LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, a political scientist at Princeton and the author of “Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics,” wrote me in an email:

Most Americans have a distorted definition of racism. We think of racism as person-to-person acts of prejudice — like using a slur. Such behavior is racist, but racism is far more than that. We have baked racism into our political institutions and economic systems.

It is important, Stephens-Dougan argues, to ask people why they think black and Latino neighborhoods struggle with poor school and higher levels of crime. “If one’s answer,” she continued, “is that those neighborhoods are under-resourced because blacks and Latinos are less smart, less hardworking or less disciplined, etc., then that answer is racist.”

Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, applies what he calls the “ ‘Golden Rule of Intergroup Relations’ — which means that if you would be upset if somebody did something to or said something about your own group, then it is bigotry if you say it about or do it to another group.”

Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and the author of “White Identity Politics,” put it this way:

The use of these terms is complicated, messy, and without consensus. There are a number of important distinctions we can make. We think of ‘racial prejudice’ as an individual-level sense of hostility, animus, set of negative stereotypes, or other negative attitudes that one person has toward members of a group by way of their race. We refer to a person as racist when they have some degree of racial prejudice. For most Americans, this is generally what they think of when they hear the term racism or racist. A racist is a person who uses racial slurs directed at racial out-groups and thinks their own racial group is superior.

Let’s turn back to Darren Davis of Notre Dame. I asked Davis and other scholars whether Asian-American protests in New York City against the potential elimination of entrance exams as the sole determinant of entry into selective high schools like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science were racist. Likewise, is the opposition of well off suburbanites to affordable housing in their neighborhoods racist? Is the number of African-Americans in prison evidence of racism? And is white opposition to the decarceration movement, or to the prison abolition movement, racist?

Davis stresses that, in his view, “not all racialized behavior and expressions stem from racial hatred or hating African Americans.” He is cautious in his wording:

Ordinary citizens, without being racists themselves, may do and say things that are consistent with a racist ideology. It does not make the outcomes any less egregious or harmful. For instance, Asian-Americans protesting NYC school proposals is not necessarily racist in my opinion because I can see other motivations driving the support for higher standards — not just beliefs about the inferiority of others.

Davis argues that the debate has become clouded, that even though individual and group motives may not be racist, the outcomes achieved can be identical to the ones that racists would seek:

My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means. In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.

Chloe Thurston, in turn, cited as specific examples

President Trump’s or Steve King’s comments about certain types of immigrants being unassimilable or not sufficiently American and suggesting that other (e.g. white) immigrants do not have those characteristics.

While both Trump and King, an anti-immigrant congressman from Iowa, “balk at the label ‘racist,’ she continued, “it is descriptively accurate and necessary from the standpoint of keeping track of the role and uses of racism in American society and politics.”

Like Davis, Thurston sought to address “the more difficult question” of “when it is legitimate to use that label for everyday behaviors.”

Her answer:

People can participate in and perpetuate racist systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs. People can recognize something they participate in or contribute to as racist but decide it’s not disqualifying. And people can design racist policies and systems. These are distinctive manifestations of racism but not all of them require us to know whether a person is expressly motivated by racism.

Cindy Kam — a political scientist at Vanderbilt, and a co-author with Camille Burge, a political scientist at Villanova, of “Uncovering Reactions to the Racial Resentment Scale Across the Racial Divide” — added another element to the discussion: wariness about how the word is used in political and policy debates:

As a social scientist, I would entertain the possibility that people’s actions are guided by a variety of motivations, potentially including racial considerations but also values (i.e., a commitment to a free market; egalitarianism; moral conservatism); economic considerations; self-interest (concerns about my child’s ability to get into a high school or my child’s commute to a faraway school), or even factual beliefs.

Because of the wide variety of possible motivations, Kam wrote in her email, she “would hesitate to label an action as ‘racist’ — unless racial considerations seem to be the only or the massively determinative consideration at play, based upon statistical modeling or carefully calibrated experiments.”

Kam notes that she worries “about excessive use of these labels” because describing someone or some action as racist “can easily escalate conflict beyond the point of return.”