That you think that US has historically been "friendly" towards the idea of rights for women, blacks, and latinos is pretty amusing.
At the very least it shows a history illiteracy that can only be derived from ignorance. It's either that or malice. I'll cut you some slack and presume it's ignorance.
We fought an entire civil war to free the blacks, they're more free here than in many places in Africa. We preceded most countries with giving women rights and even many of the most misogynist people here want them to have more rights than they have in most of the rest of the world.
If we gave minorities and women any more than they already have we'd have to actively take things from other people here (and in some cases we're already doing that.) The idea that we now or have historically not been near or at the frontier of this is completely absurd and actually historically illiterate.
I'm not necessarily saying it's bad, I'm saying it could be (likely is) the cause of the problem. Maybe it's worth the cost.
I don't think it is but a lot of people seem to think tolerating that is an absolute moral axiom that should supersede anything else so if you think that then you would say it's good.
I'm referring to some of the rhetoric used to sell the current so called "decline" (authoritarian or economic). I believe they call them wedge issues? Every culture has nice words for it's bullshit. And yeah, that's whatabotism.
There's an obvious decline in income inequality and other metrics of economic egalitarianism in the U.S. A big part of these stats has always been the labor for those industries with undocumented labor, prison labor and the like but recently, wages for your average service worker have failed to keep up with inflation and, on a longer horizon, productivity gains. These gains are in big part from automation, and I suppose owners feel entitled to that share of the pie but with gig work, monopolies and mega-corps slicing up the economy amongst themselves, workers have generally have it worse than their forebears.
Economists and sociologists have been forever talking about this.
