By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Progressives often follow a particular pattern when they
want to dismiss a phenomenon that challenges their beliefs. The writer Rob
Henderson summed it up in a tweet in
2021: “Step 1: It’s not really happening Step 2: Yeah, it’s happening, but
it’s not a big deal Step 3: It’s a good thing, actually Step 4: People freaking
out about it are the real problem.” This was the left’s archetypal response to
any number of excesses and abuses perpetrated under the banner of social
justice, including cancel culture, the outbursts of violence during the
so-called racial reckoning of 2020, and the violations of even basic fairness
at the peak of the #MeToo movement.
The cycle kicked off again last week in response to a viral article
by Jacob Savage in the online magazine Compact. Savage’s essay, like one
he wrote earlier this year, argues that white Millennial men seeking work
or recognition in prestigious cultural fields such as media, publishing, and
academia have faced structural discrimination. Starting around 2014, Savage
writes, “in industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration
to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that.”
Savage is correct: Women and people of color really have
received preferential treatment in many elite industries in recent years. But
he misses a crucial part of the story, which goes beyond gender and race. Being
Black (or any number of protected identities) affords you special privileges
only if you think and speak how gatekeepers believe you’re supposed to. As I’ve
witnessed and experienced throughout my career, there is a right kind of Black
and a wrong one.
Savage marshals ample data to make his point. In 2011, he
writes, white men occupied 48 percent of lower-level TV-writing positions; in
2024, they filled 12 percent. Out of 45 tenure-track hires in the humanities
and social sciences at Brown University since 2022, he says, just three have
been white American men. Since 2015, according to Savage, 70 Millennial writers
have been named finalists for National Book Awards; once again, he writes, only
three have been white men. Two of these men were minorities of another kind:
military veterans. (Neither Brown nor the National Book Awards immediately
responded to a request for comment; I did not independently verify these
figures.) An executive at the foundation that administers the award told one of
them—Elliot Ackerman, a veteran, contributing writer at The Atlantic,
and friend of mine—that he must have been really good. As Ackerman
relayed to me at the time, the executive told him that the foundation made sure
the judges were “super woke,” and the selection process was not designed for
people like him to become finalists.
Despite the extensive figures that Savage cites,
prominent voices on the left found ways to reject or decry his argument. Nikole
Hannah-Jones, a MacArthur fellow and the reporter behind The New York
Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” wrote
on Bluesky that the essay is statistically dubious and confirms “a deeply
held grievance amongst an apparently large % of our white colleagues that they
are the victims of rampant discrimination.” The writer Moira Donegan, who
created the “Shitty Media Men” list and was forced to pay a settlement to a man
who sued her for defamation, posted
in response to the Compact article: “Really kind of dispiriting to
realize how many men in my world see the women and people of color in their
lives as thieves and obstacles to their thriving.”
Matt Bruenig, of the People’s Policy Project, used census
data to argue
that the institutions Savage points to “employ approximately 0% of the US
population, but their transformations plus DEI rhetoric plus an internet
community aimed at negatively messaging about it all can generate the
impression of something much bigger going on.” Bruenig concludes with a
textbook illustration of step four in Henderson’s cycle: “What appears to have
happened is a lot of empty talk, no real significant change, and backlash that
is causing real harm.”
Bruenig is right that Savage examined a rarefied segment
of the U.S. labor market. And even though the essay is full of shocking
numbers, they are almost certainly the result of some degree of cherry-picking.
And of course it’s true that for most of American history, men who were deemed
white tended to be afforded privileges and opportunities not available to
others. But over the past two decades I have seen firsthand the dynamics that
Savage describes. The gatekeeping apparatus that he identifies is real, but it
often serves a specific subset of marginalized groups. Gender and race were not
the only characteristics that determined who captured the cultural and economic
windfall that wokeness wrought. Ideology played an outsize role too.
As a member of various selection committees and
recruitment initiatives, I have been privy to conversations in which
gatekeepers have passed over white men in part because they were white
men. These gatekeepers 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. As one source said to Savage,
they adopt “a kind of protective coloration, allyship mindset, to get through
the door.” 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.
As a Millennial man of so-called mixed-race ancestry (my
father is Black and my mother is white), I have no doubt that I have sometimes
benefited from the trend Savage highlights. But at other times I’ve had the
maddening experience of being categorized as the wrong kind of Black. Because
some of my affiliations and views don’t align with today’s progressive
consensus, I have been ostracized, been denied some opportunities, had other
opportunities rescinded, and been explicitly discriminated against in media,
publishing, and academia.
No one is entitled to a particular job or award. And no
one wants to hear complaints from someone like me who has found compensation in
competitive fields. But the fact remains: Well-meaning men and women who have
had the temerity or naivete to nominate me for a prize or board seat have told
me, with some embarrassment, that they were later informed that my perceived
views on matters such as my
own privilege and the primacy of open
debate had essentially rendered me ineligible.
A similar process played out when I tried to find a
publisher for my latest book, which criticizes the excesses of 2020’s fury. My
views, I was told, did not align with the kind of Black perspective that
presses wanted to publish. (This had also been the case with my previous book,
which came out in 2019, though notably not with my first one, which was
published in the “before times,” all the way back in 2010.) Sympathetic editors
who read my book proposal and expressed preemptive interest returned from meetings
with their colleagues chastened. “It was a blood bath,” one editor wrote. My
incredulous agent told me that the controversy around my submission reminded
him of the one surrounding Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
I’m not alone, of course. My late friend, Stanley
Crouch, the brilliant contrarian, was anti-woke avant la lettre.
Even though he skewered progressive dogma, he nonetheless won a coveted
MacArthur genius grant in 1993. As far as I can tell, however, no Black person
who has publicly opposed anti-racist or progressive ideology in any sustained
way has won the fellowship since then. (In 2011, the Harvard economist Roland
Fryer secured one, but that was several years before he published research
showing a lack of racial bias in police shootings, which many progressives
found unwelcome.)
If minorities were simply elevated tout court, as
Savage’s article implies, one would expect to find at least a modicum of parity
at elite institutions between young Black intellectuals who criticize modern
progressivism and those who embrace it. But this is not the case. Consider the
Black 29-year-old Coleman Hughes, who has already written incisively on
questions of race, reparations, religion, and international politics.
Institutions ought to fight over a prodigy like him the way that Silicon Valley
firms compete for top engineering talent. Instead, he focuses his attention on
podcasting and public speaking, precisely the kinds of fields where Savage
argues that enterprising white Millennial men have gone to stand out: refuges
for which “institutional barriers to entry didn’t exist.” The only college
where Hughes has held a teaching post, the University of Austin, is avowedly
heterodox. The same is true of The Free Press, the publication whose
website hosts his podcast.
Savage’s essay describes a set of elite institutions that
for years have adhered to a very specific consensus about what kind of people
they want to invite in. That consensus is not simply a matter of race and
gender; its discrimination is more sweeping, and not always so obvious. But if
you happen to notice, you are the problem.
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