that even small incidents of being excluded and pushed to the social margins can have effects similar to actual physical pain and have long-term effects on motivation, creativity, productivity, self-worth, and general health. Lots of little things add up, and the point of drawing attention to microaggressions is to get to the impact, not to accuse people of bad intent.

Impact is important. It's a reason to criticize what people do even when they don't intend harm. It's a reason to call upon people to pay attention to how their words and behavior will be received and to think through the effect of what they do. But intent is also important, because it shows us the difference between wrong and evil. Sometimes when someone does wrong the reason it's wrong is because they should have cared more to understand the impact and should have made an effort to avoid it. But that does not amount to evil in our current sense. But I see people trying to push it to that. That's wrong.

Similarly, intent is important. We need to distinguish between good motives and bad motives, because that shows us the difference between wrong and evil. But that still doesn't mean we can excuse everything anyone does just because they meant well. It might be that they should have been more understanding of what they impact would be. it might be that they should have been more aware of what the impact would be. That doesn't mean they didn't do anything wrong. It just means they weren't being evil. There is a moral difference.

There is a significant debate right now between those who see racism as merely a matter of the heart (e.g. Jorge Garcia has an influential paper in philosophy defending such a position, and I think it's shared by something like half of Americans) and those who have adopted a more expanded definition of racism to include systemic and structural features of the system we find ourselves in, where something can be racist even with no ill intent. Occasionally you will find unusual views that put things together differently from either approach (e.g. Robin DiAngelo thinks only the systemic stuff is racism, whereas the stuff in the heart is just prejudice and discrimination but not racism, but her view is so at odds with the way ordinary people use the word that I don't take it very seriously.) But the reality is that about half of Americans do hear the word "racism" in ways that include the systemic stuff. And half do not. That leads to lots of disagreements that really amount to verbal or semantic disagreements, rather than substantive moral disagreement.

The word "oppression" has also been similarly expanded by activists and academics to include more than just intentional severe policies and behavior from governments to keep particular groups of people in situations of great harm. In their use, it now includes structural and systemic elements of society or of institutions that no one intends to harm anyone. If someone is marginalized by unconscious processes or if cultural imperialism happens by innocent people simply borrowing stuff from those they want to imitate, then it still counts as oppression. And there are significant linguistic communities that use that word in each way. Since meaning is determined by use, I have to recognize that both uses amount to genuine meanings of the word. It simply can mean different things in the mouths of different people.

But what should we say morally about such expansions of meaning? Both racism and oppression are serious things. They are strong words that should be reserved for very serious things. That's why I think the 1990s era language from Christians in the United States about the war on Christmas was a bit over the top. Sure, some government entities were taking down manger scenes or blocking Christmas carols from being sung at holiday programs in schools. But to call that oppression when people were being locked up in the Soviet Union and beheaded in Saudi Arabia for being Christians is a bit much. Can we say the same thing about black Americans being assumed to be less intelligent merely for their race, as compared with being enslaved or killed in cases of the most severe kinds of oppression in the world today and throughout history? There's an argument there for being hesitant about expanding the meaning of these words too much, as if it undermines the seriousness of intentional racism and oppression. And it falls afoul of the distinction between wrong and evil to push those terms too far into areas where it's just good intent with bad impact.

At the same time, intent is not the only moral concern we should care about. We should care a lot about impact, and many views are wrong precisely because they have bad impact, even if they don't have bad intent. In my experience, too many people resisting the use of "racism" or "oppression" in cases with more innocent intent or not so severe consequences as doing so to excuse genuine wrongdoing or at least not to have to address it. Many things that the right doesn't want to call racism or oppression are nevertheless wrong and worth calling attention to and trying to prevent or reduce. Just because it's not evil in the sense Inazu means that term does not mean it's not wrong. The distinction is important, but it's not the only thing we should care about.

