> don't know, I think your frustration may be a little misplaced. This recent tide in American culture of being on tippy-toes (limited as it may be to the liberals and closed circles in academia), I don't find it appalling, I find it... silly, if not admirable, because I understand it's coming from a good place.

You’re missing the point. I’m not talking about white people being helpful or “encouraging.” I’m talking about white people claiming the power to decide what is good for minorities and who gets to define the identity of those minorities and how they relate to society as a whole? To use a specific example: It’s not about whether calling Hispanics “Latinx” is a good idea or not. It’s about “who gets to decide what we call Hispanics?”

And on that front, university wokeness is not “coming from a good place.” “Latinx” happened because white liberals used their institutional power to adopt a label for Latinos that reflected the intersectional value system of liberal whites. They co-opted the power of the community to decide for themselves even the simple question of how they are identified.

Musa Al-Gharbi’s analysis hits the nail on the head: “White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities. Rather than actually dismantling white supremacy or meaningfully empowering people of color, efforts often seem to be oriented towards consolidating social and cultural capital in the hands of the ‘good’ whites.” (See: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/)

You see this on issue after issue: policing, gender norms, religion, etc.

> The worst that happens when someone says Latinx is they might looks silly, a reasonable trade I'd say given the stakes.

Wrong. When someone says Latinx, they are imposing white liberal notions of Latino identity on Latinos.

> I think you and I have been through this in the past, but: the jury is out on this one, folks of a certain race were systemically oppressed for generations and as a result they are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of house-ownership, savings, etc. To not make the slightest of effort to undo the actions of this extant government is a ludicrous idea.

Respectfully, who cares what you think? I’m not saying that to be glib, but to get to the fundamental question: who gets to decide what’s good for minorities?

Any effort to address the consequences of discrimination has trade offs. White liberals don’t have to live with the social and economic consequences of those policies. It’s completely indefensible to argue that white elites should be able to overrule the views of minorities themselves on those questions.

> When I see an educated person argue against this, I see it as a mark on their morals.

When I see a person argue in favor of white elites choosing how society should relate to a minority group—against the majority opinion of people in that minority group—I consider it a mark on their morals. Such people consider minorities as mere subjects on which to apply their own ideological notions, and that’s morally wrong.