In the wake of President Donald Trump’s observations about Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa last week, many have been surprised to see the open utterance and printing of the word “shithole” throughout the mainstream media. The notoriously prim New York Times printed the word for the first time in its history (though kept it out of the headline), and I have been bemused at being able to happily sound off with the word on CNN and MSNBC, where hosts casually assured me that “this is cable.”

The phrase briefly threw other media outlets into a tizzy, though. “I am rendering judgment on whether we can use the word ‘shithole’ on the radio,” tweeted WNYC’s news director shortly after the story broke. NPR’s newscasters gravely warned listeners last Friday about the extremely offensive language they were about to hear, and the network was at least briefly rationing its “shitholes” to one an hour. Some newspapers still stuck with “s***hole” and similar evasions.

The episode can be seen as a teaching moment, in which we come to understand that some people’s conception of what profanity is has become disconnected from the reality of our times. Profanity we have indeed, but it is not the grand old “four letter words,” which, regardless of their actual letter count, refer to religion, sex, and excrement.

Words are treated as profane on the basis of what a society is truly hung up about. And let’s face it — American society as a whole is vastly less worried about taking the Lord’s name in vain or mentioning copulation and evacuation in public than it once was. Rather, what truly concerns us, horrifies us, inspires a desire to shield people from the full force of the language, are words like the n-word, the f-word referring to homosexual men, and the c-word referring to, well, you know.

Who, in 2018, is gravely offended by references to excrement?

This is why I suspect that even the more cautious news outlets are more “worried” about printing or airing “shithole” than truly worried. It is also why a president would be capable of uttering it in an official setting at all. Trump is, to be sure, almost vegetatively unfiltered, which is why he has become the first president to use that word in a context in which the public could become privy to it. Note, however, that speculations that one of these days he might drop the n-word in a similar situation are almost surely fantasy; even with Trump I feel confident writing that for posterity.

Even as obnoxious a personage as him would not dare to use that word, or the other two I alluded to, for public consumption. That those words exert a check upon someone as uncontrollable as Trump is a demonstration that they are today’s true profanity.

The nature of profanity in English has evolved over time, and the gatekeepers sometimes fall behind. In earlier English, profanity consisted of swearing to God and other religious figures in contexts seen as far too minor for prayer (hence the shorthand usage “swearing” to mean “cursing”). To say “Oh, my God” was to “take the Lord’s name in vain.” Hence the development of euphemisms such as “Gosh,” “zounds” (for “his wounds”), and “by George” instead of “by God.”

Later, amidst the emergence of a self-consciously bourgeois class, an extreme ticklishness about references to the body settled in. People began to refer to cuts of poultry as “white” and “dark” meat to avoid referring to “breasts.” One does not precisely rest in a rest room. Here emerged a situation where words for private parts were either clinical (penis) or earthy (fill in the blank) but never just neutral. (An anatomy book from 1400, in contrast, casually referred to the “cunt.”)

The idea that words like “damn,” “hell,” “shit,” and “fuck” are “the bad words” is a hangover from this era, which indeed persisted until relatively recently. An episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show portrayed middle-class Rob and Laura Petrie as gravely horrified that their little son Richie had used a word the script could not even specify at the time but which is clearly “fuck.” Rob refers to it as “evil.” To be sure, few of us would be ecstatic if our child used that word at school today, but we would be a far less scandalized. A modern version of the episode would have Richie dropping the n-bomb.

A bestselling book has the title Go the Fuck to Sleep

Certainly, there are Americans who remain deeply uncomfortable with the “four letter” words. A Mormon of my acquaintance, for example, refused to see the musical “The Book of Mormon” because of the language used in it, and I assume she was not alone.

Also, matters of age, region and personal predilection as well as religion matter here. However, in an America in which a bestselling parody of children’s book is called Go the Fuck to Sleep, a hit song is titled “Fuck You,” OMG is a favored exclamation of apple-cheeked teens nationwide, and the president feels comfortable saying “shithole” in a suit and tie while meeting with senators, it is safe to say that the words we are formally taught are “bad” are less profane than salty.

