Editors at National Review Online highlight one of the consequences of the DEI movement.
In a landmark article for Compact on the wages of the woke era, Jacob Savage, a once-aspiring television writer, discussed how millennial white men like him were systematically excluded from employment in the culture-making industries: Journalism, publishing, television, film. Over a decade-long period, institutions like Buzzfeed, the New York Times, Vox, along with many writers’ rooms in Hollywood, decided to pursue diversity in hiring with gusto. Those positions, already held by non-white men, stayed reserved for non-white male candidates when they reopened. New hires were meant to correct gender and racial imbalances, and those imbalances weren’t even defined by the gender and racial makeup of the prospective employees, but of society as a whole. The process of doing this was ugly, divisive, and illegal if we take the letter of the law seriously. And we should.
The great DEI purge of millennial whites became super-charged after the death of George Floyd. Savage presents the absolutely stunning numbers: “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.” The mechanism for effecting this change was in fact a cowardly, and plainly self-interested cohort of Gen-X and Boomer white executives and senior employees who made atonement, who “checked their privilege” by systematically committing racial discrimination.
One infamous story from the woke cultural revolution era is the story of Yi-Fen Chou, whose poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was selected for the Best American Poetry collection in 2015. The Editors didn’t know that the same poem had been rejected 40 times by poetry journals when submitted under the name of its real author, Michael Derek Hudson. The very same work that had been rejected for even obscure publications was suddenly one of the country’s best poems once the author was assumed to be a Chinese woman.
