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Self-destructive behaviors — dropping out of school, joining a gang, taking drugs, bearing children when one isn’t ready — compound poverty.

Yet scholars are also learning to understand the roots of these behaviors, and they’re far more complicated than the conservative narrative of human weakness.

For starters, there is growing evidence that poverty and mental health problems are linked in complex, reinforcing ways

If you’re battling mental health problems, or grow up with traumas like domestic violence (or seeing your brother shot dead), you’re more likely to have trouble in school, to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, to have trouble in relationships.

A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth.

Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

It turns out that when people have elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, they are less willing to delay gratification.

it’s circumstances that can land you in a situation where it’s really hard to make a good decision because you’re so stressed out. And the ones you get wrong matter much more, because there’s less slack to play with.”

That emphasis on personal responsibility is part of the 12-step program to confront alcoholism or drug addiction, and it may be useful for people like Jackson. But for society to place the blame entirely on the individual seems to me a cop-out.

Let’s also remember, though, that today we have randomized trials — the gold standard of evidence — showing that certain social programs make self-destructive behaviors less common.

as long as we’re talking about personal irresponsibility, let’s also examine our own. Don’t we have a collective responsibility to provide more of a fair start in life to all, so that children aren’t propelled toward bad choices?

Conservatives thus embraced Hirsch eagerly and breathlessly. He was a stout defender of the patrimony. Liberals eagerly and breathlessly attacked him with equal vigor. He was retrograde, Eurocentric, racist, sexist.

Lost in all the crossfire, however, were two facts: First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.

A generation of hindsight now enables Americans to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as the United States, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.

So, first of all, Americans do need a list. But second, it should not be Hirsch’s list. And third, it should not made the way he made his. In the balance of this essay, I want to unpack and explain each of those three statements.

If you take the time to read the book attached to Hirsch’s appendix, you’ll find a rather effective argument about the nature of background knowledge and public culture. Literacy is not just a matter of decoding the strings of letters that make up words or the meaning of each word in sequence. It is a matter of decoding context: the surrounding matrix of things referred to in the text and things implied by it

That means understanding what’s being said in public, in the media, in colloquial conversation. It means understanding what’s not being said. Literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power.

his point about background knowledge and the content of shared public culture extends well beyond schoolbooks. They are applicable to the “texts” of everyday life, in commercial culture, in sports talk, in religious language, in politics. In all cases, people become literate in patterns—“schema” is the academic word Hirsch uses. They come to recognize bundles of concept and connotation like “Party of Lincoln.” They perceive those patterns of meaning the same way a chess master reads an in-game chessboard or the way a great baseball manager reads an at bat. And in all cases, pattern recognition requires literacy in particulars.

Lots and lots of particulars. This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an ideologically controversial point. After all, parents on both left and right have come to accept recent research that shows that the more spoken words an infant or toddler hears, the more rapidly she will learn and advance in school. Volume and variety matter. And what is true about the vocabulary of spoken or written English is also true, one fractal scale up, about the vocabulary of American culture.

those who demonized Hirsch as a right-winger missed the point. Just because an endeavor requires fluency in the past does not make it worshipful of tradition or hostile to change.

radicalism is made more powerful when garbed in traditionalism. As Hirsch put it: “To be conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.”

Hence, he argued, an education that in the name of progressivism disdains past forms, schema, concepts, figures, and symbols is an education that is in fact anti-progressive and “helps preserve the political and economic status quo.” This is true. And it is made more urgently true by the changes in American demography since Hirsch gave us his list in 1987.

If you are an immigrant to the United States—or, if you were born here but are the first in your family to go to college, and thus a socioeconomic new arrival; or, say, a black citizen in Ferguson, Missouri deciding for the first time to participate in a municipal election, and thus a civic neophyte—you have a single overriding objective shared by all immigrants at the moment of arrival: figure out how stuff really gets done here.

So, for instance, a statement like “One hundred and fifty years after Appomattox, our house remains deeply divided” assumes that the reader knows that Appomattox is both a place and an event; that the event signified the end of a war; that the war was the Civil War and had begun during the presidency of a man, Abraham Lincoln, who earlier had famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”; that the divisions then were in large part about slavery; and that the divisions today are over the political, social, and economic legacies of slavery and how or whether we are to respond to those legacies.

