Abut it's worth noting that they had all been raised before as well, and within the same fields and journals that have since been widely ridiculed. In other words, the debate about them is part of cultural politics. Cultural politics is not, then, a simple distraction from the harder realities of economic injustice or efforts to organize or to pass legislation. We need to know a lot, and a lot of what we need to know is cultural. The struggle for economic redistribution, Nancy Fraser argues, necessarily passes through struggles for recognition.
Race concerns access to housing and employment as well as cultural disparagement.
Consider the Jewish question. You don't know what merit is unless you have a standard, and for many people objectivity has seemed to be that standard. But for some of us, being Jewish has been just as peremptory a reason to try to see beyond the artificial limits and subtle injustices of meritocracy, a reason to develop a larger and more generous sense of fairness. Along with a threat to universal standards of fairness, culture has also seemed too eager to be hip. For the media, academics are usefully unlikely suspects.