One may shield one’s children from them — but within the knowledge that by the time they are roughly 12 they will be bathed in them daily through usage by peers, slightly older kids, and the media they partake of, and will likely be using them themselves whenever we are out of earshot.

Consider: However much he indulges in racist code, if Donald Trump were caught on a hot mic crowing that “The niggers just need to shape up” or “If only she’d stop being such a cunt,” it would likely be one of the very few things that actually would spark a sincere effort to eject him from office — so utterly unthinkable in public usage are they. That is, they are profane in the true sense. (Yes, he was caught using “pussy,” but in use not as an epithet but as a word for a body part. And “pussy,” while distinctly unsavory, does not carry the pitiless, accusatory sting of “cunt.”)

Meanwhile, “shithole”? I suggest the media has been correct to be grown up about this, even if a few outlets seemed stuck in the 1950s. My 6-year-old saw me on TV the other day using the word multiple times and frankly she will be just fine. What’s significant is that she has never even heard the n-word, the f-word, or the c-word, won’t for a while, and will be taught not to use them as stringently as she is taught not to run out into the street.

It is a positive development that it is hatred toward vulnerable minorities that is truly considered obscene, and that we euphemize words through which some people express such loathing. We — a few stodgy editors and public-news producers aside —can congratulate ourselves that we recognize that this is the new profanity, not words referring to things like poop and sexual congress.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics, philosophy, and music history at Columbia University; his latest books are Words on the Move and Talking Back, Talking Black.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

Last summer, Black Lives Matter presented an extensive platform of remedies for the crisis in black America. A time traveler from 1964, if given a printed-out copy of this platform, could have mistaken it as an archival document from the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty” — that is, jobs programs, educational reform, mental health services, and the like. The BLM thinkers surely know that such a war had already existed, but consider it to have been a failure.

Yet at the time, it seemed that a Hillary Clinton administration would have a certain interest in attending to BLM’s concerns and black America’s entrenched problems. Donald Trump, however, is the president-elect. His interest in “the African Americans” seems parenthetical at best, and his appointment of Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development suggests a lack of commitment to the top-down assistance programs that have traditionally been offered to disadvantaged communities.

As dismaying as the appointment of someone with no relevant experience to HUD is, a new book shows that it may not be bad news for poor black people that Black Lives Matter’s approach to uplift won’t be getting much of a hearing in the near future. Michael Woodsworth’s The Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City is intended as a historiographical account but actually serves as a lesson in why, as Ronald Reagan put it, “We fought a war on poverty and we lost,” and why reviving the same strategies would, alone, accomplish little more than they did 50 years ago.

Bedford-Stuyvesant is a massive district in Brooklyn that has had a strong concentration of black people since the mid-20th century, competing with more famed Harlem as a fulcrum of New York City’s black community. As early as 1977, less than 15 years after the war on poverty had begun, a committee of black veterans of the Great Society efforts in Bed-Stuy convened to discuss “apathy among the Black masses and about the community’s seeming inability to find solutions to the nagging social problems” — as if the flood of programs from 1964 had not even happened.

A legacy of challenges 

In 1964’s Bed-Stuy, only one in 100 high school seniors were ready for college, and eighth graders’ reading skills were two years behind. The Great Society efforts yielded certain improvements, to be sure. Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and food stamps have improved the quality of life of the black poor. Yet today, Bed-Stuy’s public schools remain some of the most underperforming in New York. The problem Great Society efforts focused especially on in the ’60s was gangs; today, the neighborhood is still “well known for drive-bys, robberies, murders and assaults.”

Describing the Bed-Stuy of the ’50s and ’60s, Woodsworth sketches a neighborhood where as dismayed as residents were at the time — and as underperforming as institutions like schools were — single parenting was not yet a norm and murder rates were nothing like they have been since. There is a poignancy in the book, with its welter of acronyms (enough to require a key at the front of book) referring to programs that were ardently cherished at the time but by now forgotten — APOB, CAA, DNS, MFY, R&R, YIA, CHIP (which was something other than today’s health insurance program for children).

