Nazi flyers thrown in our driveways at night, death messages taped to our mailboxes; not terminology.

We're talking about two different things.

The people doing that are racist people. They are taking action to injure minorities based upon specific intentional animus towards those minorities. And honestly, that's not really a disputed point in our politics or culture. The folks throwing around racist flyers or making death threats against minorities are pretty widely acknowledged to be racist people.

But whether the country is racist - or whether particular broad scale institutions or organizations are themselves racist - is very much a point of contention. And that I think that the contentiousness is exacerbated by the fact that people are using the term "racist" to mean very different things. Which makes them - or allows them to - misconstrue what the other side is saying.

So while the person with the Nazi flyers is racist under virtually all definitions of racist, there's a lot less precision when someone makes a claim about something different than a person - like, whether the legacy preferences in college admissions is racist. There's no real agreement on what it would mean for that specific admissions policy to be racist or not, and no immediate shared understanding of how the term "racist" is being used between two people who might be arguing that it is, or is not, racist.