Today’s left is too focused on psychology, McWhorter argued, as if injustice and inequity are best opposed by calling out problematic language or getting white people to acknowledge their privilege. As he sees it, those modes do little to help people while tending toward “defeatism, hypersensitivity, oversimplification, and even a degree of performance.”

He grants that bias remains in American life and acknowledges the good intentions of those trying to vanquish it. But the culture of shaming that activists have created has morphed “from a pragmatic mission to change minds,” he writes, into “a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias.” He urges activists to continue their fight, but with less quasi-religious fervor and a renewed focus on sociology rather than psychology.

The essay struck me as powerfully argued. Still, I thought that Jamelle Bouie, then of Slate and now at The New York Times, issued a fair challenge: The essay “confidently asserts that the contemporary left sees the battle against racism in psychological terms,” he wrote on Twitter, “while never quoting or engaging with anyone identified with the contemporary left.”

If the phenomenon McWhorter described is real, we should be able to find leftists who intend to fight bias by calling out psychological harms, only to fall into “hypersensitivity, oversimplification, and even a degree of performance” as participants signal virtue in ways that help no one.

The apology letter was posted to the website of the Journalism and Women Symposium, or JAWS, an organization that “supports the professional empowerment and personal growth of women in journalism and works toward a more accurate portrayal of the whole society.”

The document, written by the group’s president, the journalism professor Yumi Wilson, and signed by its entire board of directors, captures a professional organization as it struggles with multiple conflicts around identity.

“This is a long statement,” Wilson apologetically noted, “but I fiercely believe that we must include as much information as possible here to help those who were not at CAMP,” the annual conference that the group sponsors, “understand what happened and why they have seen certain comments on our listserv in the days following … It also took time to interview as many people as possible who were involved.”

The approach yielded an unusually rich account of the conflicts roiling an organization of journalists and the unanimous response of its leaders, a group of well-intentioned people working toward noble ends.

Wilson opened by explaining that she has long valued the organization because it “provided me a safe space to vent about being a woman of color in mostly all-white and all-male workplaces.” But this year’s gathering “was not a safe space for many of us,” she wrote. “Several attendees made unacceptable and harmful comments toward women of color during CAMP, while some older members said they felt disrespected and irrelevant because of their age.”