Today’s Workforce Investment Act used to be the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, which in turn began as the Manpower Development Training Act. President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper is a modern version of Bed-Stuy’s similarly intentioned Youth in Action program or Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited.

And despite the intense commitment of so very many undersung heroes, many of whom were women giving their lives to the anti-poverty effort while raising children and holding down jobs, none of these early programs made any real difference. Few could deny a simple fact about Bedford-Stuyvesant: There is all but no indication today that a Great Society effort ever occurred.

The usual explanations for the war on poverty’s failure fall short

Why didn’t the war on poverty work? This is the question that hovers over The Battle for Bed-Stuy. The failure is typically flagged by pundits in passing, as if its cause were self-evident. And indeed, Woodsworth describes problems few would find surprising in themselves: bureaucracy and overstaffing (largely on the part of government administrators), inexperience and infighting (largely among black staffers), plus a new “militant” rhetoric longer on theatrics than plans, with young black men disrupting meetings with claims that the black “bourgeoisie” was trying “to make it uptown on the backs of the brothers” and that women community leaders were “emasculating the community and denying us our models of black manhood.” Funds also trickled in slowly at first, and Johnson quickly lost interest because of Vietnam.

But the standard narrative of the Great Society’s failures sells short just how hard some people strived to make it work. In 1967, Robert Kennedy breathed new life into the efforts in, specifically, Bed-Stuy. So very much happened. A new Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College program, nicknamed the “college of the streets,” was educating 500 people in classes held in various buildings in humanities, African history, computer science, and other subjects, while other programs helped people navigate the welfare bureaucracy, advocated for tenants, and formed sanitation drives and baseball leagues.

The Youth in Action program — despite the “youth” in its name, it was an organization central to the entire Bed-Stuy Great Society effort — ran a job placement program, computer education, and a senior citizens council, provided legal services, and set up a community-owned supermarket. The Young Mothers program gave prenatal care, in-house nursing training, sex education, schooling, and job training to 5,000 women, including payment for attending classes, while the Women’s Talent Corps provided job training in social service to 1,500 women across New York City.

By 1977 Great Society programs in Bed-Stuy had renovated 3,682 homes, trained 3,835 people in construction, made 1,080 loans, built 500 new units of housing, placed 8,037 people in jobs, hired 512 for job training, and established 128 small businesses and 32 construction firms.

All of this sounds almost like a caricature of state-led uplift for the poor; many thought it was why there were no “long, hot summer” riots in Bed-Stuy. Yet the neighborhood remained helpless in the face of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, and the rest has been, as they say, history. Under an alternate historical scenario, we might have expected all of these efforts to create change if only through sheer momentum. People at the time expected as much, as Woodsworth notes: “The newly employed, it was assumed, would enjoy newfound self-esteem and pride and offer examples for others.” Others would then follow on the path to employment and stability. But it didn’t happen.

Conventional ideas as to why it did not happen, to the extent that they are ever offered, are shaky at best. It is often assumed that the programs were simply underfunded or that there weren’t enough of them — there needed to be “more programs, more services, more organizations,” a well-known veteran of civil rights activism I once appeared with on a television show said. But it’s unclear just why the welter of programs described above “weren’t enough.” If instead they actually had transformed Bed-Stuy, no one would find that development counterintuitive, wondering how change had happened with so “few” programs.

Equally popular is an idea that what did in neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy was the departure of the black middle class as role models. However, conditions were already at crisis level — in poverty and education, if not drugs and violence — when those very doctors and judges still lived in the neighborhood in the 1960s. Plus, just why would all of the programs and hirings and services that blanketed Bed-Stuy in the ’60s and ’70s require the presence of middle-class people to have success?

The role of culture in the perpetuation of poverty 

It is hard to miss that “programs” alone were unable to turn the tide in Bed-Stuy, or elsewhere, and the reason was due to something many social scientists and educated Americans find counterintuitive and even off-putting: that cultural traits and behaviors can persist independently of external conditions. That is, racism can condition legacies, under which behaviors persist even when what originally caused them has receded or even disappeared. One speaks the language one grows up hearing, and culture is not different in this regard, walking in lockstep with neither the GNP nor social tensions. This is hardly cause for dismissal of the problems in question; however, it means that changing conditions is often only part of the battle.

