"The new anti-racism has a confessional, religious energy that the secular meritocracy has always lacked."

"But there is also something important about its more radical and even ridiculous elements — like the weird business that increasingly shows up in official documents, from the New York Public Schools or the Smithsonian, describing things like 'perfectionism' or 'worship of the written word' or 'emphasis on the scientific method' or 'delayed gratification' as features of a toxic whiteness. Imagine yourself as a relatively privileged white person exhausted by meritocracy — an overworked student or a fretful parent or a school administrator constantly besieged by both.... 'Wouldn’t it come as a relief, in some way, if it turned out that the whole 'exhausting "Alice in Wonderland" Red Queen Race of full-time meritocratic achievement,' in the words of a pseudonymous critic, was nothing more than a manifestation of the very white supremacy that you, as a good liberal, are obliged to dismantle and oppose? If all the testing, all the 'delayed gratification' and 'perfectionism,' was, after all, just itself a form of racism, and in easing up, chilling out, just relaxing a little bit, you can improve your life and your kid’s life and, happily, strike an anti-racist blow as well?"

Writes Ross Douthat in "The Real White Fragility/Does the white upper class feel exhausted and oppressed by meritocracy?" (NYT).

So it's sort of like the hippie movement all over again... but without the joy and the fun and the music and the flowers and the crazy clothes and the love of freedom and the willingness to say outrageous things. Instead there's grimness, guilt, pessimism, and the grueling realization that you do have to work, but it's not work at some job, it's work on yourself — you with the bred-in-the-bone racism problem.

Karl Marx wrote: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." I'm seeing this repetition the other way around. We got the comedy first. The tragedy is now.