This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work.
> I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s.
The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable Than Jamal and Lakisha" applied to jobs 5000 times with a stack of carefully crafted fake resumes that were randomly assigned names that were either stereotypically white (e.g. Greg, Emily) or black (e.g. Jamal, Lakisha.) The same resumes with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks. Over 5000 job applications. What we were doing in the 90s/2000s was not working and the fact that many white people find the polite approach more comfortable is not a good reason to stick to it. This isn't a social problem-- we're talking about people's basic chance of success in life. This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy. Pushing through the discomfort to find what actually works is a worthwhile undertaking. If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.
The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment. Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense. You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob. As flawed and overly bandwagoned as it may be, "wokeness" is addressing real problems that oppress people in measurable ways every day. "Anti-Wokeness" is just another value signalling position to have that highlights political fault lines far older than any living American.
