Had I been on Twitter, for example, I’d have noticed when the New York Times writer Bari Weiss celebrated Team U.S. Olympic ice skater Mirai Nagasu by tweeting, “Immigrants: they get the job done.” I’d have understood why that reference to the California-born skater, whose parents immigrated to the U.S., would strike some people as accurate shorthand, others as an inoffensive factual error, and still others as a microaggression against a marginalized group.

The writer Mark Joseph Stern, who had the last reaction, argued that “the original tweet—while not maliciously racist by any means—perpetuated the real and serious problem of the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype that dogs so many Asian-Americans.” Agree or disagree, anyone can understand that critique. What I don’t understand—what I’d still like to understand—is the approach taken by the many people who treated the tweet as if it were malicious; or who attacked or “dragged” Weiss; or treated her with fierce hostility. I want to know if and why they believe their approach can plausibly advance social justice.

Said Jon E. Hecht, who may already have had his hackles up, “The level to which every single centrist opinion haver in the country now has a take defending Bari Weiss calling an American born athlete an immigrant is a reminder that in American etiquette, calling someone a racist is still more insulting than racism.” Leaving aside the merits of the charge, I think racism is much more insulting than calling someone a racist. I also think that excesses in call-out culture are undermining fights against racism, authoritarianism, and the forces that make it hard to see what is in front of our noses. I want to know why the adherents of that culture don’t.

After angry responses to Bari Weiss appeared on Twitter, Ashley Feinberg published a Huffington Post article entitled, “Leaked Chat Transcripts: New York Times Employees Are Pissed About Bari Weiss,” which I read with great interest.

She wrote:

People were outraged not only at the tweet―which referenced a line from a song from “Hamilton”―but also at Weiss’ refusal to acknowledge that perhaps she had been insensitive in placing an American citizen in the category of other.

I noticed that Feinberg’s language implies that an immigrant is in a category of “other,” and that being an immigrant and an American citizen are mutually exclusive.

Later in the piece, a New York Times staffer is quoted complaining about Bari Weiss in an internal Slack chat. “… I felt that Tweet denied Mirai her full citizenship just as the Internment did,” the staffer wrote. While some might take offense at drawing an equivalence between being the subject of a tweet and being forcibly imprisoned by one’s country, what struck me was the implication that dubbing someone an immigrant denies them full citizenship—as if a foreign-born, naturalized Team USA ice skater would not be a full citizen. Lack of clarity on that point matters: Although many of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II were born in this country, the internment was no less wrongheaded in those cases in which the internees were born in Japan and became naturalized citizens as new immigrants.