It’s not just that the most successful mainstream progressive journalists / consultants / campaign staffers / activists and others like to talk and write about race in the deeply essentialist and condescending and tokenizing way that bounces right off both Zapata voters and so many other members of the United States’ linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse non-white population. At this point, I’d argue this sort of identity talk is a prerequisite to get any sort of desirable position in these fields (at least if the position in question entails discussing identity). It’s everywhere, and it has absolutely exploded during the Trump years.
This style of discussing identity is stifling and elitist and does not reflect how real people talk — it’s an extension of the longtime tendency, shared in very different ways by both right-wing racists and left-of-center social justice types, to flatten groups of hundreds of millions of people into borderline useless categories, and to then pretend they share some sort of essence.