I am grateful for the opportunity to have this exchange with Ana Tanasoca. She asks for a more detailed account of what uptake entails and how it relates to listening. As I elaborate at length in chapter 2, uptake “amounts to letting someone’s input enter into your consideration” when forming your political opinions (p. 40). Eschewing Tanasoca’s more mechanistic language of Bayesian updating, my treatment of uptake highlights how others’ perspectives are not always readily incorporated into a listener’s “priors”: inputs to deliberation are not “the communicative equivalent of presliced bread waiting to be jammed into our mind-toaster” (p. 41). A person’s meaning is not always clear and can evolve in conversation. Thus, in describing fair consideration, I focus on the various obstacles that can impede it. For example, uptake can fail due to a listener’s ideological rigidity. Here, we might say that the consideration lacked fairness. But uptake can also elude even generous and open-minded listeners when dynamics of identity/difference make it hard for them to understand another’s perspective. Sensitive to the deep differences between citizens, I emphasize that listening and uptake are not coextensive. “While not the same as uptake, performative democratic listening occurs on the way to uptake” (p. 108). Uptake cannot occur without listening, but even the most serious, attentive, and humble listening will not always result in felicitous uptake (p. 173).

Tanasoca shares my concern that we legitimize antidemocratic views by listening to them. I raise this point when discussing the perauditory effects of listening. Indeed, a key advantage of my systematic listening act theory, modeled after J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, is that it reveals the potentially undemocratic outcomes of listening (pp. 83, 90, 100, 131–32, chapter 7). I suggest ways to mitigate these potentially undemocratic effects (pp. 118–32). Given the ilauditory power of listening, however, it is a mistake to presume we could exchange listening for democracy, even at the margins (p. 100). Pushing back, Tanasoca asks whether we have to listen even when we already know “what a person’s antidemocratic views are?” In the book, I answer no (pp. 130, 178–80). Crucially, Tanasoca’s question implies a scenario in which some level of listening has already occurred. How else would we know a person’s views are antidemocratic?

Tanasoca worries that in expecting white people to listen to Black people we create “extra burdens for Blacks, who must explain (yet again!) the wrongness of those matters.” This is a misunderstanding. First, in saying people have an obligation to listen to those who are speaking, I am not saying that people have a corresponding obligation to produce something for others to listen to. As Tanasoca notes, Black Americans are and continually have been speaking out against racism. Their fellow citizens ought to listen and not immediately try to empathize or otherwise center themselves in those conversations. Second, although listening carries crucial democratic weight, I do not suggest that it exhausts all that is required for justice. The obligation to listen is distinct from and cannot fulfill our obligations to correct injustices.

Tanasoca is right: white allies should also engage in protest, educate themselves, and vote differently. But would she have them do these things without first taking the time to listen to their Black neighbors who are making specific demands and sharing particular experiences? We cannot know what justice requires without first listening. Just because that listening is long overdue does not make it any less important.