Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It’s impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.

Bullying happens along a gradient of existing power and reiterates it. That’s the difference between bullying and a fair fight: The bully is bigger and stronger and safer, and wields those advantages over someone smaller and weaker and more vulnerable. Michelle Wolf got off some zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s expense at an ultra-exclusive social event entirely filled by people whose livelihoods Sanders holds in her hands. Beyond that, as a basic function of her job, Sanders enjoys access to the water main of American political consciousness unmatched by pretty much any living person not named Donald Trump—a privilege she uses only and entirely for the purpose of pumping poison into it, aided by a healthy plurality of the people in that room but not by Michelle Wolf. I doubt there is a forum in existence in which Wolf could do anything that would qualify as “bullying” the press secretary of the President of the United States, but even if there is, the fucking White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t it.

In the protests at Mizzou and Yale and elsewhere, students have made it clear that the status quo is unbearable. Whether we agree with these student protesters or not, we should be listening: They are articulating a vision for a better future, one that cannot be reached with complacency. … We cannot ignore what is truly being said by both groups of protesters: That not all students experience Yale equally, and not all students experience Mizzou equally. These conversations were happening well before these protests, and they will continue to happen until students are guaranteed equality of experience. They are still being forced, however, to first prove that it is worth opening a conversation about either. … Student activism is widespread, because some students are making the most of their college experience. They understand that this may very well be the last moment in their lives when they can confront real issues in an environment where they are forced to encounter people who don’t look like them, who don’t think like them, environments where change is still possible. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and protestors at campuses across the country including Yale and Mizzou are part of a robust, vital tradition that we should not overlook. Today’s student activists are doing the necessary work to ensure that the next generation that participates in the tradition of student activism will be fighting different battles. Or, perhaps, they are doing the necessary work to ensure that students, of all identities, might have a fighting chance to experience college and life beyond more equally than those who came before them.

The default for avoiding discussion of racism is to invoke a separate principle, one with which few would disagree in the abstract—free speech, respectful participation in class—as the counterpoint to the violation of principles relating to civil rights. This is victim-blaming with a software update, with less interest in the kind of character assassination we saw deployed against Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown than in creating a seemingly right-minded position that serves the same effect. … The broader issue is that the student’s reaction elicited consternation in certain quarters where the precipitating incident did not. The fault line here is between those who find intolerance objectionable and those who oppose intolerance of the intolerant. … These are not abstractions. And this is where the arguments about the freedom of speech become most tone deaf. The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one’s liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another.

"The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2007."