Here, for example, is a depressing but crucial story that one rarely hears. In 1987, philanthropist George Weiss “adopted” 112 inner-city sixth-graders in Philadelphia. He guaranteed them a fully funded education through college as long as they didn’t use drugs, have children out of wedlock, or commit crimes. He provided tutors, workshops, after-school programs, summer programs, and counselors. Yet 45 of the 112 of the children in the program never made it through high school; 19 of the boys were felons by the time they were adults, and more than half of the 45 girls had babies before they were 18 (they had 63 children among them). Obviously, for reasons hardly their fault, the only cultural norms these kids had known affected them profoundly, even with external conditions crafted to nudge them in another direction.

Attitudes toward school can be similarly determined. Black kids started calling each other “white” for liking school only in the late ’60s, when desegregation efforts placed a great many black students in white schools where, in line with the era’s mores, they were subject to openly racist treatment. This made perfect sense. However, that sentiment that school is something other than “black” has persisted over the decades even in well-funded suburban schools where whites are deeply concerned about black students’ performance and social comfort.

Pundits regularly claim that the “acting white” charge is mythical, uncomfortable with the possibility that a black problem could not be due to racism. However, this resistance neglects various studies that confirm the “acting white” charge’s reality and effects, as well as a weight of personal testimony that would be considered authoritative rather than “anecdotal” if it concerned, for example, police brutality.

It was natural in 1964, then, to suppose that what ailed the black community was lack of opportunity — because, quite simply, this indeed was the problem. However, in 2016, what ails the black community is partly lack of opportunity, but also (dare we say) cultural orientations that this lack of opportunity conditioned decades ago. The challenge is that after such cultural orientations have set in, merely pointing people to opportunity can be insufficient as a social uplift strategy — more creative strategies are required.

Jobs are scarce, but neighborhood norms regarding work must also be challenged

For example, increasing the employment rate among young black men will require more than connecting them with jobs, for the simple reason that today, many such men do not work even when jobs are available. Objections that this claim is naive or even racist are understandable, but the weight of evidence for it is so crushing that to disregard it could be seen as racist in itself. No effort to bring poor black men into the workforce will bear real fruit under the pretense that the only problem is unavailability of work.

Even William Julius Wilson’s classic work on black poverty, although it focuses on factory relocation and the paucity of transportation to what jobs are still reachable, openly describes black men saying they won’t take a job because it would require getting up too early. Political scientist Lawrence Mead has documented and statistically tabulated interviews with young black men, in which large numbers say plenty of jobs are available that they do not take.

It is often supposed that the relocation of low-skill factory jobs explains black unemployment rates, but even in cities where this relocation barely happened, the same unemployment rates exploded starting in the 1970s. The black sociologist Alford Young, in a scholarly and sympathetic description, notes: “They often say they will take whatever work they can get, but a sentence or two later say that certain wages are wholly unacceptable … some men eventually find jobs but abandon them (if not be dismissed) as soon as problems or tensions arise.”

There are no grounds for calling these men lazy. They are often quite industrious within the context of their own lives, but have grown up in communities in which it is not considered abnormal for a man not to work regularly for a living, in a way that it is not in, for example, an affluent white suburb. This norm did not exist before the late 1960s, and began with how much harder it became to get a low-skill factory job at that time; it then was reinforced by a new ideology that questioned buying into the norms of an inherently racist system. All of this was understandable, but one outcome is that today, generations of poor black men have never known anything different.

Thus merely ushering such men into awareness that jobs exist will only do part of the work today. Crucially, one thing that enables the new norm — which abets the avoidance of the traditional labor market — is a standing black market for drugs that allows one to work illegally and make enough money to survive. If there were no war on drugs, and thus drugs could not be sold on the street at a markup, then the men in question would have no choice but to seek legal employment. To claim that they would not seek legal work is to indicate a lack of faith in them that borders on dehumanization.

