How exactly am I "trapped in the Lost Cause"?

You're really digging for the f.u.'s again.

Explain yourself.

I think you've built a plantation in your mind.

H, a friend , got tired of looking at a space along the West Side Highway and thought- why not place a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt  there ?-So he suggested that and it happened.

Hillary came up for a fund raiser to pay for it. Various Rooseveltians joined in.

It's long been up. Turn west on 57th street and you'll see it.

Only H's second most famous accomplishment.

For H's friends    pride of place in among his  accomplishment sweep stakes goes to his intervention to end a fight on 57th Street . Between a husband and wife. Quite physical, perhaps from past practice. On this  occasion peace resulted from H's intervention as the two of them joined  forces to pummel H.

Which I bear  in mind when I  occasionally ponder intervening in the pleasantries among pp, rmrd and aa.

I definitely do not speak for the organization African Descendants of Slaves. Thanks for the humor.

You took Roxane Gay's comments about identity politics out of context.

Gay cited the adoption of Michelle Obama’s oft-cited “They go low, we go high,” statement, the use of “nasty woman” by Hillary Clinton supporters as a slogan and “love Trumps hate” as understandable but misguided attempts to find comfort or solidarity.

“Millions of people went on to parrot these words with no understanding of the world and how it really works,” Gay said. “Too many people were and are invested in this idea of purity and infallibility to realize that there can be no purity in fighting fascism. There is no high road with a man who has appointed a white supremacist as his chief strategist in the White House. When they go low we have to be willing to go lower if we have any hope of resisting their greedy, shallow and insular brand of fascism.”

“The phrase ‘loves Trumps hate’ was equally loathsome,” Gay said, “because that is in fact rarely the case and by repeating it over and over, people were literally centering Trump. Language matters because sometimes it becomes an empty container,” for whatever people want to fill it with, she said.

Gay argued for the need to “move beyond tidy words that make us feel like the world is a better, more unified place than it actually is,” and for the need to recognize when phrases are used to duck responsibility or dismiss important issues.

Gay described “diversity” as a word so overused as to become meaningless and “identity politics” as a phrase misused to imply that “we can’t both acknowledge and embrace our identities and be part of a broader community.”

https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-14/gay

Kendi would say that your pity olympics is ridiculous.

On pushback to using the word "racist" and whether it means you have to understand someone's intent

I think that again, that is based on this definition that a racist has racist bones in their body, a racist has a racist heart — but I don't really define racist at all by intent. I define it based on what a person is saying. The idea — is this idea keynoting hierarchy or equality? And I define policy based on its effect, purely and simply. And so if the effect of a policy is an injustice or an inequity, it's racist. And I think journalists can do that. You know, if someone says, "This is what's wrong with black people," they can say that idea is racist. If a policy is, is leading to inequity, they can call that policy racist. We no longer — the way we should be defining "racist" and "antiracist" — have to worry at all about intent.

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750799889/ibram-x-kendi-racism-isnt-an-identity-its-what-youre-doing-in-the-moment