Again, criticising racial activism is exactly what historians were upset about here. More specifically, Sweet was openly asking historians to pump the brakes on the performative wokeism that's taken ahold across almost all of academia. He didn't want to see history desecrated and sacrificed to the religion of wokeism; he wanted fellow historians to put their religion aside and be objective.

Instead of heeding his advice he was called a heretic and nearly excommunicated.

My OP in this thread:

>Sweet's faux-pas AHA was criticized as tone-deaf - and it was

No it absolutely wasn't. It was a refreshing call to reason in the deluge of delusional nonsense that followed the BLM "summer of love" moral panic. Tone policing is regularly weaponized by those looking to preserve a narrative. "We can't have facts/logic/reason get in the way! What you're saying is tone deaf to our righteous crusade!"