When White’s Not Right

National Review Online

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

 

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, and 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 Derrick Hudson. The very same work that had been rejected by even obscure publications was suddenly one of the country’s best poems once the author was assumed to be a Chinese woman.

 

We applaud Andrea Lucas, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairwoman, for seeing Savage’s article and then publicly inviting anyone who may have suffered “this widespread, systemic, unlawful discrimination” to make a report to her office. She has been backed up and supported in this by Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department. Civil Rights apply to all people, or they are merely racial spoils dressed up in the name of equality.

 

The fact is that we need law enforcement agencies to take these forms of anti-white-male discrimination seriously. For decades, college admissions offices have been stacked against white male and Asian applicants, and they often documented their discrimination in explicitly self-incriminating ways. But rarely were officials or institutions held to account. The victims of this discrimination were preemptively shamed into never coming forward with their complaints. Those who did were ridiculed as losers who were advertising their status on the bottom rung of the meritocracy, when in fact they were kicked to the bottom of a hierarchy of aggrieved races.