<i>Personally, I have gotten some heat for working with YAF. As a person of color, I am seen as a contrarian. Growing up, I was taught that the left cares about us minorities, while anyone who aligns with the right is racist. Some people on campus think this way and see my activism as a betrayal. I’ve been called an Uncle Tom, but I don’t let it bother me.</i><p>Name calling aside, this "heat" he's been getting might have something to do with his joining a group that was founded in the home of America's foremost unapologetic segregationist of the time (or perhaps second-most, after George Wallace):<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley_Jr" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley_Jr</a>.
I'm sort of surprised that we don't see pressure from the left on it too.<p>It feels like a lot of "woke" stuff is performative while insubstantial. "We're making an effort to embrace/celebrate you, but nothing that would cost money or really ruffle feathers." At the same time, it tends to create a lot of chest puffing and argument-for-the-sake-of-argument that distracts from things that would do more for the communities you're trying to support.<p>Yes, it's well-intentioned to let people write "xe/xer" on their account profile. But if you really want to support the transgender community, I suspect making sure your employees have access to the right mental and physical health care to live their best life goes a lot further. But that's gonna cost real money.<p>Killing off old symbols, whether it's renaming buildings, tearing down statues, or swapping pictures on banknotes, is similar. The costs are trivial, and it buys you some quick feel-good headlines. But a lot of it ends up with tokens and placeholders, recycling the same short lists of luminaries over and over again. If you want to get rid of old white men in those contexts, we need the long game. Let's focus on the educational and economic opportunities to organically grow a diverse pantheon of success. In 50 years, we shouldn't be asking "do we want to name the new elementary school after Andrew Jackson or Barack Obama", but "which of these dozens of storied names, names that we don't even know in 2022 yet, who took advantage of the tools America provided to thrive, do we want to celebrate?"