Roxane Gay’s latest column in The New York Times, "Civility Is a Fantasy," declares that civility is a “fantasy” and incivility is liberation. Gay is famously known as the “bad feminist” — a woman who embraces her contradictions as if she were confessing to being a sinner against God, except her god is the feminist mantra. That doesn’t mean she’s an anti-abortion feminist — no, her big rebellion is that she likes misogynistic rap lyrics. And lord forbid she ever go against any of the important leftist teachings. She's not that kind of a rebel.
She also fails to mention that the Freedom Riders she cites as examples of civility’s futility were rescued from a mob-surrounded hospital by armed — yes, armed with guns — black community leaders. No, instead she casts them as helpless victims instead of heroes who practiced discipline and courage. But I digress. This is a fisking, and I fisk hard.
For those who aren’t history buffs: the Freedom Riders were racially integrated groups of activists in the early 1960s who rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test Supreme Court rulings that outlawed segregation in buses and bus terminals. They were beaten, firebombed, and arrested — and they met that violence with nonviolent discipline. That’s what exposed Jim Crow’s brutality to the world.
A Fisking! A Fisking!
Civility is the mode of engagement that is often demanded in political discourse; it is the price of admission to important political conversation, its adherents would have us believe; no civility, no service. But civility — this idea that there is a perfect, polite way to communicate about sociopolitical differences — is a fantasy.
Right out of the gate, she redefines civility as some impossible demand for perfection. Wrong. Civility isn’t about being perfect or polite for politeness’ sake. It’s about keeping disagreement from spilling into violence. Without civility, you don’t get liberation — you get chaos, like the recent Texas ICE shooting where two detainees died while the targeted ICE agents walked away untouched. That wasn’t civility. That was incivility, and the powerless paid the price.
If civility were a fantasy, the American Revolution wouldn’t have birthed a republic through debate and petition before a single shot was fired. The Constitution itself is civility written down. Incivility didn’t protect the powerless; it killed them. Gay calls civility a cage. In reality, it’s the only shield the weak have left.
In the fantasy of civility, if we are polite about our disagreements, we are practicing politics the right way. If we are polite when we express bigotry, we are performing respectability for people whom we do not actually respect and who, in return, do not respect us. The performance is the only thing that matters.
Notice how she quietly redefines civility as “polite bigotry.” In Gay’s world, there’s no such thing as principled disagreement — only hatred dressed up in a suit. That lets her dodge the actual point of civility, which is not to pretend everyone respects everyone else, but to stop disagreements from devolving into fists, firebombs, or bullets. What she calls “performance” is really the hard work of self-restraint — the exact quality that kept the Freedom Riders from becoming just another mob.
Civility obsessives love a silver-tongued devil, wearing a nice suit, sporting a tidy haircut, while whispering sweet bigotries. The conservatives among them push for marginalized people to lose their rights and freedoms and, sometimes, even risk their lives.
Ah yes, the caricature: conservatives as slick devils in suits (shades of the hackneyed "white devils" idea, too). Easier to sneer at the haircut than grapple with the argument. That’s not analysis — it’s ad hominem with better hair gel. Civility doesn’t turn men into devils; it exposes devils when they try to pass for gentlemen.
To be uncivil means pointing out hypocrisies and misinformation. It means accurately acknowledging what people have said, with ample documentation and holding them accountable for their words and deeds.
In theory, maybe. In practice, “being uncivil” looks a lot less like careful documentation and a lot more like riots, looting, and shootings. Ask the black business owners in Minneapolis who lost everything during BLM. Ask the immigrant shopkeepers in Kenosha whose livelihoods went up in flames. And it’s not new: the Watts riots in 1965 and the Milwaukee riots in 1967 left black neighborhoods gutted, families poorer, and communities set back for decades. The only people “held accountable” were the ones least able to recover. Incivility doesn’t check power; it just preys on whoever can’t fight back.
