> Yes, practices based in tradition and not evidence have that problem.
Let’s not pretend that education is a practice based in “evidence.” America has among the most professionalized schools systems in the developed world, and also among the worst. My cousin in Sacramento was complaining the other day about how far behind her kid’s school is in math compared to what she learned in Bangladesh in the 1990s. You think we have EdDs? No, just tradition (i.e. practices with a track record of working).
> Minorities (especially blacks and American Indians) are ghettoized by the status quo system, in which they do not have equal upward mobility.
And ethnic identity politics is part of the status quo system for those groups. At least in the last 30 years, that seems to have hurt more than it’s helped.
> You play a nice trick talking about immigrants (a small minority of racial and ethnic minorities) and the pretending that covers the bulk of the minority experience, but it does not.
Hispanics and Asians, the vast majority of whom have immigrant backgrounds within the last few generations, comprise 25% of the country, while Black and native Americans comprise 15%. By 2060, the Black and native population share will be about the same, while Asians and Hispanics will be nearly 40% of the population. The liberal approach of projecting the Black and indigenous experience onto all “people of color” is innumerate.
Hispanics and Asians are economically converging with whites over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Possibly derailing that convergence (which is pretty much unprecedented in the world) is something everyone should be scared of.
The TV show White Lotus had a tremendous illustration of the problem. One of the characters, Paula, is a minority who is college friends with a white girl and comes to Hawaii with the girl’s family. Paula falsely convinces herself that her white friends don’t really care about her. She persuades a (reluctant) native Hawaiian worker at the hotel to steal from her friend’s family, giving some speech she learned at school about stolen land, but he gets caught and arrested. Liberal identity education hurts the affluent “brown” girl by driving an artificial racial wedge between her and her friend who genuinely cares about her, and destroys the life of the working class “brown” boy, by corrupting his traditional morality. I’m not sure it was supposed to be a conservative polemic but it succinctly illustrated exactly what I’m afraid of happening to my own kids as they’re taught to develop an “identity” around their “skin color” in elementary school (according to the email I received recently).