As an undergraduate in the early 1980s, I studied German and Russian literature in college. Over my adult lifetime, however, I’ve felt increasingly out of place in the humanities.
I’m not leftist. I don’t think capitalism is a bad word, although capitalists (like all people) sometimes do bad things and try to justify those things through their ideology. I also think racism is both evil and stupid: in all of its manifestations. So I have been horrified to see racist views come to be acceptable again in the very social and political communities that once loathed and fought racism. The form taken by the “politics of identity”, and the idea that people are defined inexorably by their racial/ethnic/cultural background, is different than that of racism in the early and middle 20th century, but those ideas are fundamentally racist.