Maybe not motivated by, but this is certainly an escalating culture war. Part of it has its roots in academia, yes. These professors, and former academics, some of which now hold high profile jobs at big tech companies like Google, definitely play a role in inflaming tensions between these people.

You're assuming that people fit molds a lot more than they actually do. The reality is that there's a fair number of people who buy into race statistics, want to do something about racism, but also don't buy into the narrative books like White Fragility have proposed. That book is especially steeped in academia and it's proponents have large Twitter accounts where they feel emboldened to say detestfully broad things about large groups of people. Some of those posts end up on here, so how you've missed them is beyond me.