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.