Since the results of this election, I have overwhelmingly heard two things. First and most importantly, I have heard a very real fear––which I, as an overly-privileged white male, can only begin to understand––from everyone who has been hurt and who will be hurt by our President-elect.

Second, from pundits, most of whom tend to be like me, white and privileged, I have heard mourning about how we in America don’t listen to each other any more. Particularly how liberal elites don’t listen to the white-working-class, whom they dismiss as “baskets of deplorables.” Until Election Day, when they strike back, forming the sea of red that envelops all but the coasts and the cities.

As someone who’s lived on coasts and in cities most of his life, I agree that liberal elites have not been listening enough and have been ignoring the underlying concerns related to globalization and shrinking wages that do matter. I was a Bernie supporter, after all, though he certainly has his problems too, but the issue isn’t that they have been too quick to dismiss racism and nationalistic bigotry.

It’s been that they’ve been too complicit with their dollars and their voices, which has allowed prejudiced anger to fester. More than anything, this complacency has translated itself into our language and into our thinking and is why, barring a godsend, Mr. Trump will be our next President.

First, to understand what exactly this phenomenon is in the context of our community, we have to take a step back, to last October, to an event that still makes me cringe.“The Whiteness MX,” as it is called by most. A group of faculty and students tried to start a conversation, mainly among white students, in regard to understanding their white racial identity, in the context of fighting racism. This, needless to say, had a wildly different effect.

Of course everyone speaks about race differently, but some of the language used a little over a year ago is indicative of how much of our community still talks about race. Experiences with race are put into a box called “racial identity,” the “Civil Rights Movement happened,” and “microaggressions” are small and are uniquely problematic.

These assumptions are blatantly wrong in every possible way, yet they are a byproduct of one certain truth: language itself stems from reference. The first words probably got their start from people simultaneously making noises and pointing at things, until other people put the two together. Gradually, words could also start referring to things inside our heads, things a lot harder to point at, through the fact that much of the human experience is universal.

When we stub our toes, we probably experience similar sensations, allowing us to point to our stubbed toe to refer to a certain type of pain. But some things, like our experiences with race and our feelings about this election, are not universal and cannot be beckoned by symbols or reduced to simpler concepts, which is why people often speak their truth, or run for office on the basis of their truth, but still are distinctly out of touch with so much of our society, including the backbone of our community.

But we have an opportunity as a community to act differently, to do our best to embrace this ambiguity gap, to dive into the process of using imperfect tools, to try to understand those whose voices are heard the least, and to recognize that our perspectives are neither special nor alone in importance.

While the state of language after this election is troublesome – too many speak more than ever in 140 characters and in generalities, geared only towards themselves and those like them – it is our challenge, and more than that our obligation, to understand and promote the understanding of the world and the people in it in all their complexity. This, in many ways, is the call of the progressive school in 2016, which Parker must answer.