As such, one thing a Trump administration could do to increase employment among poor black men is to help to end the war on drugs. As a Republican accustomed to bucking his party’s traditions, Trump could conceivably be quite comfortable with such an approach, especially as late in the Obama administration, under the radar, Republicans and Democrats have been coming together on criminal justice reform efforts.

That Trump has stressed “law and order” doesn’t seem exactly congruent with a more progressive policy on drugs, but Trump is so fundamentally non-ideological, at heart, that the optimist is hardly crazy to suppose that he could made to consider changing just what the law, in this case, consists of, in view of enhancing the “order” in question. To end the war on drugs would do much more to change innocently perceived, but damaging, norms in poor black communities as continuing programs such as Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper.

Long-acting reversible contraceptives should be more readily available

Similarly, it is now a norm in poor communities, white as well as black, for children to be raised by single mothers. As Wilson and others have documented, many such women see little benefit to marrying the men they know given their problems with maintaining employment. However, single mothers can have a hard time finding or maintaining work that can accommodate the unpredictable aspects of having small children. Moreover, it is incontrovertible that children raised by two parents are better off, and as Isabel Sawhill has noted, in the communities in question, pregnancy is quite often accidental: 60 percent of pregnancies outside marriage are unplanned.

The right-wing punditocracy insists that poor (black) people simply need to adopt proper “family values.” They stress marriage, with the implication that until they do marry we can feel guiltless in letting them stew in their own juice. However, decades of such calls for black people to just “behave” have borne no fruit, and this approach, complete with its coded dismissal of black humanity, lacks ingenuity. Meanwhile, the Great Society’s approach was to help single mothers be as successful in parenthood as possible, which was admirable in getting past the Victorian contempt for unwed mothers that had prevailed so recently before. A modern outgrowth of this approach is calls by thinkers such as Barbara Ehrenreich for employers to adjust to the needs of such single mothers.

However, clearly mothers and children would be better off if single parenthood became an occasional choice and not a norm. A better solution than calling for people to marry more, or hoping corporations will hire workers whose appearance on the job cannot be assured, is a much cleaner solution: long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs), which allows pregnancy to be a choice rather than an accident. An IUD, for example, requires no attendance to contraception at each sexual encounter, and also saves a woman thousands of dollars over five years in comparison with using condoms or birth control pills. In two studies, poor women have praised long-acting reversible contraception and advised that it be more widely available to those who wish to use it.

These two strategies may seem small potatoes compared with the blizzard of top-down strategies that the Black Lives Matter movement advocated or that the Great Society implemented. After 50 years, it can seem as if such an approach is the only plausible one to helping the poor. Such programs can, of course, do some good. Woodsworth’s book valuably chronicles the hard work of people it’s easy to forget today. Jesse Jackson is a household name today while Bed-Stuy stalwarts like Elsie Richardson are historical footnotes, despite her being an activist radical who first awakened Robert Kennedy to the scale of the neighborhood’s problems, leading the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council, which centered Bed-Stuy’s neighborhood improvement efforts before the Great Society even kicked in. That is unfair.

Yet the fact remains that people like Richardson, for all that they knew about the problems facing them, had no way of knowing how certain sociohistorical currents were set to waylay even their protean efforts. That is the message of Woodsworth’s book when we consider what happened after the events he chronicles.

In 2017, it is worth considering the value of simply creating communities in which women have more control over when they have children, and where more men are legally employed and therefore have better prospects for marriage or long-term relationship commitment. This will allow women to raise their children more often with partners, to the benefit of all concerned. This would seem to be a promising and relatively elementary approach to poverty, and the Trump administration should consider it.

John McWhorter, a linguist, is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Words on the Move: Why English Won’t — and Can’t — Sit Still (Like, Literally).

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The debate over whether racism made Donald Trump president is forcing educated America to grapple with something we are taught is inapplicable when it comes to racism: degree. Typically, the closest we come to acknowledging that racism is not a starkly binary matter is to say that racism “plays a part” in, for example, how whites view Barack Obama — but only meaning “the main part,” and the only one worthy of extended discussion.

