“What is ‘Asian and Pacific Islander food’?” the American historian Michael Lind asks during our recent podcast. “There are no 'Asian and Pacific Islander' [AAPI] people. Indians do not think they're part of an AAPI category along with Korean Americans and Filipino Americans.”
The line is classic Lind: cutting through the pretensions of elite ideology with history and humor. It came during a wide-ranging conversation in which we tried to answer the question that has bothered so many of us for years: why did the Left, which once championed Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of universal values and equal rights, return to racial discrimination under DEI?
How did progressives and liberals go from believing in King’s picture of progress, white and black children holding hands, to a picture of progress as a strict racialist hierarchy complete with racial quotas and preferences?
