>You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention.
Yeah I totally buy that.
>With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.
If we believe racial discrimination is the root cause of racial inequality, then "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. So the thing about people patting themselves on the back seems perhaps overly cynical?
I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. For example, this Gallup poll indicates that Black adults believe race relations with white people have gotten much worse since 2013: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
And I've seen research indicating that corporate bias reduction trainings typically backfire. Apparently if you want your company to have more diverse leadership, one of the most effective ways to do that is to create an official mentorship program which randomly pairs off junior people and senior people without regard to race. It seems that a junior employee of color gets better mentorship if they are regarded as a "junior employee at our company" as opposed to "junior employee of color". The mentorship program just works to overcome activation energy and create relationships between junior and senior people which might otherwise not exist due to awkwardness. (This is all from Chapter 8 of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It)
The output of the 90s and 00s era was Obama getting elected president in 2008 and serving two terms. By contrast, I do think you can make the argument that Trump is in some sense a product of the woke era.
Trump's popularity exploded around July 2015: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2...
But e.g. the number of NY Times articles on "whiteness" were on an exploding trend by 2014: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
(The number of articles with those terms grows even faster after Trump becomes popular. I would postulate that the mechanism is something like this game I linked elsewhere in the thread https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb )
Anyway, my impression from reading right-wing Twitter feeds is that supposed woke overreach is a major motivation for Trump supporters, playing into the backfire point I mentioned previously.
I'm sure there is room to improve on the 90s and 00s. But I remain skeptical of the politician's syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."