But that kind of thinking doesn’t work this time, and a failure to acknowledge it will “play a part” in making catastrophes like this election keep happening. Make no mistake; it was a catastrophe indeed. Donald Trump is an incurious, ignorant, mean-spirited, impulsive person, whose blithe, ugly embrace of sexist and racist rhetoric has established a new, adventurous attitude among those who share his troglodytic views on human groups. I share the feeling of many that his election just couldn’t have been quite real, that just possibly, and hopefully, we fell into some kind of realm behind the looking glass or are having a bad dream. I remain numb.

And yet — yes, and yet — it won’t do to allow a mental shorthand that the people who voted for this man are a bunch of racists, à la pieces like this one, titled “Farewell, America,” by the writer Neal Gabler. “Who knew,” Gabler writes breathlessly, “that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans?”

The problem of extrapolating from an offensive minority

Yes, a faction among Trump’s voters — the people with the ugly signs and T-shirts and chants — are racists. But we, who so confidently despise stereotyping, cannot now decide that those newsworthy people represent all, or even most, of the people who pulled the lever for Trump.

Yes, in the wake of Trump’s election, hooligans nationwide are pulling disgusting racist pranks against black, Latino, and Muslim persons — spray-painting slogans or swastikas, for example — feeling enabled by Trump’s rhetoric. But again, if it’s wrong for people to make any assumptions about black people based on the behavior of a few, or even more than a few, then we cannot indulge the habit of deciding that these clueless teenagers and barflies represent the mass of people who voted Trump after dropping off their kids at school.

Rather, the a-holes represent what Will Saletan has usefully called a couple of “baskets” out of five among the Trump voter palette. The case that these people represent the views of the typical Trump voter gets weaker by the day. There was no “whitelash” — fewer whites voted for Trump than for Mitt Romney. And let us not forget how very many of these supposed bigots voted for Obama.  

Then they voted for Trump, though — and many can’t imagine why they would have done so given how revolting Trump’s behavior has been. They must have, we suppose, held their noses when voting for Obama but then expressed their true colors when voting for Trump. However, there is a more humane interpretation here, and equally plausible: They were holding their noses voting for Trump.

When a politician’s racism isn’t a deal breaker

Namely, what we have seen is that for a great many voters, Trump’s racism and sexism may have been less than ideal, but they weren’t deal breakers in comparison to other concerns. That is, racism and sexism weren’t a priority to them as much as they are to others.

Is such a person a racist? A mom in central Pennsylvania is attracted to Trump’s promise of change. She and her family may have had problems with employment in the wake of deindustrialization; or, she may see this problem elsewhere and worry about it; or she may be spooked by episodes like ones in San Bernardino and Orlando. “This guy seems really different. Yes, he says tacky stuff about Latinos, black people, and women, but so do a lot of people and, you know, in the end I’m not sure I care whether I’d want him around my daughter. I don’t have to have dinner with him. I wish these jerks wouldn’t show up at his rallies, but I’m not like them. And really, people get too upset these days about words anyway.” 

Now, according to a certain script, that person qualifies as a bigot, as someone you’d shudder to have at your Thanksgiving table, as someone whose thinking is the cognitive equivalent of the noxious fume. A likely argument would be that Republican voters like this one test as more likely to agree with statements like, “blacks could be just as well off as whites if they tried harder.”

However, I sense that this is the script of only a certain few, whose representation thins quickly with distance from college towns. Is everyone who thinks black America could benefit from more of a sense of self-empowerment a bigot? More than a few black people harbor the same sentiment and would be hard to classify as racists, as would the roughly one in five Latino voters who went for Trump  

Certainly one might be dismayed, nevertheless, that for so many of Trump’s voters, racism and sexism aren’t decisive issues. However, in our post-civil rights era we can lose sight of what a miracle the destruction of institutionalized segregation was, and what a radical, ambitious, and possibly quixotic goal it has been since to hope that we would make all Americans actively revile all bias the way they revile pedophilia. That’s a tall order.

One might suppose, and be called “conservative” in the process, despite what John Locke would have readily understood, that the policing of human sentiment can only have so much effect.

