Is Perfectionism Part of a Successor Ideology?

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Sally Kohn: If there is a dominant standard, not just of beauty, but of professionalism, which says that what professional hair looks like. And so any sort of hairstyle that you can present with as a black person is by definition unprofession. Then there's a real injustice being done here and a sort of seemingly objective standard, but of course you have to come to your office looking sort of proper is actually deeply racially coded. She asks whether we think our current standards in the United States are discriminatory and unfair.

Wesley Yang is one of the America’s leading essayists. From “Paper Tigers,” his examination of why Asian-Americans remain underrepresented in leaderships positions, to “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” his meditation on the shooter who killed 33 people at Virginia Tech, he has traced America’s shifting understanding of race.

But over the past years, the focus of Yang’s work has subtly shifted. He is now trying to chronicle and explain what he calls the “successor ideology,” the constellation of ideas that seek to usurp liberalism, and which others have called by such names as “wokeness” or “social justice.”

In the latest episode of The Good Fight, Yascha Mounk and Wesley Yang discuss the precise definition of the successor ideology; the need for genuine empathy when exchanging ideas; and what forms of cultural sensitivity are truly inclusive as opposed to alienating

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Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid

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