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Do they problematize it? Or are they seeing actual problems? Are they pushing more atomizing forms of identity or were their forms of identity not accepted so they rebelled? Have they succeeded in convincing everyone their forms of identity should be accepted on the shining city or is that still ongoing with significant numbers of hold outs? Chicken or egg?
They problematize it.
I just edited my post to add an example: The 1619 Project is a deliberate and historically dubious attempt to problematize the founding myth of the US. The problems of 1776 I think are pretty obvious, there was no need to go looking for trouble. But apparently it's not enough to simply point out those undisputed issues.
They're pushing it. In a variety of ways. Even if we put aside that their refusal to countenance ROGD and their pushing of pronouns may lead to kids adopting it.
Just their general denigration of straight,white males and their pushing of AA gives people a reason to adopt other identities in progressive spaces. The funniest and most out there examples of this are of course people who claim to be a totally different race (usually Native American or First Nations) so they can get some sinecure.
They've made serious gains with gays, blacks, Latinos and so on. Many smaller and more recent minorities (e.g. Indians) honestly have no need of a movement as intense as the Civil Rights movement
There are obviously issues but those issues do not prevent appealing to the promise of the civic faith of the US -MLK did it in far worse times . They don't want to. They have a general cultural bias against patriotism and see it coded as right-wing and they believe in the idpol view of focusing on ever more specific minorities and consider stuff like "I don't see race" that fits with the civic faith problematic.
Also, they have serious problems they apparently can't solve (the most important of which being the black achievement gap) and their solution is to destroy standards and the basic ideal/goal of the country as meritocratic as a result.
Serious gains is not enough. If you want the shining city on the hill as the tied civic religion (from these groups perspective) it must be near universal. The ongoing culture war is evidence the battle has not been won. Gay marriage could be gone in a snap.
Going from being ostracised to merely tolerated is not enough. To be part of the shining city on the hill that they would want to valorize they must be as accepted as anyone else. And in large swathes of America this is not the case.
Blue Tribe Americans are less patriotic than Red Tribe this is true in my experience, but they are still much more patriotic than average citizens of most other nations. So that isn't on its own a problem, part of them accepting the new city on the hill is being proud of it. They are not patriotic because they see flaws in their own nation.
Thats the key, they are not currently as proud of America as it is, but they could be of an America as they want it to be.
I am a straight white male in academia, I am told the wokest area of all, yet I do not feel denigrated at all. Most of my colleagues are still straight white males, then straight white females. I just don't see that denigration even here in what should be its heart. My boss is a straight white man, his boss is a straight white man.
"I don't see race", requires with those races (primarily black communities in the US) to have moved past previous (and current) mistreatments. They haven't. My ex-wife still tells how her mom lost 3 babies with a white ob-gyn and her last was born with a needle in his skull, she is convinced the doctor tried to abort him too. When she avoided doctors entirely she had 5 healthy babies. The trauma is not from academia, but from the communities themselves. Wounds are still generationally fresh. Handed from one to the other.
Color blindness is still the end goal I personally think, but it isn't plausible from where we are right now.
I don't accept the premise. You can appeal to the promise of the American civic religion without it being perfectly implemented - arguably that is precisely when you should lean on it most. Again, people used to do this.
By this standard it'll never be legitimate to back said civic religion cause some group, somewhere, will always claim oppression, dubious or no.
For example: I find the idea that America can't lean on the civic faith if say...transpeople are "oppressed" by not getting blockers to be a dubious on yet left-wingers are, as a matter of fact, acting like this is some grand injustice. Does that push back the great colorblind utopia by another 20 years (this was Contrapoints' estimation on trans acceptance). And who's to say they won't spin up another group like "non-binary"?
Except many groups are not just tolerated. They are affirmed. Important distinction.
If we take gays as an example not only has public opinion shifted heavily on gay rights (one example).They have Pride marches that are attended by the major corporations that determine things in the US (see the Disney kerfuffle) and, in some places, being part of Pride is seen as prestigious enough that people being denied (e.g. cops) is the site of controversy, not people being allowed to go.
Yes, they want to change the basic premise. The problem for your argument is that many of those cases like 1619 Project are about undermining the very founding story you're saying they eventually want to appeal to.
If the goal was to actually assimilate into that story then why undermine it? Surely the rhetorical force of "America should live up to its foundational promises" is a more intuitive take than "actually it was about enslaving us from before the start".
There's also the fact that some forms of lack of pride can't be fixed. If a black American wants to insist that "this country wasn't made for us" and to not be proud cause his people were slaves and didn't really found the country and were kept marginalized for a long while you can't stop them. They're not wrong, it's just not a workable standard to expect people to not buy into America due to this.
Yet that's how people talk.
Then why the reports about people identifying out of whiteness?.
Also: the denigration obviously happens in left spaces, it's just that left-wing men have become acclimated to it and have accepted the logic it's not really denigration but the expression of in-group approved political priorities - recall the Sarah Jeong story where she was criticized for what would usually be called straightforward racism but it was okay because
it was against white mena satirical response to patriarchy and white supremacy. Of course, the men who can't convince themselves of this are selected out.The trauma isn't the issue - though here I would say the wounds are still "fresh" because some communities (blacks specifically) may be caught in a self-perpetuating feedback loop of maladaptive behaviors besides any direct legal discrimination or hell, sometimes even dispositional attitudes - it is the story and narrative used to fight those issues.
It doesn't have to be divisive, to undermine the founding story of America or to insist on racial quotas or trying to bring America closer to some Lebanese-style sectarian compromise. And many groups didn't ask for that. Of course, as I said, the more the gap persists - even if for more complex reasons- the greater the incentive to destroy the idea of meritocracy.
Here the very anti-color blind systems we're talking about prevent color-blindness: if blacks are disproportionately less educated I can't have a color-blind education or hiring system or I'll be "racist" or potentially showing some sort of bias. Can't just use IQ and call it a day cause that shows disparate impact.
How you're going determines where you go.
If all your actions are basically attempting to end color blindness, to make it taboo and immoral to even say it (the example I gave is an alleged microaggression) why should anyone believe that you'll circle back to it at some point? This is like saying statelessness is the ultimate goal of Christianity because the Messiah will abolish earthly states. Does anyone care if Christians believe in statelessness in this sense? Is anyone blase about Christian theocrats seizing the state? Will it all just "work out"?
When you implement a regime of affirmative action that racially discriminates, when you pass laws creating an entire DEI infrastructure in every major company that encourages discrimination, when you deliberately shape the demographics and thus interests of a university using it, when you make it more and more a part of policy, people are just supposed to take you at your word - all while you're crowing about the upcoming eclipse of the white man - that you'll eventually rollback all of these things (that give you power) in the name of fairness and retire to your farm like Cincinnatus?
Psychology is disproportionately female. Are these gains being rolled back so we can hit a more even distribution? HR is 70% female. Are we going to see rollbacks in specific fields like that or even AA in the other direction? Has the progress led to much reconsideration of "the patriarchy"? That'd be a better indicator that what you want might happen but I doubt it. The movement mainly just demands more.
The funny thing is that the progressives' own argument undermines this - why did it require a movement to get white people to relinquish power? Are minorities just more virtuous than the whites before them?
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