Academics have been steadily expanding the group of people categorized as “racists”

In a book (Race Experts) that got lost amidst the previous American tragedy of Trumpian proportion, 9/11, historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn noted how starting in the late 1960s, “the desired goal was no longer civic equality and participation, but individual psychic well-being.” Starting then, well-meaning black psychologist Price Cobbs pioneered “encounter sessions” seeking to purge whites of even subtle racist bias — here’s a peek at one of these, circa 1970:

WHITE WOMAN: I don’t relate towards you, towards color or anything else, I relate towards every single person here as an individual.

COBBS: You’re lying! You’re lying! You’re lying!

WHITE WOMAN: Why?

COBBS: If I would say “You look like a little boy to me, I just don’t see anything” you’d say I was crazy because you’re a woman … if I could neutralize you in some way this is exactly what white folks do to black folks.

Some will cheer at that sequence, enjoying seeing the white lady squirm as her inner “racist” is revealed. The line of descent is clear from these sessions to today’s quest to inculcate whites into an awareness of their “privilege” (amidst stipulations that their white opinions don’t matter: “IT’S – NOT – ABOUT – YOU” is common mantra). Also hard to miss is a certain resemblance to indoctrination rhetoric of the past amidst movements like Stalinism that we now securely condemn as having gone off track. 

Let’s pull the camera back Did these antiracist encounter sessions work? Apparently not. There may be limits to how thoroughly one can purge a vast society of even subliminal bias. Could we ever make all, or even almost all, Americans think of those ills as unquestioned, absolute deal breakers?

But do I really know? Do I really get it? I sometimes hear that I just don’t how much racism is “out there.” It can be bemusing, as a black American, to savor these doses of “whitesplaining” about how racism is not always overt, the subtext being that I’m such an overeducated hothouse flower that I don’t know what’s “really goin’ down.” But I could write — and in fact have written — reams about the racist bias I have seen, gleaned, and experienced in my life and that of others. My claim here is specific: Is what got Trump elected something responsible people should be calling, specifically, “racist”? 

Personalizing the argument

Some of my actual “knowing” sheds at least some light on the answer to that question. Earlier in my life, I was close for a long time to a number of people of the “whites out there” category: suburban and exurban whites of modest education, culturally what one might call a little bit “country,” some financially just making ends meet. Did racism inflect some of their views? Sure, a bit. Most of them would not have passed the New Yorker reader’s antiracism purity test, and only rigorous and long-term Socratic dialogue could have changed that.

However, were they “racists” in any sense that would justify affixing such a contemptuous label upon someone trying their best in this vale of tears called life? Certainly not. They did not wish it were still 1950. Plenty of them, and people in their family, were dating or married to people of color. And it wasn’t, and never had been, an issue.

Because of geography and time, I don’t know these people well anymore, but I am quite sure of two things. One is that some of them voted for Trump. The second is that they did not think of Barack Obama as “that nigger in the White House,” not even “on some level” or “intersectionally.” They were almost certainly toasting with champagne that September night in 2008 as I was. If they voted for Trump this time, it was a matter of their priorities, not hating black people.

Now, after all of this, I have heard many people of color, women, and LGBTQ people this week say that it still dismays them that such voters don’t care about them. And there are certainly gloomy issues at hand here in terms of how far people’s circle of empathy extends and whether or not we can change that. 

Yet it’s hard to miss that for some, a claim that Trump’s victory was not due to “racism” is something to resist, unwelcome — as if some people want half of the country’s voters to have revealed themselves as morally backward bigots. But one could only want such a thing out of a quest to affirm one’s own morality. 

There is no better recipe for driving Mr. and Mrs. “Out There” to vote Trump into a second four years than having them watch smart people on television calling them racists 24/7. I would suggest that just as Americans should always check themselves for bias, and they should, those tempted to assail practically every second American voter in 2016 as a bigot ought check themselves for self-congratulation.

John McWhorter, a linguist, is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Words on the Move: Why English Won’t — and Can’t — Sit Still (Like, Literally).

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.