Rather than viewing civility as mere politeness or as suppressing dissent, true civility promotes further discourse. In contentious/political conversations, practice “calling in” individuals while “calling out” contested language. In addition, conversants should begin by establishing ground rules that will promote discursive openings and continuing conversation, and they should directly confront and discuss contested language.
Civility is especially important for political decision-making where disagreement is rife. Past scholars have offered many views of what civility is: forgiveness, respect for others, a cultural investment in collective open discourse, and “masks for the preservation of injustice.” Too often these views construct a false dichotomy of civility and incivility. In turn, calls for civility end up suppressing disagreement and closing off opportunities for dialogue.
Rather than viewing civility as mere politeness without civic purpose or as “suppression in service of hegemonic arrangements,” we ought to understand the truly valuable civility as “that which fosters discursive openings.” It is dynamic, situational, and, crucially, generative; seeking to further/continue the conversation rather than to censor or limit disagreement. As such, civility must be understood to lie “outside the context of individual behavior,” consisting of “the communicative structures and conditions that work to keep the conversation open.”
“Calling out” and efforts to police political correctness (or incorrectness), when used to silence, shame, or condescend, ultimately close off opportunities for discourse by restricting acceptable zones of discussion and incentivizing self-censorship. Calling out should instead be viewed as a form of dissent, i.e., “a tactic for gaining attention that is not available through polite means” or “the only tool available to marginalized groups that have not been granted a voice.” The authors endorse Ngoc Loan Trần’s “idea of ‘calling in’ in which we acknowledge that even those of us who have learned to account for the unheard voices, and indeed to hear them speak for themselves, didn’t always know this.” This approach promotes discourse by allowing earnest speech rather than requiring perfect speech. It is best, then, to call in individuals while calling out language, because language can be implicitly ideological (consider, e.g., “anchor baby” and “chain migration” in the immigration context). Because language is “dynamic and negotiated among interactants,” it is useful “to explicitly bring language to the forefront of policy discussions” rather than to proceed with confusing and likely conflicting perceptions of established meanings.
In leading their own student dialogues around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the authors “employed two specific practices that cultivated civility toward discursive opening: First, constructing and honoring ground rules that foster gracious contestation, and second, calling out language associated with the issue, and calling in the conversants to negotiate what that language means.” In their view, gracious contestation entails accepting conflict and disagreement as part of the decision-making process, which manifests as “calling out while maintaining earnestness and humility.” This approach “calls for responsibility on the part of the speaker and the listener, where the listener may believe: ‘I don’t like what you said, but I am going to presume you do not say it to intend me harm.’” To achieve this, conversants should establish ground rules in advance which promote continuing conversation rather than closing it down.