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It is common to read news of someone getting fired for speaking or acting in ways that harmed members of another race. Our current call-out culture often advocates publicly shaming and humiliating wrongdoers, destroying their reputations and making them lose their jobs. Further, this culture prioritizes the impact of people’s words or actions over their intent. In higher education alone, there have been many cases of such call-outs. Greg Patton, a professor at University of Southern California, had to step away from teaching in the MBA program for using a Chinese word that sounded like a racial slur during a Zoom lecture. At Smith College, staff members who were falsely called out for being racist suffered health issues and left the job. UCLA accounting lecturer Gordon Klein was suspend...

History shows that a broad coalition of civil rights activists is how to fight back. In the latest in a long string of attacks on immigration, this week Trump declared he would issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship. Established by the 14th amendment to grant citizenship to freed slaves, the idea that all people born in the United States are U.S. citizens, regardless of race or where their parents came from, has long been upheld by the courts and the Constitution. But this is not the first time White supremacists have tried to restrict the rights of citizenship along racial lines. In a little-known episode from World War II, nativist agitators who had led earlier efforts to exclude Asian immigrant communities—and paved the way for Japanese American incarcerati...