SOME of the most potent threats to free speech these days come not from our government or corporations, but from our citizenry. Pitched battles being waged at Yale and the University of Missouri pit speech versus speech in a contest of who and what is entitled to be heard. These are only the latest examples: In recent years speakers have been disinvited, campus events disrupted and activists threatened for speaking their minds.

The passions are authentic and the debates matter. But proponents of social and racial justice and free speech advocates are talking past one another, fueling mutual frustrations. Rather than a casualty of the drive to counter racism on campus, the defense of free speech is essential to it.

Simmering racial tensions at Yale combusted when the question of what constitutes a legitimate Halloween costume — and who gets to decide — escalated into a war of emails and videos endangering the reputations and safety of two college masters accused of insensitivity, and a student whose fiery tirade against one of them has been met with death threats online.

At the University of Missouri, after protests forced the school’s president and chancellor to resign over problems of campus racism, a student journalist was browbeaten; his entreaty that “the First Amendment protects your right to be here and mine” was ignored. A social media avalanche has now piled on a media studies professor who called for “muscle” to push another photographer out of the way.