Racism pervades our country. Students who have roiled college campuses from coast to coast have that exactly right.

But we’re never going to make the progress that we need to if they hurl the word “racist” as reflexively and indiscriminately as some of them do, in a frenzy of righteousness aimed at gagging speakers and strangling debate.

That’s a mechanism for shaming, not a strategy for change. It mesmerizes all. It converts none.

I’m thinking of the recent ugliness at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash., which echoed too many other incidents at too many other schools.

A white biology professor named Bret Weinstein who identifies himself as a political progressive infuriated many students there, for two principal reasons. One, he objected openly to a proposal that there be an “equity justification/explanation” for all new faculty hires. His stated worry was that race would take precedence over all other considerations.