We had a field trip to the baseball stadium today. Parents were asked to chaperone and transport children to the train station in batches. But 100% of parents showed up, so everybody drove their own child.

The excursion was unavoidably woke. Three of the four stories we heard had the words “but because of the color of his skin.”
The most bizarre story was told in front of the photos of the team’s most famous players.

“These are our most famous players,” said the tour guide. “But I won’t talk about them. Instead, I’ll tell you about a player who never played for our team. He played for [some other team name]. He’s important because the color of his skin…”
People keep asking why Americans are so nutty about race but imagine hearing this 4 times a day every day, often completely out of any context. And on and on and on. Anybody would get nutty.
In case you are American and don’t understand what I’m saying, here’s an example. I tell Klara about her great-grandfather a lot. He was a doctor, a pediatrician. He founded several clinics in Kharkiv. It was impossible to walk down the street with him without somebody stopping us to say, “Doctor, you saved my son”, “Doctor, my child can walk because of you”. He created the first clinic in the region where women could give birth in the water. He instituted a doula experience in his clinic which, in the USSR, was next to impossible to do. (The horrors of Soviet childbirth are the main reason for the collapse of fertility in the 1990s but that’s another story).
When I talk to Klara about her great-grandfather, do I add “but because he was a Jew” after every sentence? No, I don’t. I don’t want it to be a miserable, guilt-trippy story. Badgering her with the anti-semitism that grandpa very much experienced would generate a mix of guilt and repellence. And more guilt for feeling repelled.
There’s an enormous distance between concealing unpleasant parts of history and obsessing over them maniacally. Americans have left the “obsessing maniacally” territory behind and are hurtling straight towards utter lunacy.