But why a list, one might ask? Aren’t lists just the very worst form of rote learning and standardized, mechanized education? Well, yes and no.

it’s not just newcomers who need greater command of common knowledge. People whose families have been here ten generations are often as ignorant about American traditions, mores, history, and idioms as someone “fresh off the boat.”

The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.

as the pool of potential culture-makers has widened, the modes of culture creation have similarly shifted away from hierarchies and institutions to webs and networks. Wikipedia is the prime embodiment of this reality, both in how the online encyclopedia is crowd-created and how every crowd-created entry contains links to other entries.

so any endeavor that makes it easier for those who do not know the memes and themes of American civic life to attain them closes the opportunity gap. It is inherently progressive.

since I started writing this essay, dipping into the list has become a game my high-school-age daughter and I play together.

I’ll name each of those entries, she’ll describe what she thinks to be its meaning. If she doesn’t know, I’ll explain it and give some back story. If I don’t know, we’ll look it up together. This of course is not a good way for her teachers to teach the main content of American history or English. But it is definitely a good way for us both to supplement what school should be giving her.

And however long we end up playing this game, it is already teaching her a meta-lesson about the importance of cultural literacy. Now anytime a reference we’ve discussed comes up in the news or on TV or in dinner conversation, she can claim ownership. Sometimes she does so proudly, sometimes with a knowing look. My bet is that the satisfaction of that ownership, and the value of it, will compound as the years and her education progress.

The trouble is, there are also many items on Hirsch’s list that don’t seem particularly necessary for entry into today’s civic and economic mainstream.

Which brings us back to why diversity matters. The same diversity that makes it necessary to have and to sustain a unifying cultural core demands that Americans make the core less monochromatic, more inclusive, and continuously relevant for contemporary life

it’s worth unpacking the baseline assumption of both Hirsch’s original argument and the battles that erupted around it. The assumption was that multiculturalism sits in polar opposition to a traditional common culture, that the fight between multiculturalism and the common culture was zero-sum.

As scholars like Ronald Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror, the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.

The truth, of course, is that since well before the formation of the United States, the United States has been shaped by nonwhites in its mores, political structures, aesthetics, slang, economic practices, cuisine, dress, song, and sensibility.

In its serious forms, multiculturalism never asserted that every racial group should have its own sealed and separate history or that each group’s history was equally salient to the formation of the American experience. It simply claimed that the omni-American story—of diversity and hybridity—was the legitimate American story.

as Nathan Glazer has put it (somewhat ruefully), “We are all multiculturalists now.” Americans have come to see—have chosen to see—that multiculturalism is not at odds with a single common culture; it is a single common culture.

it is true that in a finite school year, say, with finite class time and books of finite heft, not everything about everyone can be taught. There are necessary trade-offs. But in practice, recognizing the true and longstanding diversity of American identity is not an either-or. Learning about the internment of Japanese Americans does not block out knowledge of D-Day or Midway. It is additive.

As more diverse voices attain ever more forms of reach and power we need to re-integrate and reimagine Hirsch’s list of what literate Americans ought to know.

To be clear: A 21st-century omni-American approach to cultural literacy is not about crowding out “real” history with the perishable stuff of contemporary life. It’s about drawing lines of descent from the old forms of cultural expression, however formal, to their progeny, however colloquial.

Nor is Omni-American cultural literacy about raising the “self-esteem” of the poor, nonwhite, and marginalized. It’s about raising the collective knowledge of all—and recognizing that the wealthy, white, and powerful also have blind spots and swaths of ignorance

What, then, would be on your list? It’s not an idle question. It turns out to be the key to rethinking how a list should even get made.

the Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. As barriers to culture creation have fallen, orders of magnitude more citizens—amateurs—are able to shape the culture in which we must all be literate. Cat videos and Star Trek fan fiction may not hold up long beside Toni Morrison. But the entry of new creators leads to new claims of right: The right to be recognized. The right to be counted. The right to make the means of recognition and accounting.

