She worked to improve the participation of women of color as a program director at the National Organization for Women and is credited, along with 11 others, as having coined the term “reproductive justice” — a combination of “reproductive rights” and “social justice” in response to what they believed was missing from Bill Clinton’s 1994 health care reform plan.

As it turns out, all of that shaming may be counterproductive. Multiple studies, Ms. Crockett said, have found that shaming can make people more resistant to change.And, as anyone who has partaken in a game of casual doom scrolling knows, it can also be bad for health — physical and mental.

“I think we overuse that word ‘trigger’ when really we mean discomfort,” she said. “And we should be able to have uncomfortable conversations.”

“We have a saying in the movement: Some people you can work with and some people you can work around. But the thing that I want to emphasize is that the calling-in practice means you always keep a seat at the table for them if they come back.”

Katherine Albert-Aranovich, a sophomore from Los Angeles, said she has deleted all of her social profiles, to try to be “removed from that negativity.”

A radical Black feminist who has been doing human rights work for four decades, she was one of the signatories of a widely denounced letter in Harper’s Magazine, for which she herself was called out. “There’s such an irony for being called out for calling out the calling-out culture,”

What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In?

Not that Professor Ross is conflict averse. “I have no problem calling out politicians who aren’t living up to the oaths that they swore to,” she said. She cited Colin Kaepernick, someone who quite effectively called out a powerful organization, the N.F.L. “The thing I am sharply critical of is punching down, calling out people who have less power than you simply because you can get away with it. But there is a very strategic use of punching up.”