Call Them by Their True Names

Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) appeared in September 2018 from Haymarket Books and landed with the compressed force of a book that knows exactly what it is doing. Rebecca Solnit gathered twenty-two essays written in the years immediately following the 2016 presidential election, essays that had appeared in the Guardian, Literary Hub, and other publications, and organized them into a collection that reads less like an anthology than a sustained argument. The argument is this: language is a political instrument, the naming of things accurately is an act of resistance, and the American crisis of the moment is also and fundamentally a crisis of language, of euphemism, of the deliberate obfuscation that allows harm to continue unremarked.

Solnit has been one of the most consistently important essayists working in English for more than two decades. Books like A Field Guide to Getting Lost, A Paradise Built in Hell, and Men Explain Things to Me established her as a writer who thinks in unexpected lateral connections, who can hold the local and the planetary in the same essay without either collapsing. Call Them by Their True Names is a narrower book than some of her earlier work, more explicitly political and more urgently timed. That urgency does not diminish it. If anything, the constraints of the political moment gave her essays a precision that some of her more expansive work, for all its beauty, occasionally lacks.

The collection addresses climate denial, voter suppression, white nationalism, the politics of hope and despair, the language of American violence, indigenous rights, and the specific mechanisms by which power sustains itself by controlling what things can be called. These essays were written in real time, as events unfolded, and they carry that quality: the thinking is live, the stakes are immediate, and Solnit is not writing from the comfortable distance of retrospective analysis.

Central Thesis

The collection’s animating claim is stated most directly in its title essay: that accurate naming is a political act, and that the refusal to name things accurately is a form of complicity. When a police killing is described as a “police-involved shooting,” when systematic voter disenfranchisement appears in coverage as “election irregularities,” when the deliberate dismantling of climate policy gets framed as “regulatory reform,” language serves power rather than accountability. Solnit argues that this is not accidental. Euphemism and vagueness are tools. The work of accurate naming, calling violence violence, calling lies lies, calling the beneficiaries of a system by their relationship to that system, is itself a form of opposition.

This thesis connects to a broader argument about the relationship between language and reality that runs through political philosophy from Orwell forward, but Solnit is not making a philosophical argument about language in the abstract. She is making a practical argument about specific language in specific political contexts, and she grounds every claim in examples: specific politicians, specific policies, specific media coverage, specific moments where the choice of words shaped what was possible to think and therefore to do.

The thesis is not novel on its face, but the way Solnit develops and applies it is. She refuses the symmetry that lazy political commentary reaches for, the implication that “both sides” deploy language dishonestly and that the solution is some neutral zone of objective description. She is clear about where she stands and why, and she makes her case through specificity rather than through the confidence of her position alone.

Argument Structure

The collection does not organize its essays into numbered sections or explicit thematic clusters, but it has a discernible architecture. The opening essays establish the stakes and the method: what naming means, what it costs to name things accurately, what it enables. The middle sections apply the argument to specific domains: climate, race, voting rights, indigenous land, the culture of American violence. The closing essays address hope as a political practice rather than an emotional state, returning the collection to the question of what action looks like when you have named the problem honestly.

This movement from diagnosis to what follows diagnosis gives the collection more momentum than essay collections typically achieve. Reading straight through, you feel the argument accumulate rather than repeat. The pieces were written separately, for different occasions and different publications, but Solnit revised and sequenced them with care. The seams occasionally show, particularly in the middle section where two or three essays cover adjacent ground without quite resolving their overlap. That is the minor cost of collecting journalism; the major gain is the texture of thinking that happens in real time, when the stakes are still live.

Several individual essays stand out as the sharpest expressions of the thesis. “Letter to a Dead Man” is addressed to a man killed by police and takes the bureaucratic language of his death apart sentence by sentence. “Voter Suppression Begins at Home” traces the mechanisms of disenfranchisement with the patience of someone who has done the research and will not let the reader look away from what the research shows. “One Year After the Election” is the most openly reckoning essay in the collection, written at a moment of exhaustion and genuine uncertainty, and it is the more valuable for that honesty.

Thematic Reach

The collection’s intelligence lies partly in its refusal to treat the political crises it addresses as separate phenomena. Climate denial, voter suppression, police violence, indigenous land dispossession, the normalization of presidential dishonesty: Solnit does not argue that these are expressions of a single unified cause, but she does argue that they are connected by the same mechanism of euphemism and the same requirement that people not look at what is actually happening. The essays speak to each other across their different subjects because they are making the same point from different angles.

The theme of hope deserves particular attention because Solnit handles it with more sophistication than the word usually implies. She distinguishes sharply between hope as wishful thinking, which she finds useless and a little dishonest, and hope as a choice to act in the absence of certainty about outcomes. Her argument is that despair is as much a failure of political imagination as naive optimism, that both remove the need for action by deciding in advance that the outcome is already determined. The essays on hope are some of the most practically useful in the collection for anyone trying to sustain engagement over the long haul of a political crisis, and they are grounded in specific historical cases of unexpected change rather than in inspirational generality.

The collection also engages seriously with the question of who gets to tell stories about America. The essays on indigenous rights connect directly to the naming argument: to describe Standing Rock as a protest rather than a defense of treaty rights is to mis-name it, and that mis-naming has consequences for what responses seem proportionate or legitimate. Solnit is consistently attentive to whose language has historically controlled American self-description and whose has been systematically excluded.