It is true that lists alone, with no teaching to bring them to life and no expectation that they be connected to a broader education, are somewhere between useless and harmful.

This will be a list of nodes and nested networks. It will be a fractal of associations, which reflects far more than a linear list how our brains work and how we learn and create. Hirsch himself nodded to this reality in Cultural Literacy when he described the process he and his colleagues used for collecting items for their list, though he raised it by way of pointing out the danger of infinite regress.

His conclusion, appropriate to his times, was that you had to draw boundaries somewhere with the help of experts. My take, appropriate to our times, is that Americans can draw not boundaries so much as circles and linkages, concept sets and pathways among them.

Because 5,000 or even 500 items is too daunting a place to start, I ask here only for your top ten. What are ten things every American—newcomer or native born, affluent or indigent—should know? What ten things do you feel are both required knowledge and illuminating gateways to those unenlightened about American life? Here are my entries: Whiteness The Federalist Papers The Almighty Dollar Organized labor Reconstruction Nativism The American Dream The Reagan Revolution DARPA A sucker born every minute

The problem is the way that wealth has come to be distributed. The share of national income that accrues to the top one percent, which had stayed at about 10 percent from 1954 to 1980, has risen to about 23 percent. In a $15 trillion economy, the difference represents a premium of almost $2 trillion a year, or more than twice the current annual federal budget deficit. As far as I’m concerned, that money belongs to the rest of us, especially the bottom 80 percent, whether in the form of increased pay or higher public spending. By manipulating the legislative and legal systems—which is to say, by buying them—the rich have simply stolen it.

The outcome is the lottery society that’s with us now. Social mobility has slowed to a crawl. If you work hard and play by the rules, it probably won’t make a damn bit of difference

The human brain was formed by relentless competition in the natural world, so it should be no surprise that we adapt quickly to changes in circumstances.

All of this brings us back to our decisions about how hard we should work — choices that have important implications for the lives we are able to lead. Most people would love to have a job with interesting, capable colleagues, a high level of autonomy and ample opportunities for creative expression. But only a limited number of such jobs are available — and it’s our fretting that can motivate us to get them.

THE anxiety we feel about whether we’ll succeed is evolution’s way of motivating us.

Most people successfully avoided reading until about 300 years ago. It was about then that Western European priests and princes decided that everyone should be taught to read. These literacy-loving types tried various schemes to make common folks literate; the most effective of these, however, was naked coercion. By the nineteenth century, churches and states all over Europe and North America were forcing parents to send their kids to school to learn to read

So it happened that by the early twentieth century most people in Western Europe and North America could read. They had no choice in the matter. They still don’t.

Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun. It consumes all of your attention, requires active thought, and makes your eyes hurt. For most people, then, reading is naturally hard and, therefore, something to be avoided if at all possible.

we have misidentified the “problem” facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.

If we lived in an aristocracy of readers, this maldistribution of knowledge might be acceptable. But we don’t; rather, we live in a democracy (if we are lucky). In a democracy, the people – readers and non-readers alike – decide. Thus we would like all citizens to be knowledgeable so that they can make well-informed decisions about our common affairs. This has been a central goal of the Reading Class since the literacy-loving Enlightenment.

If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.

We have to laboriously learn to read, but we are born with the ability to watch and listen. We don’t find reading terribly pleasant, but we do find watching and listening generally enjoyable.

The results of this “natural experiment” are in: people would much rather watch/listen than read. This is why Americans sit in front of the television for three hours a day, while they read for only a tiny fraction of that time.

Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds. The good news is that we can easily do this.

Today any lecturer can produce and distribute high quality audio and video programs. Most scholars have the equipment on their desks (that is, a PC). The software is dead simple and inexpensive. And the shows themselves can be distributed the world over on the Internet for almost nothing.

I’ve done it. Here are two examples. The first is New Books in History, an author-interview podcast featuring historians with new books. Aside from the computer, the total hardware and software start-up costs were roughly $300. It took me no time to learn the software thanks to some handy on-line tutorials available on Lynda.com. Today New Books in History has a large international audience.

