ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the rhetoric of civility, then examines more closely some of its core contradictions: the assumption, in the context appeals to “free speech” and open dialogue, of ethical and political equivalence among political viewpoints; the de facto exclusion and disciplining of women and faculty of color and the concomitant denial of power; and the affective “de-materialization” of difference – the rendering of bodily threat and real oppression as ideas or feelings rather than experiences, standpoints, and lives. These elements amount to a disavowal or denial of differential power and of the reality of the White supremacist threat. Moral equivalence is often described as a logical fallacy in the context of discussions of good and evil. The alternatives to civility and dialogue as responses to oppression, exploitation, and the forces of the far-Right include counter-speech and collective resistance.
