It's Not the Fascists We Need to Convince

Why defanging right-wing extremism requires we change how — and to whom — we communicate about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

During spring break of my first year in college, I visited my high school campus to catch up with a handful of my old teachers. I was eager to share how I was doing and what I was learning about: a dabbling of social psychology, feminist and queer studies, communications, data analysis, and more. There’s not much I remember from this visit more than a decade later, save for one interaction.

It was during a conversation with one of my old English teachers, a lanky White man with a stern gaze and a habit of wryly calling on me to answer a question at the precise moment I had fallen asleep in his classroom. I don’t even remember how the topic came up. Only that our conversation had wandered into current events that had highlighted the persistence of racial inequality and bias in our society. In response to a comment I made, he raised an eyebrow and said matter-of-factly, “aren’t you worried that the approach you’re talking about might be perceived as racist toward White people?”

I looked at him in surprise for half a second, then literally waved my hand. “Oh, you can’t be racist against White people,” I responded, with a tone like I was sharing with him what I had for breakfast. Before I could start my next sentence, he was already crossing his arms.

“I very much disagree.”

In my nineteen-year-old naiveté, I think I gaped at him for a few moments before trying to stammer out a response.

“Well, racism requires power, and- uh, in a White supremacist society people of color don’t have that kind of power. Racism and prejudice aren’t the same thing…”

He stared at me with the same piercing stare that he used on his students, and despite the fact that I was standing and he was sitting at his desk, I suddenly felt very small. The topic moved on, but when he eventually said goodbye and wished me luck completing my first year, I swear I could hear a tinge of disappointment in his voice.

This was my first experience trying to communicate the theory behind diversity, equity, and inclusion work in a real-life context, and I’m pretty sure I failed. It wasn’t just my lack of confidence, but the way I communicated: both the lingo and the attitude so common to my liberal college-educated political bubble immediately failed to land.

Research shows that despite the prevalence of common social justice language in the pro-DEI social media landscape, most people simply don’t say (or even know the meaning) of words like “intersectionality,” “decolonization,” or “microaggression” in real life. Pair this with adjacent research on defensive disbelief, which shows that people strongly resist to information that makes them feel threatened or guilty, and the communication norms so common to social justice circles are set up to flop.

I didn’t know this yet, at nineteen. But I started to feel like it didn’t matter that my analysis was “right” if my choice of words ground my conversations to a halt. I was talking with people who might have been receptive to the core ideas I was trying to communicate, had I communicated them differently. But I didn’t yet know how to reach them.