It’s not only a correct take, but a critical one. Elite universities taking over the discourse has the perverse effect of diverting political and cultural power from minority groups to elite whites (along with a small group of elite minorities hand picked by those whites).
"Latinx" also proves that the motivation is grounded in bad faith, for if someone were truly offended by the gendered term "Latino", they would surely use "Latin" instead of creating an ostentatious monstrosity that is totally alien to both English and Spanish.
Or, like the people who came up with :-), lmfao, wtf, l33t, pwned!!!111!1 and similar internet shortcuts, they were communicating in a text only medium and didn't need to worry about pronunciation?
The discourse around policing is another one. Eric Adams addressed this in his recent op ed on moving the Democratic primary to South Carolina: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/opinions/democrats-2024-prima.... Adams writes that the move could help “address[] the concerns of all people of color and working-class people, many of whom feel the party has misrepresented their beliefs.”
Adams is talking about white political elites rather than white academics, but as Elizabeth Warren illustrates, there’s a lot of ideological overlap between the two.
Wait, how does the effort ostensibly against "elite whites" and in support of minorities, that looks exactly like many similar efforts by minorities and their advocates aimed against "elite whites" (or white men in general), ends up being "diverting political and cultural power from minority group to elite whites"?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm completely baffled by how you've managed to reach the opposite conclusion to the one I'd expect.
Who are “white elites?” Harvard professors or Wall Street executives with BLM lawn signs might demonize Trump or Elon Musk as “white elites.” They may even mean people who aren’t even all that elite, such as small business owners who support Trump. But they don’t identify with the term themselves, even though they undoubtedly fit the bill.
Thus, advocacy that purports to attack “white elites” can nonetheless take power away from minorities and give it to elite whites. Historically, advocacy on behalf of minority groups was done by minority groups themselves. For example, the black civil rights movement was closely tied to black churches. Today, such advocacy has been increasingly taken over by white elites. BLM is funded mainly by affluent white people. Ibram Kendi was selected to be a professor at BU by an overwhelmingly white faculty. Or to use another example, consider MacKenzie Bezos giving tens of millions of dollars to “AAPI” activist organizations. Those groups don’t answer to recent Chinese and Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens. Their whole incentive structure is oriented toward appealing to rich white people like MacKenzie Bezos.
The net effect of that is that much advocacy that claims to empower minorities actually ends up taking power away from minorities and empowering white elites. You can see this clearly in New York City, where white people in Manhattan strongly opposed Eric Adams, and so did minority activist groups. But actual minorities overwhelmingly voted for him. But in many, many cases, minorities don’t get to directly weigh in like that. Instead white-dominated institutions act on behalf of minorities, based on their own ideological preferences.
The project of identity politics is based in the elite classes, and is used to further alienate the working classes, who lack the time or interest to keep up with the quickly-evolving shibboleths, that often contradict their lived experiences.
Identity politics is gleefully adopted by the elite institutions, and the base of resistance against it is working class.
It's because this is simply an exercise in wasting resources while looking progressive. Instead of advocating to actually help discriminated people in important ways (pressure on wages, blind interviews to combat unfair hiring, unionization to help solidify such practices, and many other real social changes), they are pushing bullshit changes that don't help anyone in the affected groups, but make them feel better and give them a new lever to use against ideological opponents.
