I agree with the overall concern - and am working on an article about those concerns - but this sort of critique rests on latent assumptions about “thinking” that are probably wrong. Nor is it obvious that this paradigm of modeling cannot create new knowledge. The real problem is deeper I think.

The kinder way to put this is that the distance from “I’m not free if I have to pay some sort of fee/tax if I choose not to carry health insurance” and “students at oberlin are booing white supremacists” to the chaos, shakedowns, bribes, commands, threats, and masked federal police is hella big.

Brave

I think one of the worst effects of the O’Connor consensus has been to take from institutions of all sorts the ability to talk about inequality and race like adults. That’s been stolen from us. And it’s entirely warped the meta-conversation to the point of caricature.

Elite non-maga conservative consensus had been that racism is obvs bad, diversity is an ok goal, but reverse discrimination is just as icky. So colorblindness and stay the course long enough for natural equality to assert itself socially. Colorblindness + diversity = indirect measures, undiscussed.