I want to end with a really interesting example that got me thinking for a bit before I arrived at what seems to me the right way to think about this. At Inazu's talk this week, someone asked a question about President Trump's executive order regarding what some call affirming care for transgender people. He wanted to suggest that with such an order, evil has actually arrived, because it involves not caring about the well-being of people who are in need of such care. But is that the right way to think about that? We have a debate going on precisely about whether such care is affirming. Whether it is even care. One side of that discussion sees the gender identity of a person (defined as how they come to see themselves) as definitive of who they really are. It follows from such a view that the only way to affirm such a person is to affirm that identity and pursue any ways that they want to get their body to match their perception of who they really are. In their view, any resistance to that is harmful to transgender people. On Inazu's classification system, that would make such resistance wrong. But would it be evil?

Think about what the other side says. They perceive such gender identities as a fictional view about oneself. What is really definitive of who the person is comes from biology. That might take some nuance and complexity once you understand what some people refer to as intersex conditions, and so on. But the main idea is that gender identities are a mistake about who you are. Your biology determines who you really are. Now whether that take is right or wrong, it's clearly their take. And on that view, someone is actually harming themselves by undergoing surgery that mutilates their sexual organs irreversibly. Even hormone therapy can have permanent effects. Growing breasts out or having your voice changed is not rally reversible, even though I have seen people claim that such treatments are reversible. What is the intent, then? It's to prevent harm. And in the case of minors, it's to prevent harm being done to those who cannot consent by those who have the decision-making capacity to give in to desires that a not fully mature person has when a few more years of maturity might well change their mind (statistics actually do bear that out, too).

So it seems to me that the case this commenter raised is actually not a good case of evil having arrived in power. It's a case that illustrates someone seeing something as evil when at most it should be classified as wrong. If that professor's view of gender-affirming surgery is correct, then Trump's policy is wrong, but it should not count as evil by Inazu's categorization. And I think those on the other side need to recognize the same thing about people who do want children to be able to undergo such hormonal and surgical treatments. If their view is correct, then such people are wrong to want to allow children to be treated in such ways. But they are not evil, because they are not trying to harm anyone. They just have a very mistaken view about what counts as the well-being of transgender children.

I see people making these blunders every day on social media. I think they are wrong to do confuse wrong with evil. But they may not be evil to confuse wrong with evil, and I think that has to govern how I should interact with them.

​​What Pope Francis says in this interview is an affirmation of fundamental human goodness. Christian doctrine has always taught that. It also teaches that we are fallen. Augustine expressed this as the doctrine of original sin, which under a Protestant understanding has been expressed by total depravity.

Total depravity does not mean we are as fallen as we possibly could be. It means that every aspect of our being is fallen. Is this compatible with holding that we are fundamentally good? It sure is. Take Augustine for a good example of someone saying both things.

In Augustine's view, virtue is well-ordered love. Being perfect would mean loving everything according to how good it is. All of our desires are lined up in the right order, meaning we love what is most good the most and what is less good less.

Augustine sees evil as a privation, i.e. a falling from what is best. Everything that exists has some good to it, or it wouldn't exist. There is no negative value, then. Some things are not as good as they could be, but they all have some positive value. We thus should love everything God created as good.

But some things are less good than they should be. That's what we call evil. It's a distortion. Some things are evil because good things are missing, such as when the keyboard I am typing on right now has a missing key. It doesn't function as it ought to, because the J key is not present.

Other things are evil because they are in the wrong order, such as when you try to connect the hard drive of the computer in backwards. All the parts are there, but the disorder prevents it from working as it should. In Augustine's view, all evil is one of those two things -- something missing or something in the wrong order.

Sin is a kind of evil. Typically sin is when we love good things but in the wrong order. There is nothing wrong with seeing my well-being as good and seeking it out. But when I place my comfort, which is good, above higher moral concerns, I am disordered.

Total depravity and original sin are concepts Augustine would affirm. He would say that every aspect of my being has fallen desires. I want things that are good, but they are disordered. I place things that are not as good as God above God, which is idolatry. I place self-interest above the good of others, which can be selfish. And I might value good things but in a distorted way.