Nonviolence didn’t mean passivity. It was a strategy, intended to reveal the brutal contrast between the tactics of the oppressor and the experiences of the oppressed.
Exactly. Which makes it bizarre that Gay trots out the Freedom Riders as proof that civility is meaningless. Their disciplined nonviolent protest was civility in action. That discipline is what forced the cameras to capture fire hoses, dogs, and billy clubs for the world to see. If they’d chosen Gay’s path of “incivility,” they’d be remembered as just another mob, not the heroes who cracked Jim Crow wide open.
It means exercising one’s constitutionally protected right to free speech. It means believing in science and factual information and public education and other such heretical ideas.
Oh, please. The “science” she means isn’t the messy, evidence-driven pursuit of truth — it’s whatever government-sanctioned line is trending this week. Real scientists challenge orthodoxy using their constitutionally protected right to free speech — the same right that cost many of them jobs, reputations, and platforms when their findings contradicted the official narrative. Gay’s “uncivil rebels” aren’t rebels at all. They’re sheep, falling into line behind whatever mantra their leaders chant. Calling that rebellion is like calling synchronized swimming a bar fight.
Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control.
Wrong. Civility is what restrains power. If civility were just a tool of the powerful, then Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn’t have used it to march straight into the teeth of segregation and win. Gandhi wouldn’t have used it to shake the foundations of the British Empire. Civility is not the weapon of the strong against the weak — it is the shield the weak use against the strong. Tear it down, and you don’t get justice — you get chaos, where the only winners are those most willing to destroy. That’s not liberation; it’s surrendering society to the most dangerous player at the table.
The Trump administration does not have subtle ambitions. Whether it is renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War or gesturing broadly toward ‘leftists’ as ‘domestic terrorists,’ the administration makes clear that there are enemies and allies; there is an us and a them.
This from the same essay that divides the world neatly into “civil” liars and “uncivil” truth-tellers like herself. The projection is almost too on the nose. Gay condemns “us vs. them” thinking while doing it sentence by sentence.
And I know firsthand how poisonous that mindset can be. Years ago, I was attacked by a homeless man at a bus stop. Across the street, a businessman at the door of a banking high-rise shouted to ask if I was all right. The attacker froze, and I bolted toward the building. Inside, the businessman shook his head. “I almost didn’t stop,” he said, “but then I saw your briefcase and realized you were one of us.”
That single comment stuck with me longer than the attack itself. To him, my worth hinged on whether I was “us” or “them.” That is the danger of dividing the world into tribes and labels. It shrinks human beings into categories, and when categories decide who deserves help or dignity, everyone is at risk. Civility insists there is no us and them — only fellow citizens bound by rules that protect us all.
Every single day, I read the news, and I can hardly process it all. I keep wondering when we will reach a cultural breaking point…
Translation: things are bad, so let’s speed-run collapse. Gay plays the arsonist who lights the fire and then complains about the smoke. If your answer to every crisis is “burn it down,” don’t be shocked when all you have left is ashes — and when the powerless are the ones buried in them.
To Conclude
Gay’s essay isn’t fresh, new, or exciting. It’s a rehash of the contradictory thinking that has become normal on the left — war is peace, truth is a lie, and apparently “civil disobedience” now includes Molotov cocktails and bricks hurled at law enforcement. Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning; the modern left is using it as a how-to manual.
The free thinkers are no longer on the left. They’re the ones in the center and to the right, the supposedly stuffy folks who insist on the rule of law, who want people to keep what they’ve earned, and who believe in worshiping God not just on Sunday but every day of the week. The left, meanwhile, has become Jacobin rabble, chanting meaningless phrases — or worse, phrases it does not even understand, like “from the river to the sea.”
The free thinkers are the ones insisting that words mean what they mean, that science is tested, not decreed, and that civility is not a cage but the only thing that keeps the ruthless from ruling the day. Incivility may feel like rebellion, but it’s just obedience to chaos. And chaos always eats its own.