The “new books” podcasts are not about serious books; they are about the ideas trapped in those serious, and seriously un-read, books. Books imprison ideas; the “new books” podcasts set them free.)

“These studies suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.” Other scholars have called empathy a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern.

empathy often leads people astray. It influences people to care more about cute victims than ugly victims. It leads to nepotism. It subverts justice; juries give lighter sentences to defendants that show sadness.

Empathy orients you toward moral action, but it doesn’t seem to help much when that action comes at a personal cost. You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar.

It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.

People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.

Think of anybody you admire. They probably have some talent for fellow-feeling, but it is overshadowed by their sense of obligation to some religious, military, social or philosophic code. They would feel a sense of shame or guilt if they didn’t live up to the code. The code tells them when they deserve public admiration or dishonor.

The code isn’t just a set of rules. It’s a source of identity. It’s pursued with joy. It arouses the strongest emotions and attachments. Empathy is a sideshow. If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and enact their codes. Accept that codes conflict.

Of all philosophical writers on metaphor, Nietzsche probably draws the strongest conclusions from this situation. ''Tropes,'' he writes, ''are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature.'' He argues that there is ''no real knowing apart from metaphor,'' by which he means that we experience reality through metaphors, and our notion of literal meaning simply reflects the ossification of language, as figures of speech lose their vitality. He emphasizes in The Genealogy of Morals how metaphor tends to extend its sway, to bring wider ranges of experience under its wing. He goes so far as to say that ''the drive toward the formation of metaphor is the fundamental human drive.'' For him, literal and figurative meaning are not stable categories, but historical ones determined by their social context.

the evolution of abstractions is always a case of going from the physical and sensible to the abstract.

The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious. As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.

All were told that there would be a second phase to the experiment, also lasting five minutes, in which they could eat the chocolate they earned. But they were told they would forfeit any chocolate they couldn’t consume, and they were asked how much they expected to be able to eat.

On average, people in the high-earner group predicted that they could consume 3.75 chocolates. But when it came time to “earn” chocolates, they accumulated well beyond their estimate

“We introduce the concept of ‘mindless accumulation,’ ” said one of the paper’s authors, Christopher Hsee, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Busi

The impulse seemed less pronounced, even mixed, with the low earners. They earned less chocolate than they predicted they could eat. But the high earners and the low earners listened to about the same amount of obnoxious noise in the five-minute period, which Dr. Hsee said strongly suggested that both groups were driven by the same thing: not by how much they need, but by how much work they could withstand.

“If I were teaching this in a course,” said Merilee Grindle, president of the Latin American Studies Association and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, “I would take his comments, add them in and use them to generate a far more interesting discussion about how we see and interpret events at different points in time.” And that seems to be exactly what many professors plan to do.

“Open Veins” has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has sold more than a million copies. In its heyday, its influence extended throughout what was then called the third world, including Africa and Asia, until the economic rise of China and India and Brazil seemed to undercut parts of its thesis.In the United States, “Open Veins” has been widely taught on university campuses since the 1970s, in courses ranging from history and anthropology to economics and geography. But Mr. Galeano’s unexpected takedown of his own work has left scholars wondering how to deal with the book in class.

“Reality has changed a lot, and I have changed a lot,” he said in Brazil, adding: “Reality is much more complex precisely because the human condition is diverse. Some political sectors close to me thought such diversity was a heresy. Even today, there are some survivors of this type who think that all diversity is a threat. Fortunately, it is not.”

In the mid-1990s, three advocates of free-market policies — the Colombian writer and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the exiled Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner and the Peruvian journalist and author Álvaro Vargas Llosa — reacted to Mr. Galeano with a polemic of their own, “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.” They dismissed “Open Veins” as “the idiot’s bible,” and reduced its thesis to a single sentence: “We’re poor; it’s their fault.”