Yet Augustine would affirm that humans are all fundamentally good in the sense that our desires are all for good things. Everything we seek after can be conceived of as a longing for good, even if it's distorted. What we want is not bad in that sense, even if it's bad in another sense. We were created good, indeed in the image of God. That is what gives us a moral status not possessed by other animals. It's not because we are morally perfect that grounds universal human rights. It's because God made us to have intrinsic value. God declared us good, and we represent God to the world. That image has been distorted, but every human being is fundamentally good. Every desire we have is for something good, even if we have it in a distorted way or out of order with other desires for good things, because everything created by God is good, and having desires for good things is good.

Augustine also insisted on finding ways to talk that allow most of what we say to come out as true. He was a defender of ordinary speech. This manifested in his response to skepticism. He thought of skeptical approaches as having too high a standard for what counts as knowledge. Expecting knowledge to be 100% certainty, as the skeptics did, was misusing knowledge-language in a way at odds with how the words for knowledge are actually used by real people.

He criticized the Stoics for defining emotion in a way that is at odds with ordinary language use, taking emotions to be the bad ones and thus getting the conclusion that all emotion is bad, but they had to pretend that righteous indignation is not anger and is not an emotion to make such a claim, since they had no problem with that emotion. They simply refused to call it an emotion. And he insisted that when we call people good, we are not speaking falsely.

On this issue, he insisted that the perfect life is not possible in this life, but it still makes sense to speak of some lives as better than others. So we can call someone's life a good life and, speaking relative to other lives, be speaking truly, even though the truly blessed life is only possible in the afterlife, Similarly, he is very clear that there's nothing wrong with saying that someone is good, in a way that is totally compatible with the doctrine of original sin or what later came to be called total depravity. We can say that Mother Theresa is good, relative to Adolf Hitler. Some people are morally better than others. And we can say that one person is better than they were several years ago. Our desires can become more in line with what they ought to be. We can make such comparative judgments, and they are relative to each other, not to the absolute standard. So we can call someone a good person and not be saying something false, even if the person is not good in an absolute sense.

What Augustine would insist on is recognizing that we are fundamentally good but distorted from the goodness that would be ideally present in humanity's original state. Total depravity is traditionally presented as being fallen in every aspect of our being but not as being fallen to the greatest degree. Every aspect of our being, in Augustine's view, is below where it ought to be. We don't want what is most good as much as we should. We want other things that are less good more than the things that are most good. But that is compatible with recognizing that the things we want are good and with seeing our hearts as mostly directed toward good things.

The pope said that most humans are fundamentally good. In what sense? He says we mostly want good things. Our heart desires good. That's pretty much all he actually said. But isn't that precisely what Augustine says? And Augustine was a firm believer in original sin and what later came to be called total depravity. So I don't see anything here that necessarily is at odds with historic Christian doctrine on this issue. Is it possible that he could have been clearer, perhaps by saying right before this that everyone is a sinner? Sure, and he actually did do that, but the clips posted on social media are conveniently cutting that out in order to make this look worse than it actually is. But that is what the Bible calls false witness. I will have no part of that.

The idea of systemic, institutional, or structural racism goes back before the Civil Rights era. People had been calling attention to these sorts of problems well before the time of MLK. But it began to be more mainstream as people noticed that changes in laws and societal attitudes were not bringing along changes in some of the other forces that advantage or disadvantage people along race lines. MLK began to see this toward the end of his life, and he began to recognize that just getting people having the right attitudes and making changes in laws to prevent explicit and deliberate discrimination would not be sufficient to solve all of our race problems. There are systemic, structural, and institutional forces that lead to disadvantage and advantage in ways that no one intends. No one is deliberately discriminating or explicitly prejudiced. Yet disadvantage and advantage occur. The problem is in institutions, structures, and systems rather than in beliefs, desires, emotions, or actions of individual people. That is the concept of systemic racism.

