Thread by @Noahpinion

@popedum The U.S. elite becomes integrated through universities; these are where the top 1/3 of the economic pyramid learn to become one people (what the army did for the working class during WW2 and the Civil War but not usually)...

@popedum At these universities, elite Americans need something to unite them into one people. Perhaps 150 years ago, rigid ideological and identitarian conformity would have been enforced at universities, but certainly not now, and not for a very long time...

@popedum Instead, American universities teach young elite Americans to find unity in diversity -- to embrace their particular identities (racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic) while finding unity in the fact that they all value these same things.

@popedum The culture of the broad elite also imparts a certain noblesse oblige -- something to remind the young elites that they are elites, and have an obligation to those the system has left behind. This is the notion of privilege.

@popedum The most important part of the idea of privilege is White privilege, because Black Americans are the most disadvantaged group, both historically and in terms of current economics.

@popedum As an important aside, you might ask who teaches this stuff? Is it professors? Sometimes maybe, but mostly students teach it to each other; the culture of the elite is passed down from older students to younger students, in dorms, through student groups, etc. etc.

@popedum So anyway, young college-educated Americans are assimilated into a unified American elite by being taught to value diversity and by being inculcated with awareness of privilege.

@popedum What of those who are neither White nor Black? The members of these groups who are part of the college-educated elite learn a close analogue to the noblesse oblige of White privilege.

blogs.brown.edu/ethn-1650b-s01…

@popedum This doesn't resolve all the contradictions, of course, and people who are economically elite but neither White nor Black can often feel a bit displaced from the American system.

amazon.com/Loneliest-Amer…

@popedum In any case, by all becoming woke, embracing diversity, and recognizing privilege, America's elite assimilates newcomers, knits itself into a homogeneous group, and maintains a sense of noblesse oblige.

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