Civility is a consensus bargain that brands dissent as unworthy rowdiness.

Evidence

Civility is prompted and promoted among the agreeable, where there is broad social consensus about social arrangements and the shape and content of state arrangements – in short, where social conditions and political infrastructure are largely settled. But resistance, critique, subversion call forth not so much incivility and rudeness as oppositionalities and resistances defined as such, characterized as not belonging because outside the compact, rowdy because already unfitting and unfitted, so not worthy of belonging, stylistically at odds or in contention with the compact. The insistent unworthiness of the uncivil is a product really of a different conception of being and longing, different romantic utopias coupled with the threat – the terror – of subversion. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 246

Categorization

• DEFINE: Civility is defined not as restraint but as membership in a settled consensus that delegitimizes dissent.
• XREF: connects to: Civility veils socially sanctioned violence rather than ending it. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 250; Civility masks the egoism and violence of those who claim refined manners; Civility and barbarity constitute each other rather than oppose each other

Broader Connections

• Civility and barbarity constitute each other rather than oppose each other #expands (0.80)
• Civility veils socially sanctioned violence rather than ending it. #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 250
• Civility masks the egoism and violence of those who claim refined manners #complicates (0.75)