The comedian Elon James White (who hosts the web series “This Week in Blackness,” writes for a number of venues including Slate and The Huffington Post, and undertakes a huge array of other endeavors) has started the “Have a Seat Movement” (http://haveaseatmovement.org/). The mission is simple and pretty amusing: to identify celebrities, scholars, pundits who speak out on public issues that they don’t know anything about or about which they don’t have any meaningful contribution to make… and then launch a collective campaign asking them to stand down.

This movement, according to its promotors, “crosses gender, class, race, and political lines” and “isn’t about ideology—it’s about common sense.” “When we tell someone to have a seat it doesn’t mean that they are bad people. It doesn’t mean that they are specifically malicious or evil. It means that on this particular issue that they are speaking on they need to stop speaking. They aren’t enlightening. They aren’t helping. They’re causing more harm than good and need to be told that. A seat is needed. They should take it.”

I’m definitely amused, and generally I think I’m with them. However, I do want to offer one caveat: while common-sense might offer a reasonable standard for advising people out of their element to sit down, I’m not quite sure if it provides an accurate compass or gauge for identifying those individuals and organizations who actually should speak up (especially when  issues require certain amounts of information and expertise). That seems the harder task—and a task, moreover, that sociologists could take a more active, engaged role. Indeed I like to think that that is part of what we long tried to do with Contexts and will continue to do with The Society Pages.

Maybe, while Elon James White invites folks to nominate candidates who need to sit down and clears the decks a bit, perhaps we should begin to collect the names of those who should be encouraged to stand up. Thoughts? Suggestions? Nominees?