Claiming that arguments cause harm will make learning impossible

I’m sorry.

I know that some readers will be harmed by this article. So please allow me to apologise in advance, for any damage that I cause.

Just kidding.

People might well be offended by what I write. Annoyed, perhaps. But they will not be harmed or damaged. Moreover, once we start to use those words to describe what we say or write, we won’t be able to communicate at all.

Witness the recent kerfuffle over an essay by University of Wisconsin historian James Sweet, the current president of the American Historical Association. Writing in the AHA’s monthly magazine, Perspectives on History, Sweet worried that the profession was being infected by “presentism” – that is, by the tendency to interpret and evaluate the past through the lens of the present.

The Twitterverse exploded, condemning Sweet as an out-of-touch white guy who had lost the real plot of history: the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors. Critics especially disliked his jab at “identity politics”, which they took to mean that Sweet was denigrating or ignoring racial minorities. Never mind that Sweet has spent his career studying Africa and the Black diaspora. He used the wrong words, his foes said, and he must be punished for them. Some called on the AHA to retract the essay; others said that Sweet should be relieved of his presidency.

I was hoping that Sweet would reply to the critics, refining his argument and inviting more retorts to it. That’s the way academia works, or so I thought. You make a claim. I critique it. You respond. And so on, until we all come to a deeper understanding of what we mean.

No such luck. Many of the social media posts impugned Sweet’s character, not his argument; one commenter even likened him to the Ku Klux Klan (yes, you can look it up). And instead of engaging with the complicated questions raised by his essay, Sweet issued an abject apology for it.

“I had hoped to open a conversation on how we ‘do’ history in our politically charged environment,” Sweet wrote, in an author’s note that the AHA appended to his original essay. “Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.” He concluded by apologising again for the “damage” he had inflicted on other historians and the profession writ large. “I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all,” Sweet wrote. “I’m listening and learning.”

Don’t hold your breath for that dialogue. The very terms of Sweet’s apology make real conversation – and real learning – almost impossible. Who wants to harm or damage a colleague or a student? I certainly don’t. But once you imagine disagreement as a form of harm, there’s nothing left to do but plead guilty, beg for forgiveness and keep your big mouth shut in the future to protect everyone – not least yourself.

In his apology, Sweet said the attacks on his piece showed that “the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever”. Actually, it proved the opposite. For the most part, the only people who spoke up about Sweet’s column condemned it (and him). Almost everyone else went silent.

Full disclosure: although I’ve never met Sweet, I admire his scholarship. That said, I think his essay had some glaring weaknesses and ambiguities. Nodding to Lynn Hunt’s attack on presentism 20 years ago, in her own AHA presidential column, Sweet did not explore how the profession has changed over time (a telling omission for a historian). He alluded to his forthcoming critique of The New York Times’ 1619 Project (which aims to "place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative") but he did not explain how he thought presentism had marred it. And he linked bad historical reasoning in the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on abortion and gun rights to distortions of African involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, which ignored the very different actors (with very different levels of power) in the two instances.

But that doesn’t mean Sweet is a racist and an imperialist, as his Twitter assailants charged. It is fine – indeed, necessary – to critique what he writes about presentism, and everything else. But it is despicable to label him a bigot simply because you disagree with him.

I don’t believe he was harmed by that, any more than he harmed his readers. But substituting name-calling for argument makes real disagreement and discussion impossible, just as the metaphors of harm and damage do.

If you dislike this article, don’t call me names or claim I harmed you; critique my claim, instead. I’m listening, and learning.

Jonathan Zimmerman is Judy and Howard Berkowitz professor in education and professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.