Was There a Woke War on White Millennial Men?
In Compact, Jacob Savage exhaustively documents discrimination in the name of equity.
Jacob Savage is a screenwriter from Los Angeles. And he may have written the definitive testament that explains why one specific demographic had it so rough this past decade. We're talking, of course, about white male millennials.
As a white male millennial myself, I approached his article—which was published earlier this week in Compact, and subsequently made a huge splash on social media—with some trepidation. After all, it can be pretty lame to whine about one's own victimhood. Moreover, blaming your bad economic prospects on sinister, larger-than-life forces is part of the conspiratorial mindset. And the tendency to pinpoint wokeness as the motivating ideology behind every destructive trend is starting to feel like punching down, to borrow a term from the woke lexicon itself. Donald Trump is president again, many social media platforms have largely abandoned content moderation, people who hurl obscenities at others are often rewarded (or at least see their punishment mitigated), and entertainment companies are more afraid of crossing the right than interested in catering to the left. Piers Morgan declares in the title of his new book that "Woke Is Dead," which might be something of an overstatement: I'm fairly confident that there are still zealots asking for trigger warnings and safe spaces on college campuses. But let's agree that we have at least defeated wokeness for the time being. To use a metaphor beloved by my fellow millennials, it now exists as a formless evil with a greatly diminished capacity to pester us. You know, like Voldemort.
But I digress. Savage's article is really terrific, and uses data—not just vibes, or griping—to back up his argument. What he effectively demonstrates is that over the course of the 2010s, several sectors of the economy were taken over by wokeness: entertainment, academia, and the media, to name just three. Wokeness can be defined in many ways, but in terms of employment, it's effectively synonymous with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which is the progressive push to equalize workplaces by giving preferential treatment to minorities in hiring and admissions. What this meant in practice was that white males entering the job market in the 2010s faced unprecedented disadvantages, since employers actively wanted to dilute the white male percentage of the workforce.
Savage marshals tons of data to demonstrate his point:
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.
In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn't a white man—and then provided just that.
Is it a little self-pitying to point all this out? Perhaps. But what really makes the article so terrific is that Savage doesn't lay the blame on the minority employees who benefited from this scheme. After all, women and people of color once faced not just de facto discrimination but active, legally compelled discrimination, which is much worse. What Savage shows is that the drive to discriminate against whites applied only to entry-level positions. In other words, the Gen X and Baby Boomer whites, comfortably ensconced in management positions, engaged in very little self-sacrifice: They did not step aside and hand their jobs over to black women. They just made it much, much more difficult for much younger white men to be hired in the first place.
In practice, this meant the tenured white male professor was safe, but a white male millennial who had just finished his thesis and was hoping for an appointment was utterly screwed. It meant that the senior editors at various prestige publications remained disproportionately white and male—and that they would routinely toss writers' applications in the dumpster unless the applicant fit the right identity profile. It meant that it was easier for a white male to sell a script to Hollywood and have his idea turned into a television show than it was to actually get hired in the writers' room for that show.
In 2011, when he (and I) moved to California, white men were around 60 percent of TV writers; by 2025, according to the WGA's own diversity statistics, they accounted for just 11.9 percent of lower-level writers; women of color made up 34.6 percent. White men directed 69 percent of TV episodes in 2014, and just 34 percent by 2021. But that remaining third went overwhelmingly to established names, leaving little space for younger white men. Since 2021, 11 directors under 40 have been nominated for Emmys. None have been white men.
Judging by the reaction to this article, a lot of my fellow white male millennials are understandably really upset about this! And if I thought my own employment prospects had been impacted in any way by this, I'd be mad too. (Thankfully, Reason does not practice identitarianism.)
I am moderately worried about the backlash, though. Already, we are seeing plenty of infighting on the right between the conservative old guard and a new generation of younger commentators who are, in some cases, explicitly racist. This partly explains the groyper movement, which has absorbed a growing number of poorly adjusted young men who seek to blame their problems on women, black people, Israel, and various institutions that they say never gave them a chance. The fact that there existed for 10 years an active campaign of discrimination against young white males is no doubt politically radicalizing for some of them.
This is all very bad. The last thing our country needs is a young, white, male conservative movement that argues for identity-based revanchism. As the hangover from the decade of DEI finally wears off, we should get back to the libertarian/classically liberal approach to hiring, admissions, and the like: colorblindness and the rejection of affinity group-based characterization in favor of individual merit and achievement. As Ayn Rand wrote, "Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism." That's still true, no matter which race it disadvantages.
This Week on Freed Up
Have you watched my new podcast with Christian Britschgi? Well, you should. We're chartering bold new territory in the category of two dudes talking about politics and Lord of the Rings and the Habsburg Empire. Check out the latest episode and see what became of my co-host after he attempted to flee to Somalia:
This Week on Free Media
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