Mr. Montaner responded to Mr. Galeano’s recent remarks with a blog post titled “Galeano Corrects Himself and the Idiots Lose Their Bible.” In Brazil, Rodrigo Constantino, the author of “The Caviar Left,” took an even harsher tone, blaming Mr. Galeano’s analysis and prescription for many of Latin America’s ills. “He should feel really guilty for the damage he caused,”

When the study drew attention and controversy, there was a moment when they both could have said: "We didn't look carefully enough at this the first time. Now we can see that it doesn't meet our standards." Instead they allowed Facebook and the PR people to take the lead in responding to the controversy.

What should this reality signal to Facebook users? Is it time to pull-back? You have (almost) no rights. You have (almost) no control. You have no idea what they're doing to you or with you. You don't even know who's getting the stuff you are posting, and you're not allowed to know. Trade secret!

Are there any particular warnings here for journalists and editors in terms of their exposure on Facebook? Yeah. Facebook has all the power. You have almost none. Just keep that in mind in all your dealings with it, as an individual with family and friends, as a journalist with a story to file, and as a news organization that is "on" Facebook.

I am not in a commercial situation where I have to maximize my traffic, so I can opt out. Right now my choice is to keep my account, but use it cynically. 

does this level of experimentation indicate the prospect of a further undermining of audience-driven news priorities and traditional news values? The right way to think about it is a loss of power—for news producers and their priorities. As I said, Facebook thinks it knows better than I do what "my" 180,000 subscribers should get from me.

Facebook has "where else are they going to go?" logic now. And they have good reason for this confidence. (It's called network effects.) But "where else are they going to go?" is a long way from trust and loyalty. It is less a durable business model than a statement of power. 

I distinguished between the "thin" legitimacy that Facebook operates under and the "thick" legitimacy that the university requires to be the institution it was always supposed to be. (Both are distinct from il-legitimacy.) News organizations should learn to make this distinction more often. Normal PR exists to muddle it. Which is why you don't hand a research crisis over to university PR people.

some commentators have questioned the practice of A/B headline testing in the aftermath of this scandal—is there a clear connection? The connection to me is that both are forms of behaviourism. Behaviourism is a view of human beings in which, as Hannah Arendt said, they are reduced to the level of a conditioned and "behaving" animal—an animal that responds to these stimuli but not those. This is why a popular shorthand for Facebook's study was that users were being treated as lab rats.

Journalism is supposed to be about informing people so they can understand the world and take action when necessary. Action and behaviour are not the same thing at all. One is a conscious choice, the other a human tendency. There's a tension, then, between commercial behaviourism, which may be deeply functional in some ways for the news industry, and informing people as citizens capable of understanding their world well enough to improve it, which is the deepest purpose of journalism. A/B testing merely highlights this tension.

it seems as if networks think that post-racial story lines are the only acceptable ways of showcasing black characters on television.

TV is resplendent with ethnically diverse casts, from procedurals like “Law & Order: SVU” and “NCIS: Los Angeles” to hits like “Scandal” and “Elementary” to sitcoms like “New Girl” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”  But the characters on those series don’t often deal directly with racial issues in everyday life and, by not doing so, perpetuate another kind of colorblindness, one that homogenizes characters and treats race as inconsequential, when it is anything but.

“The PC way of handling culture has been to not talk about it,” Kenya Barris, the show’s creator, said in an interview. “But we should be talking about it.”

What black viewers are left with instead, said Dayna Chatman, a media researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, is a dynamic that “makes whiteness the norm.”

reality television often showcases African-Americans, but since that genre is often about over-the-top performances, she said, it isn’t “particularly representative or flattering.”

“The business explanation is always that this isn’t what the marketplace is asking for,”

The lack of texture and diversity on television is harder to ignore amid the rise of streaming and online series (say, Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black” or Issa Rae’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl”) as well as social media like Instagram and Vine (see King Bach’s account). They offer a welcome and much more nuanced window into black humor and culture.

there’s no middle ground: Either race is largely absent or exaggerated to the point of caricature.

He said ABC and cable networks pursued him and the “Black-ish” pilot “very aggressively.” Contrary to popular belief, networks “are looking for something that deals with diversity,” he said. “The problem has been timing and having the right package behind it.”

