>Contrast this approach with that of people lionized today who worked within a racism none could disagree was more implacably overt and hostile than today.
This is exactly the issue being raised by the people the author decries. The fact that these issues have become less overt and hostile is part of the problem - we compare current racisms to the more "overt" ones and therefore conclude they have disappeared rather than change form, just as Zizek notes the new forms of dominance in the workplace are no longer to command you to work, but for your boss to befriend you such that you feel bad for not working. I think the superego is at work in racism and in the workplace.
>fostering social justice requires fashioning oneself as vulnerable, injured, and/or broken by things
Does this apply to the large body of academics in the social and philosophical sciences who have usually maintained a large degree of professionalism, or is the author only criticising young people who are, like any other generation, interested in drawing attention to themselves, in addition to whatever legitimate grievances they might have?
>She believed that the speech rights blacks had fought for so hard must be extended to people she found noxious, including on issues as personal to her as race.
This is one example where the author cites a black person to maintain the notion that if a civil rights leader has done something correctly, then it must have been right. Could it not, on the contrary, be argued that modern times have called for a change in tactics and a renewed set of problems, even if the author had previously suggested that they are less overt, could it not also be that they are different in kind not merely degree? Is the author aware of the work of Herbert Marcuse in his criticism of J.S. Mill's idea of speech and tolerance, or indeed the left criticism of human rights? I'd actually suppose that if the people he decries are putting forward strong anti-racist arguments then he should also be willing to consider the critique of ideology which drives them.
He is thus either not willing to look deeply into what he criticises (i.e he will focus on the appearance of "woke" college students rather than the essence of why they do what they do psyhcoanalytically or philosophically) or he is unable to look that deep for one reason or another.