Thread by @DouthatNYT

My Sunday column (tweeted belatedly): The Excesses of Antiracist Education
nytimes.com/2021/07/03/opi…

Relevant to my concluding point, that figures like Kendi just keep on influencing even though the smarter progressives on this website clearly don't particularly want to defend their ideas:

https://twitter.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1412403134228537344

Also as a placeholder for a longer response to @herandrews + @CharlesFLehman, who disputed or doubted that ideas about structural racism can be practically separated from the wokest progressivism, here's my earlier piece on structural racism and abortion:
nytimes.com/2020/07/25/opi…

My baseline assumption is that in a country that enslaved a population for 250 years and subjugated them for another century, it would be *very* unlikely if some version of systemic disadvantage did not persist.

The scale and scope of that disadvantage, the policy implications it implies, the emphasis it deserves in education, are all debatable Qs. But the reality of *some* systemic disadvantage seems plain enough ...

... that conservatives (or liberals) who want to oppose Kendism or DiAngelism effectively should not preemptively concede that "acknowledgment of systemic disadvantage leads inexorably to current new progressive thought."

The reality is that the argument being made by left and center-left critics of the new racial progressivism - that systemic disadvantage exists but more broad-based pan-racial policy can help with it AND be popular - is one that right-populists could reasonably adopt as well.