Style and Voice

Solnit’s prose style is one of the most recognizable in contemporary American nonfiction: associative, building lateral connections between apparently unlike things, capable of moving from the historical to the immediate to the lyrical without losing the thread of the argument. In Call Them by Their True Names, that style is tighter than in some of her earlier books. The essay form suits her well generally, but the urgency of the political moment here sharpens her sentences in ways that serve the argument. She writes angry essays that do not read as rants, which is a technical achievement worth noticing.

She is particularly strong on the mot juste, on finding the exact word that captures what official language works to obscure. A sentence will turn on a single word that suddenly makes something visible that had been available to see but not quite seen. That is the style enacting the argument: the essays themselves are demonstrations of what accurate naming looks like in practice. The voice is that of someone who has thought carefully about language for a long time and knows exactly what she is doing with it.

Verdict

Call Them by Their True Names is Solnit at her most focused and most direct. It does not have the ranging beauty of A Field Guide to Getting Lost or the ambitious scope of A Paradise Built in Hell, but it does something those books do not attempt: it stays precisely on one question and refuses to let go of it across twenty-two essays. If you want to understand how language functions in political life and why the specific words used to describe American crises matter as much as the crises themselves, this collection makes that case better than anything else published in its moment.

Readers who prefer Solnit’s more lyrical and historically expansive mode may find this collection harder, more insistent, less willing to wander. That is not a weakness of the book. It is the book being the right book for its moment. The right reader for this collection is anyone who wants to think more clearly about what is happening in American political life and why the way it gets described is not a neutral fact but a choice with consequences. That is a large category of readers, and most of them will find this collection worth their time.

Frequently Asked Questions about Call Them by Their True Names

What is Call Them by Their True Names by Rebecca Solnit about?

Call Them by Their True Names is a collection of twenty-two essays by Rebecca Solnit, published in 2018, that argues accurate political language is itself a form of resistance. Written in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the essays address American crises including climate denial, voter suppression, white nationalism, police violence, and indigenous rights, all through the lens of how language either names these things honestly or enables them to continue through euphemism and deliberate vagueness.

Who is Rebecca Solnit and what makes her significant as a writer?

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer, historian, and activist based in San Francisco, best known for a body of nonfiction that spans environmental history, political commentary, walking and geography, feminism, and the philosophy of uncertainty. Her 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me” helped give the concept of mansplaining its cultural currency. Books including A Paradise Built in Hell, a study of community response to disasters, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost established her as one of the most original essayists working in English. Call Them by Their True Names won the 2018 Meridian Award in the Philosophy category.

What is the central argument of Call Them by Their True Names?

The collection argues that language is a political instrument and that naming things accurately — calling violence violence, calling disenfranchisement disenfranchisement rather than electoral irregularity — is an act of opposition to the power structures that depend on vagueness and euphemism. Solnit develops this argument across different subjects but returns to it consistently: the choice of words is not a neutral matter of style but a political choice with real consequences for what becomes visible, what becomes possible to demand, and who bears responsibility for what.

Is Call Them by Their True Names still relevant after 2018?

The collection addresses structural features of American political language and power that predate 2016 and have not resolved since 2018. The specific examples are dated to their moment, but the mechanisms Solnit describes — the use of euphemism to normalize harm, the relationship between accurate naming and political action, the analysis of hope as distinct from optimism — remain fully applicable to the present. Readers in 2024 and beyond will recognize the dynamics the essays describe without any difficulty.

How does Call Them by Their True Names compare to Rebecca Solnit’s other books?

This is a more pointed and explicitly political collection than most of Solnit’s work. Books like A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Wanderlust are more lyrical, more expansive, more willing to take detours through history and landscape. Men Explain Things to Me, her previous essay collection, is the closest comparison in form, but Call Them by Their True Names is more unified in argument and more directly addressed to the political emergency of its moment. Readers who come to Solnit for philosophical wandering may find this collection tighter and more insistent than they prefer; those who want her thinking at its most focused will find exactly that.

What does Solnit mean by hope in these essays?

Solnit distinguishes carefully between hope as wishful thinking (a passive emotional state that assumes things will improve without requiring action) and hope as a choice to act without certainty about outcomes. She argues that both naive optimism and political despair are failures of political imagination that relieve the person holding them of the requirement to act. Her essays on hope are grounded in historical examples of unexpected political change, and they make a practical argument: that sustaining engagement over a long political crisis requires treating the future as genuinely open rather than decided in either direction.

Is Call Them by Their True Names a work of philosophy or political journalism?

It is most accurately described as political philosophy in essay form. The essays are grounded in specific events and specific language choices, which is the work of journalism, but the argument they develop about the relationship between language, power, and accountability is a philosophical one. Solnit brings the habits of a historian and the attention of a stylist to political analysis that most journalists do not have time for and most philosophers do not anchor in specific enough fact. The result belongs to a tradition of engaged political writing that includes Orwell, Baldwin, and Didion: writers who think at the level of ideas without leaving the ground.

Should I read Call Them by Their True Names if I am not already politically engaged?

Yes, particularly if you want to understand why the specific words used in political reporting and political speech matter as much as the events they describe. The collection is not a polemic that requires you to arrive sharing Solnit’s politics. It makes arguments that can be evaluated on their own terms, and the case it makes for the political significance of accurate language is one that applies to any political context, not only the American one of 2016 to 2018. If you read carefully and think about the examples she gives, you will notice language choices you previously looked past, and that noticing is useful regardless of where you stand politically.