“This is the first time in American history where the most famous people in America are black,” he said, naming the Obama family and the musicians Kanye West and Beyoncé. “But there’s still a really obvious invisibility on television.”

Mr. Barris said he was determined to do more than create a successor to “The Cosby Show,” although “Black-ish” draws from its legacy. But while the popularity of the Huxtable family centered on its warmth and relatability, it was, Mr. Barris said, “about a family that happened to be black.” He added that he wanted his show to be much more cognizant of modern racial identity, and to reflect the class and racial dynamics of being black in America.

“We are hyperaware of how people and the media perceive us,” she said. “And who gets it and who doesn’t get it.”

In 2005, Mr. Chappelle walked away from his lucrative show on Comedy Central after expressing discomfort that the line between his social commentary and racial satire had grown too thin.

Today, there are a few other shows operating in the space left behind by Mr. Chappelle, including “Key & Peele” on Comedy Central and “Black Jesus” on Adult Swim. But those are cable outlets with smaller audiences, whereas “Black-ish” is on a mainstream network.

For Coates, true equality means “black people in this country have the right to be as mediocre as white people,” he says. “Not that individual black people will be as excellent, or more excellent, than other white people.”

he came to see black respectability—the idea that, to succeed, African-Americans must stoically prevail against the odds and be “twice as good” as white people to get the same rights—as deeply immoral.

He is no soothsayer, telling people what to think from on high, but rather is refreshingly open about what he doesn’t know, inviting readers to learn with him. Coates is not merely an ivory-tower pontificator or a shiny Web 2.0 brand. He is a public intellectual for the digital age.

we miss the real question of why there is a systemic, historical difference in the way police treat blacks versus whites.

Another term for that road is “white supremacy.” This refers not so much to hate groups, but, as Coates defines it, a system of policies and beliefs that aims to keep African-Americans as “a peon class.”

To be “white” in this sense does not refer merely to skin color but to the degree that someone qualifies as “normal,” and thus worthy of the same rights as all Americans

The pool where all these ideas eventually arrive is a question: “How big-hearted can democracy be?” he says. “How many people can it actually include and sustain itself? That is the question I’m asking over and over again.”

it is a question of empathy. Are humans capable of forming a society where everyone can flourish?

there was the coverage of Michael Brown (or Jordan Davis, or Renisha McBride, or Eric Garner): unarmed African-Americans killed by police or others under controversial circumstances. In each case, the storyline was that these horrific encounters were caused either by genuine provocation, or by race-fueled fear or hatred. Either way, they were stories of personal failings.

When an event becomes news, there is often an implication that it is an exception—that the world is mostly working as it should and this event is newsworthy because it’s an aberration. If the race-related stories we see most often in the media are about personal bigotry, then our conception of racism is limited to the bigoted remarks or actions—racism becomes little more than uttering the n-word.

he cites research that in 1860 slaves were the largest asset in the US economy. “It is almost impossible to think of democracy, as it was formed in America, without the enslavement of African-Americans,” he says. “Not that these things were bumps in the road along the way, but that they were the road.”

a lack of historical perspective in the media’s approach to race. “Journalism privileges what’s happening now over the long reasons for things happening,” he says. “And for African-Americans, that has a particular effect.”

Even the very existence of racism is questioned: A recent study published by the Association of Psychological Science has shown that whites think they are discriminated against due to race as much if not more than blacks.

“So when you’re talking about something like institutional racism and prejudice, how do you talk about that as an objective reality?”

Coates’ strength is in connecting contemporary problems to historical scholarship. “I think if I bring anything to the table it’s the ability to synthesize all of that into something that people find emotionally moving,” he says. The irony of the reparations piece, as unoriginal as it may have been to scholars, is that it was news to many people.

Reporting on race requires simultaneously understanding multiple, contradictory worlds, with contradictory narratives. Widespread black poverty exists; so do a black middle class and a black president

Progress is key to the myth of American Exceptionalism, and the notion that America is built on slavery and on freedom are discordant ideas that threaten any simple storyline. Coates, together with others who join him, is trying to claim the frontier of a new narrative.

reading Coates is like building a worldview, piece by piece, on an area of contemporary life that’s otherwise difficult to grasp.

