In 2019, left-wing writer and co-founder of Vox, Matthew Yglesias, wrote an article titled "The Great Awokening." "A hidden shift is revolutionizing American racial politics — and could transform the future of the Democratic Party," Yglesias wrote.
"In the past five years," Yglesias wrote in 2019, "white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.'
In 2014, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., activists made use of social media tools to highlight and dramatize their protests, leading to an extraordinary movement toward "racial justice." This energized white liberals beyond any recent phenomenon.
Pollsters noted that "white Democrats suddenly started expressing dramatically higher levels of concern about racial inequality and discrimination, while showing greater enthusiasm for racial diversity and immigration."
The change was supercharged after the George Floyd riots and the "racial reckoning" in newsrooms and boardrooms across America. The riots elicited promises from the news media and academia to "diversify" their workforce.
That diversification deliberately elevated less qualified, less competent women and people of color over young white men. What's more, the editors, department heads, and others involved in the hiring admitted it.
Jacob Savage, a ticket scalper and screenwriter, wrote in Compact Magazine of his experiences trying to find employment after "The Great Awkokening" of 2014 and how millennial white men were denied advancement in their chosen fields based solely on their race and gender.
Meanwhile, the left played dumb.
“Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”
Uh-huh. "Benign" my a**.
This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.
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.
Savage refers to them as the "Lost Generation." Previously, most men in the workforce began to move up the corporate ladder in their early 30s (or had hit a ceiling and either accepted their fate or went elsewhere). This isn't a "glass" ceiling." It's a concrete wall that has been placed in front of millennials in the name of diversity.
This "infantilizing" of women and people of color by portraying them as incapable of getting hired without enormous help is extraordinarily racist.
"I would say, for one, that the cartoon of equity, if you are using it as a full analogy, is incredibly racist," suggested Savage in an interview with Yascha Mounck. "It suggests that the non-white man is incapable of seeing the field without an incredible amount of help."
The raw employment numbers tell the tale.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a “reckoning.” The New York Times solemnly promised “sweeping” reforms—on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised. The Washington Post declared it would become “the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.” CNN pledged a “sustained commitment” to race coverage, while Bon Appétit confessed that “our mastheads have been far too white for far too long” and that the magazine had “tokenize[d] many BIPOC staffers and contributors.” NPR went further still, declaring that diversity was nothing less than its “North Star.”
These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.
"Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men," writes Savage. "Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men."
Diversity as a part of an overall corporate hiring strategy is fine. But as the end-all and be-all of corporate personnel policy, it's disastrous. This is especially true for white males aged 30-40 who find themselves caught in "The Great Awokening" and its performative liberal posturing that has had ruinous effects on the careers of so many.
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