Matt Yglessias article:
“But the politics of these framings are perverse. It’s particularly perverse because the kinds of people who spend a lot of time thinking about race from a progressive point of view are precisely the people who in other contexts are inclined to emphasize what a big deal racism has historically been in shaping American politics.
That’s why liberals from FDR and LBJ to Obama tried to downplay it when possible — they were trying to win and help people! After all, there’s no special features of unions or Medicaid or the minimum wage that leads them to close racial gaps — all egalitarian economic policy has this effect.
My suspicion is that this is a weird tic of campus politics that has followed graduates into the professional arena where they unconsciously started deploying it in less appropriate contexts. If you’re in a dorm at a fancy college and you can convince an administrator that something is racist, the administrator will probably put a stop to it. At the same time, “this is bad for poor people” just isn’t going to get you far as a campus argument. After all, these schools more or less openly auction off a number of admissions slots to wealthy donors (while, of course, practicing affirmative action to keep things diverse) so they can hardly take a hard line on class politics.
But electoral politics in a democracy isn’t like that. And to the extent that the US political system isn’t democratic, it’s mostly tilted in favor of over-representing white people with no college degree. So if you actually want to close racial gaps by raising the minimum wage, expanding union membership, expanding Medicaid, and reducing student debt, the last thing you want to do is to sell people on the idea that this is really all about race.”
And I think I see that gap in action, especially on Twitter. So often, I read “We called out the Republicans on X and they don’t care???” and they just don’t get that Republican politicians don’t act the way that their deans or HR departments act.
Too few on our side can “see it as they see it”; they almost see the ability to see things from “the other side” as a weakness!
And this brings up something else: one of the reasons I am slow to “call out xxx-ism” is that I am often not sure as to what I am seeing, and I always wonder if I am missing something. I just don’t have the “confidence” in my initial reactions that many “wokes” have in theirs.
Remember the Covington fiasco? But…in my world, “wanting to know the facts and context” is almost considered a micro-aggression! (yes, I’ve been accused of that….for asking what time a certain Waffle House closed when someone complained they were locked out and not let in..)
Life of an old goat 