People Are Getting Tired of Discrimination - Even Against White Men

More evidence that the tide is turning against extreme wokeness

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Compact magazine has an excellent piece by Jacob Savage on diversity hiring over the last decade or so. The central argument is that DEI hiring practices haven’t disadvantaged all White men equally, but have largely disadvantaged millennial White men.

The piece has gone massively viral and elicited a surprisingly positive response - another sign, I suggest, that the tide is turning against the extreme wokeness of the 2010s and early 2020s. Below is an excerpt from the essay, but the whole piece is well worth reading.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life…

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us…

The fact that other groups, in other eras, have faced worse discrimination—that in the grand scheme of things, the disenfranchisement of white male millennials was relatively mild—is not itself an argument. Especially when the entire liberal establishment insists that nothing actually happened, that the “mild” correction was in fact no correction at all, and that any white man harmed in the process was in fact “mediocre.”

Savage’s piece has inspired a huge amount of commentary. Here’s an excerpt from an essay in The New York Times by Ross Douthat.

[One] counterpoint might be that for the entirety of American history, discrimination ran the other way, and if the past 10 years were unfair to some subset of white men, well, revolutions are always a little messy, and success is nobody’s natural birthright.

But even if you set aside the moral problem of collective punishment — is a young white man who wants an academic job in 2020 responsible for how white men behaved in 1960? — and the legal issue of discriminating on the basis of race and sex (quite a lot to set aside!), you are still left with the political problem: This particular attempt at revolution has created a cadre of potential counterrevolutionaries with a clear material grievance against the entire system, especially against its claims to moral superiority on issues related to race.

Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams adds an important wrinkle to Savage’s argument.

Savage… misses a crucial part of the story, which goes beyond gender and race…

[G]atekeepers have typically favored women or members of racial minorities, but only those equipped with a prix-fixe menu of progressive values and beliefs. Many of these favored candidates spoke in esoteric codes and espoused beliefs that put them at odds with the majorities of their respective ethnic and gender cohorts, as polling on progressive shibboleths such as police abolition, pronoun innovations, and jargon like Latinx has consistently shown. Some white candidates speak this way too… These applicants were likely in a far stronger position to thrive in DEI-driven institutions than the minorities who checked the right identity boxes but contradicted the prevailing orthodoxy of the post-2014 era.

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Coming Soon to The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter…

• Is the Female-Male Distinction Valid?

• How Personality Changes in the Teen Years

• Marrying Behavior Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology

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