America was built on the concept of the individual and that the state exists to protect that individual from becoming the "victim" of collective thinking.

There are plenty of others like Karl Marx that saw the world through the eyes of identity groups, where individuals sacrificed their individualism for the mandates of the collective in order to "wage war" against oppressors.

Yet in such thinking, the inherent understanding is that one trades away ones "life, liberty and right to pursue happiness" for the group. Effectively creating a new form of bondage, that people believe they have a right to impose on individuals whether you are assigned to the "oppressor group" or "oppressed" group.

Your references largely relate to "woke" thinking which emerged in the 50s and 60s and extended the concepts of Marxism from being grounded in "class" warfare to a far broader spectrum of identity groups, but its underlying premise is deeply flawed, since as a society collaboration and cooperation are the key to advancing as "humans" and yet "wokeism" is built around societal division which ultimately breeds violence and death.

It might sound "intelligent" to promote division in some carefully crafted ideology, but it is not liberating, it leads to social bondage. Think about the phrase "politically correct" thinking... the idea that your thought can be and should be controlled should be terrifying...

The greatest struggle for individual liberty began with the Reformation which freed individuals from the bonding power of the institutional church, followed by the age of liberalism, which extended liberty as unalienable right of all humans rather than subject to the Divine Power of Kings, and then the struggle over the centuries to turn this aspiration into a reality as echoed by MLK in his speech where we judge one another as "individuals" based on each person's character and not identity politics based on each person's skin color. MLK's speech was not "new thinking" but rather the expression of hundreds of years of evolving thought reduced to a simple speech.

Against the aspiration of unalienable human rights have been those who benefit as "leaders" of identity groups.

America elected Barrack Obama believing he would help to right many of the wrongs in society. A community organizer, well educated, who knew how to use identity groups to create coalitions and weld them into a political force. And yet where are we today, Obama is now worth over $70 million and if you believe most surveys, the marginalized group that supported his rise to power saw no benefit from his leadership.

I don't view Barack Obama as evil, but simply used him to illustrate, a pattern that has been in place for centuries. Leaders of marginalized identity groups use the power of those positions to accrue wealth far more often than benefit those who have put their faith in them.

I point this out simply to highlight that segregation whether imposed by the powerful or promoted by the marginalized is not the answer. Collectivism is a form of social segregation.

The answer is integration at every level. Rather than forming identity groups around skin color, religion, gender, we need to focus on embracing the shared values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What human does not want those things...

But you can never achieve them... if the very first step to trade away your liberty by becoming a "slave" to the group... followed shortly after by the loss of your right to pursue happiness" in the interests of "the group", and ultimately ending in death as violence is embraced as a "means to an end".

We need to move forward as a society committed to those three simple cornerstones on which our societal compact is based. Again, the human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness need to be the guiding principles of our society and not some identity group's ideology. Division has always been appealing, since as humans we hope to use it to "get ahead", but rest assured, the only ones that benefit in the long term are those that sit on top of the "identity group", not the people who sacrificed their individual dreams for collective.