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Understanding something that you didn't understand before means changing one's mind, though...
The rest of your comment is mostly just a just-so fictional narrative in hindsight you made up that appears to me as a rationalization for your committed belief. It's trivially easy to come up with any number of counterfactuals about how Blue Tribe's attitudes towards race would've developed with equal plausibility (and more generally, about how anything would've happened, with equal plausibility as what actually did happen), because of the nature of counterfactuals. E.g. one could respond to white guilt by just rejecting it as a concept and prioritizing individuality. Much of the Blue Tribe was on board with that in the 90s, of treating individuals as individuals who aren't tarnished with the guilt of their ancestors or people who happened to share their skin color in the case of recent immigrants. That this narrative being crushed in the Blue Tribe was destined is not proven or even supported by the fact that you can put together a narrative explaining the chain of logic.
In reality, what we do see is pretty well evidenced chain of causality of these ideas built and developed by academia spreading to society at large, often word-for-word, done with overt intent. Maybe the people intentionally doing this are mistaken. Almost certainly, they're mistaken about some of the impact they believe they have on society at large, like everyone. But to claim that they're completely mistaken and that they have zero influence in pulling Blue Tribe towards those ideas that were developed and crystalized in academia (largely based on feelings already within that Tribe), well, your arguments for such a claim seem mostly like motivated reasoning.
How so? I am in Academia. My motivated reasoning would be to make us more important not less no? I could very well be wrong to be clear! But it's a worldview I have put together over many years of trying to influence people, and to me it fits the observed evidence of my own eyes better than any other.
No. Or rather, maybe. There are a myriad of reasons why someone would want to over- or under-estimate the influence and importance of organizations to which they belong. Generally, the former helps oneself feel more important and powerful, while the latter helps oneself feel more unfettered and free from responsibility. But it depends greatly on the specifics.
I don't know you personally, and even if I did, I doubt I would know you well enough to figure out whatever motivations you have behind understating the impact academia has had on Blue Tribe culture. Based on your surprise at the idea that your position could motivate you towards understating the impact, I'd groundlessly speculate that some of it is motivated by your belief that your position should motivate you the other way and trying to correct for it. I'm guilty of this more often than I'd like - and almost definitely more often than I perceive - in that I'm very aware that my upbringing makes me inevitably biased in favor of Blue Tribe/progressive/leftist ideas, and as such, I apply greater scrutiny to such ideas than ones from competing groups.
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