On one conception of racism, the one I was raised with, the one that feels to me like how the English language actually operates, these systemic problems are simply not racism. I completely understand those who don't like to call it racism. I myself don't like to call it that. Racism is an attitude of the heart or a set of actions of individuals. But that's a linguistic issue. It's not an issue of what the world is actually like. The thing people are in fact calling systemic racism, and in fact the only thing that term has ever referred to, is real. Not only is it real, but it consists of what seem to me to be the more significant and substantial problems that we have in our society at this point. The stuff I'm inclined to call racism is becoming less present, less effective in causing real problems. Why? Because there is such a stigma attached to racism, to even being perceived as racist, that it's diminished to a much greater degree than the systemic problems have. But the systemic problems remain. And the systemic problems do trace back to racism in the classic sense, when you look hard enough and far enough. They wouldn't be present without racism having occurred.

​Here's an non-racial example for anyone having trouble understanding the concept of a systemic problem. Adderall is a controlled substance. People take it when they have no condition requiring it, and people take doses that are much too high. That means it's illegal for a pharmacy to put it on auto-refill, and it's illegal even to prescribe it with refills. You have to call your doctor every month to get them to submit a new prescription. Typically, the people who are taking Adderall are the same people who have executive control issues and are going to have a harder time being organized and remembering to call about that new prescription, which places an additional burden on people who are already worse off when it comes to things like this. That results in days without the medication that helps them be more organized and attentive. No one is trying to make life harder for people with ADHD and autism who rely on this medication. That's not the point. The goal is to prevent abuse by those who don't need the medication to begin with. But because of laws designed to prevent that abuse, the people who need the medication suffer. This is what a systemic or structural problem looks like. 

Are there such problems that occur along race lines? There certainly are. There are institutional, systemic, and structural forces in our society that work against people of color, some of them stronger for certain groups than for others, some of them not because of any present discrimination but just because of the effects of past discrimination (e.g. housing segregation today is not a result of present-day bank practices but because of past discrimination in mortgages and racial contracts of who could live in which neighborhoods), and there remain disparities in infrastructure, housing quality, locations of shopping or other necessities nearby, and so on. School segregation no longer has any laws forcing it, but kids tend to go to school where they live, and the quality of schools reflects the resources of the neighborhood. Together with policies like school choice, which allows enterprising parents and students to get out of the bad schools but also thereby makes the bad schools worse for those without that initiative and drive, our schools get more segregated and more disparate in quality and outcome, and that occurs along race lines. There is many careful studies that identify biases that affect law enforcement and criminal justice, disparities in health care, stigmatizations and stereotypes that affect our behavior even if we think the stereotypes are false, and so on. It should be obvious that many of these things are not racism in the classic sense, but they are the only thing that people  have ever meant by terms like "systemic racism." They are disparate results that occur along race lines in ways that are predictable and systemic. The forces in our society tend to produce those results along certain lines in ways that are consistent and recurring. And these problems are much more serious than a privileged white kid using the N-word or not inviting the one black kid in the mostly white neighborhood over for a birthday party.

Now if you prefer to call these things "systemic advantage" and "systemic disadvantage" or something like that, I have great sympathies for why you might want to do that. But the fact remains that these are the only thing that terms like "structural racism" and "systemic racism" have ever meant. Words mean what they are used to mean. So those terms do in fact refer to these sorts of problems. That is so, whether you want to think of these sorts of issues as racism or not.  I tend to be in the "not" category on that myself. But systemic racism is real, and those who consistently deny it are in effect denying that any of these problems are real. It does not help the cause of the political right in trying to push back against some of the excesses and unhelpful behaviors of the left on race issues if it just looks like you are denying observable facts, and that's what denials of systemic racism look like to the left. If you want to have real conversations where you engage with real people and actually try to convince them of things, to help them see that you have a legitimate point against anything they are saying, it helps to understand their view and get it right first. You are not doing that if you simply deny the reality of systemic racism and say no more. That strategy is doomed to failure. It is no wonder that they will call that strategy "white fragility" or "white supremacy," because it just looks like a desperate attempt to pretend that our most serious problems along race lines simply don't exist. Let's stop doing that, please. If you don't want to be accused of white fragility and white supremacy, then do not set yourself up to be accused of it by behaving in exactly the way the left predicts you will act. And then maybe there will be room for an actual conversation where people seek to understand each other and move forward.