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As someone who was essentially born into the Blue tribe of the culture war and raised to be its soldier, I think you almost have it with "legacy of slavery," but rather, it's the broader oppression narrative, of which the legacy of slavery is one type. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in the bluest of blue areas, this oppression narrative was just taken for granted as Obviously True, with the notion that all the Bad Stuff like slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc. in our society could be gotten rid of, while keeping all the Good Stuff we like, if only those ignorant people would stop holding up these old, decrepit, sexist, racist patriarchal structures. There was generally a real sense of pity for these ignorant bigots, though certainly there was some disgust as well.
It seems that in the decades since I was in school, this kind of teaching has only become more common in schools in less-blue and non-blue areas. It also seems to me that encouragement of active disgust instead of condescending pity has come into vogue in that time. Given that, I don't think Blue tribe's nigh-genocidal hatred of the Red is that surprising.
Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction. Much of the ideas behind this oppression narrative came from academia, and specifically parts of academia that are largely allergic to empirical testing. Sans empiricism, success in the field became even more about winning status than it normally is, which freed people to make more and more extreme statements (e.g. any old idiot can argue that murder is wrong, but it takes a true genius academic to argue that murder is right) without the messy real world getting in the way. And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.
Of course, that just moves the question back another step: why did the Blue Tribe allow the humanities in academia to be so freed from empiricism and basic checking as to allow status games to dominate over truth? That one's probably above my pay grade, but my guess would just be generic laziness, nothing interesting in particular. Doing rigorous analysis of anything is tough, and the appeal of taking shortcuts is always there even when you know others will critique your work. When you can be confident that others won't, and this becomes common knowledge among everyone in the field... it'd be surprising if it even accidentally produced truth even once.
From the inside:
Thanks to science and reason, we know how to solve all our problems.
Given that we know how to solve all our problems, if a problem isn't solved that necessarily means that someone is choosing not to solve it, or is otherwise obstructing the solution.
Therefore, if you have a problem you can't solve, the solution is to find the people blocking the obvious solutions and get them out of the way.
From the outside:
Progressive ideology doesn't actually have workable solutions. When the solutions their ideology preaches fail, they need scapegoats. Their relationship with Red Tribe is built around this scapegoating behavior.
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A whole host of those subjects have never been and will never be empirical in any real sense. They might be occasionally rigorous (I would argue the philosophy is rigorous, but outside of the logic subcategories are not really empirical. You can create perfectly logical arguments that run counter to empirical reality if you desire.) or create a pseudo-empirical structure (like psychology, sociology, and anthropology have) where terrible research methods (don’t get me started on self report) can be run through statistical analysis and conclusions can be drawn. There are ways to teach these subjects that are at least honest (historical analysis of literature or the intent of the author over a [outgroup] analysis of whatever literature).
But if you insist on empirical evidence and research in the arts, you essentially cannot have it. There’s no real scientific methodology to creating literature and thus no way to make it rigorous in analysis. And thus you either stop doing it and simply teach the undergrads to write coherently, or it morphs into a cesspit of whatever is socially and politically radical (because it’s impossible to fire someone for bad research when the entire field is unempirical) with no checks.
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I think this is the wrong answer. Your answer should naturally prompt the question 'if its just arbitrary status games across all relevant areas and institutions, why do they all cohere to exactly the same result?'
These people already shared a framework which lead to all of them to arrive at the same conclusion regardless of their subject/position/domain. That should key you in to the fact that its not the competition per se.
As you mention:
The end-points were predetermined because they were all competing to do the same thing for the same moral reason. The end points existed before the institutions did. They were always driving towards them.
The academics in question are largely leftists, and leftist have always held that distinctions between things and people is the moral evil and that people who support fundamental distinctions between things are therefore the least moral persons. For example:
Emphasis mine. Manifesto of the Equals, Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals 1796. It goes thousands of years back before this but this quote is the one I had at hand.
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