“To come and tell someone may not be as effective in convincing them as allowing them to learn on their own. If you believe you come to a conclusion on your own, you’re more likely to agree.”

It’s brave to bare yourself intellectually on the Web, and to acknowledge mistakes, especially when the capital that public intellectuals appear to have is their ability to be “right.”

Coates is equally demanding of his followers. Online he is blunt, and willing to call people out. He cares enough to be rigorous

despite being a master of online engagement, Coates insists he does not write for others, an idea he explained in a recent post: “I have long believed that the best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself. The best thing I can say about the reparations piece is that I now understand.”

To him, it’s an open question whether or not America will ever be capable of fostering true equality. “How big-hearted can democracy be? It points to a very ugly answer: maybe not that big-hearted at all. That in fact America is not exceptional. That it’s just like every other country. That it passes its democracy and it passes all these allegedly big-hearted programs [the New Deal, the G.I. Bill] but still excludes other people,

In a 2010 post about antebellum America, Coates mentioned feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimke. “Suffice to say that much like Abe Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant, Angelina Grimke was a Walker,” he wrote. “What was the Walker reference?” Rosemartian asked in the comments section. “Just someone who spends their life evolving, or, walking,” Coates replied. “Grant and Lincoln fit in there for me. Malcolm X was another Walker. Walkers tend to be sometimes—even often—wrong. But they are rarely bigots, in the sense of nakedly clinging to ignorance.”

On campuses, activists interpret ordinary interactions as “microaggressions” and set up “safe spaces” to protect students from certain forms of speech. And presidential candidates on both the left and the right routinely motivate supporters by declaring that they are under attack by immigrants or wealthy people.

victimhood makes it more and more difficult for us to resolve political and social conflicts. The culture feeds a mentality that crowds out a necessary give and take — the very concept of good-faith disagreement — turning every policy difference into a pitched battle between good (us) and evil (them).

Consider a 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which examined why opposing groups, including Democrats and Republicans, found compromise so difficult. The researchers concluded that there was a widespread political “motive attribution asymmetry,” in which both sides attributed their own group’s aggressive behavior to love, but the opposite side’s to hatred. Today, millions of Americans believe that their side is basically benevolent while the other side is evil and out to get them.

the intervening two decades have made Mr. Hughes look prophetic

In a separate experiment, the researchers found that members of the unfairness group were 11 percent more likely to express selfish attitudes. In a comical and telling aside, the researchers noted that the victims were more likely than the nonvictims to leave trash behind on the desks and to steal the experimenters’ pens.

Does this mean that we should reject all claims that people are victims? Of course not. Some people are indeed victims in America — of crime, discrimination or deprivation. They deserve our empathy and require justice.

The problem is that the line is fuzzy between fighting for victimized people and promoting a victimhood culture.

look at the role of free speech in the debate. Victims and their advocates always rely on free speech and open dialogue to articulate unpopular truths. They rely on free speech to assert their right to speak. Victimhood culture, by contrast, generally seeks to restrict expression in order to protect the sensibilities of its advocates

look at a movement’s leadership. The fight for victims is led by aspirational leaders who challenge us to cultivate higher values. They insist that everyone is capable of — and has a right to — earned success. They articulate visions of human dignity. But the organizations and people who ascend in a victimhood culture are very different. Some set themselves up as saviors; others focus on a common enemy. In all cases, they treat people less as individuals and more as aggrieved masses.

The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”

in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”

Disgusting. So much so that the item would collapse from its own weightlessness, right? Wrong. Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.

The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.” So, when the occasional debunker would point out that there was no evidence of the post anywhere, it made little difference. When confronted with evidence that the story was utterly false, it only convinced many that there was a conspiracy and coverup.

conversations on Facebook are somewhat more civil, because people generally have to reveal their identities. But on Twitter and in other places — the online comments section of The Post, for example — people can be anonymous or have pseudonyms. And that is where bile and venom flow freely.

an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.”

This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.