You are completely ignoring philosophy. It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible. China had the tools, sure. But not the incentives. Their emperor could not let lose a zoo of creativity, for fear of destruction of the empire.
I cannot trust an article (podcast) where people say the following:
> Historian Judith Bennett notes that medieval women made about 1d./day while men made 1 ½ or 2d./day when doing similar work, like brewing, as men. 700 years later, women still make just 80 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.
The statement "80 cts on the dollar for the same work" is a falsehood. Simple as that. If people cannot get these simple facts right, I will not trust the rest they are saying.
If you need to appeal to the goodness of people's hearts, you know you've lost.
The age of Enlightement and the idea of liberalism have been so powerful because they programmatically went against any kind of censorship. Their ideas helped to see how humans are truly all equal, that we all share what it means to be human.
Identity politics set out to destroy these ideas. It is the enemy of liberalism, of a free flow of ideas, of a will to see us all as equals. It divides us into groups, based on biological features like the color of our skin, our age and our genitals.
I used to feel to belong to "The Left" (whatever that is) precisely because it did not do these things. Now it does, and sees it even as a moral imperative to do so.
I'm on the autism spectrum, as are many others around here. Social rules are hard in the best of times. Now they are impossible to follow, and breaking them is outright dangerous.
Regarding "but is it really mainstream": Difficult question. I believe the answer is a "yes" with many caveats and clarifications.
How to define "mainstream"? Maybe your definition is "among the entire US population, less than 10 % believe the 10-points" or something similar. I think McWhorter has another frame of reference: (non-right wing) media, (higher) education, (non-right wing) politics and a subset of economical organisations (think Silicon Valley). Within these organisations, you should not be surprised to witness an adherence to at least some of the 10-points, and receive punishment if you loudly oppose them.
A recent data point: The New York Times has fired an acclaimed science reporter (specialized on COVID, nonetheless), because in 2019 he dared to utter the N-word in the following context: A student asked him for an example of egretious racism, to which he replied with saying "If somebody said the N-word". He dared to utter the word actually, leading to the recent events (https://quillette.com/2021/02/09/with-a-star-science-reporte...). Just like in Harry Potter, the mere utterance of a word has magic effects. To me, this is literally a regression to the Dark Ages. The word is the thing, saying it out loud stirrs the evil.
Of course this is just one anecdote, but there are many similar anecdotes. At which point does it become a trend? Here it becomes important to note that there is no need for a majority to command social change. Instead, small but determined minorities are extremely successful in getting what they want. The mechanics behind that are currently a hot topic of debate (https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...).
However, the important takeaway is that critical race theory ("white fragility") is not the only "this cannot be real" movement taking hold of universities, social media, established media outlets and politics. In places of higher education you may find yourself drastically punished if you insist that sex has a biological basis, that vocational interests are not evenly distributed between genders, that the American Civil War indeed aimed at freeing slaves, or that hiring decisions should be primarily based on merit of the applicants.
From your other comments I gathered that you are relatively new to "this", whatever this is. I suppose your priors were calibrated in a time certain tenets of humanism such as the value of truth, rationality and the universality of human experience were common place, especiall among the left. The tectonic shift we are witnessing today is that these tenets are declared to be false and even imoral, and that the proponents of such views are gaining the upper hand. I will sound dramatic, but I fear that the progress won by the period of enlightenment is in grave danger.
I probably have not convinced you that what I am saying is actually happening, but that's ok. This would take a longer discussion, there is a lot to unpack here. Perhaps you can consider it as a possibility, and adjust your priors for future events.
To update you with an actual source on some of the points, you can start with Robin DiAngelo's book "White Fragility". Most of the points are argued in the book. DiAngelo's books have been many weeks on the NYT's best seller lists. She sells her diversity training courses to many Fortune 500 companies and is held in high regards in progressive circles.
> Unlike Kendi, who boldly defines racism, DiAngelo is endlessly deferential--for her, racism is basically whatever any person of color thinks it is. In the story she tells about the world, she and her fellow white people have all the power, and therefore all the responsibility to do the gruelling but transformative spiritual work she calls for. The story makes white people seem like flawed, complicated characters; by comparison, people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple.
If you look a little bit, you will find many stories that fit into the 10 points. One of my favorite examples is how an (Asian American) reporter got fired for quoting from an interview from an African American man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Fang#The_Intercept).
> In June 2020, Fang was accused of racism by Akela Lacy, a colleague at The Intercept. This occurred after Fang shared a Martin Luther King Jr. quote about remaining non-violent and tweeted out an interview in which a black man at a George Floyd protest expressed concern about black-on-black crime.
The best part of the story? The person who set of the Twitter storm to get Fang fired, then a colleague of Lee Fang at the Intercept, is (to my knowledge) a white woman pretending to be Black.
I had a colleague from Cameroon (in Germany). He applied for a study visa, studied here, applied for a work visa, worked here, applied for German citizenship, got it. Same for people from Egypt and Nigeria I have met.
People who claim there are not legal ways are ignorant or deceptive.
Could be possibly because they were Czech? The culture is very different from what Americans are used to. Very reserved, very matter-of-fact, no smalltalk.