What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In?

Not sure why this is in the style section, but glad it got published.

“The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is “calling in.” Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. “It’s a call out done with love,” she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone (!) to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one “do better” without explaining how.

Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it.

I appreciated David Blight’s essay here, particularly the paragraph on institutions.

Thomas Edsall solicited ideas from a number of historians and compiled them here.

A piece assessing the President’s attack on history teachers.

Need to remember this page when we start Gatsby.

Here’s the initial project: Obituaries, The American Dream 1931-2020.

It’s harder and harder for me, as someone whose mind runs to the negative, as someone capable of cutting cynicism, as someone who has watched for years what American poverty and racism does to my beautiful students, to remain positive.

I once heard a child pay tribute to Simon Hauger. She said:

He loves his family.
He loves his students.
He loves his work.

Simple. Remember that.

Terrific essay here. Too long to try and use in class (reading time is already spoken for) but might use these paragraphs:

“It is often said that America is an idea, stated definitively in early documents left to us by a coterie of men seemingly too compromised to have come up with such glorious language — as we would be, too, if we should happen to achieve anything comparable. Human beings are sacred, therefore equal. We are asked to see one another in the light of a singular inalienable worth that would make a family of us if we let it.”

“This country was, from the outset, a tremendous leap of faith. We tend not to ponder the brutality of the European world at the time our colonies formed and then fledged, so we have little or no idea of the radicalism not only of stating that “men,” as creatures of God, were equal, but of giving the idea profound political consequences by asserting for them unalienable rights, which were defined and elaborated in the Constitution. Our history to the present day is proof that people find justice hard to reach and to sustain. It is also proof that where justice is defined as equality, a thing never to be assumed, justice enlarges its own definition, pushing its margins in light of a better understanding of what equality should mean.”

Love this paragraph, but probably wouldn’t use it:

“If we learn anything from this sad passage in our history it should be that rage and contempt are a sort of neutron bomb in the marketplace of ideas, obviating actual competition. This country would do itself a world of good by restoring a sense of the dignity, even the beauty, of individual ethicalism, of self-restraint, of courtesy. These things might help us to like one another, even trust one another, both necessary to a functioning democracy.”

Marilynne Robinson, “Opinion | Don’t Give Up on America,” The New York Times, October 9, 2020, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/sunday/america-patriotism.html.