On December 13, John McWhorter wrote a column for the New York Times. I haven’t read it yet. I read his columns whenever they appear in the Times and I very much enjoyed his lectures on linguistics, which he developed for The Teaching Company. But I want to write this based on the headline. If McWhorter himself wrote the headline, he included in it all the major emphases I expect to find in the column.

Here’s the headline: “Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort.” Here are three observations based on that headline.

First, note that “black students” are the focus. They are the object of the passive verb “are being trained.” That’s not all that unusual. There is a lot of talk from the left that young black people are being trained for docility and from the right that they are being trained for racial hatred. But if you buy the premise, as it is offered in the phrasing of the headline, that this is another column about the infinite plasticity of young black people, you are in for a surprise. That’s the first thing I like about the headline.

Second, note that “black students are being trained to think something in particular.” The most common use of such a phrasing is as the setup to the next statement, which is that what they are being trained to think is false or destructive. “Trained to think that….” prepares the writer, McWhorter in this case, to say that they should not be trained in this way and to say just why. “Trained to think that…” stops short of saying that what they are being trained to think is an illusion. But not short by much.

Third, the word “discomfort” signals that this is not the kind of column we are used to seeing, particularly not from a black professor. The whole escalation of attitudes about race is recent and powerful. “Using the wrong word about a racial group is racism and racism is cousin to genocide.” Now you know. It is that very common and scarcely noticed escalation that McWhorter analyzes in his book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. It has nothing to do with “discomfort.”

If you are writing on this topic, the very least you can do it to call the experience “pain” or possibly “anguish.” Clearly “discomfort” is a step down. It may be several steps down. And if you are going to write about the discomfort of black students, the very least you can do is bury it in the text of the column somewhere. You absolutely do not want to feature it in the headline, as if the “discomfort” of black students were important. And even more, that the training of these students to feel discomfort were important.

Those three observations are what I saw in the headline. As soon as I finish this post, I am going to read the column. I am quite certain it is going to say that the students who could be trained to feel something more useful—I’ll return to that in a moment—are being trained to feel discomfort instead. Thereby, McWhorter will say, the discourse about race is made brittle and inflammatory. The range of views about race and its implications is thereby constrained and the heat of the discussion intensified.

McWhorter might argue that if we are going to take the trouble to “train” black students at all, they should be trained for something more useful. They could be taught that an immediate hot anger is more appropriate and more useful. (How one might express that anger is a separate question.) They could be taught that compassion for the people who are demeaning them is more appropriate and more useful. It shows their ignorance, their confinement in the racism of their little section of society, their emotional vulnerability. They could be taught to take the immediate discomfort they feel as fuel for the next step in the interaction, which could be making the slur or the institutional practice the focus of sustained debate.

McWhorter might go so far—I don’t think he will—of saying that one of those responses is more appropriate in some circumstance and a different one in other circumstances. He might say that black kids with this skill set might respond in one way and kids with another set might do other things instead.

I don’t actually know what he will say, but those are things that he has prepared for in the headline and I am really looking forward to finding out.