RACISM AGAINST:
Posted on 12/20/2025 1:11:14 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
America has more than one "lost" generation of white men
When I read Jacob Savage’s widely praised essay on “the lost generation” of young white men in America—a generation of men who, like himself, have lost out on prestigious jobs in media and academia for no reason other than the lightness of their skin and the equipment dangling between their legs—I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of recognition. More than a tinge, actually.
You see, between 2015 and 2018, I was a DPhil student at the University of Oxford. My research was on the Reformation in England, the great schism that produced the Protestant and Catholic Churches and set the modern world on its course in so many different ways. I focused on how ordinary people experienced the momentous changes set in motion by Henry VIII’s marital problems and whether really, on the local level, much changed for them at all. My answer was—yes and no. It was more interesting than that, of course.
By most obvious metrics—the ones that are supposed to matter—my research was a success. It was entirely funded by scholarships, and I finished within three years. I passed with minor corrections, nothing more than a few spelling and formatting errors in a 100,000 word document. While doing my research, I also published more than half a dozen peer-reviewed articles. Most graduate students publish none. One of them was in an international journal established academics would be lucky to be in.
Once upon a time, I would have been well on my way to a comfortable, safe career as an academic, probably at Oxford or Cambridge, or at least a very good second-tier university (a.k.a. a “redbrick”).
But 2018 was not that time.
It was clear to me from very early on that I wouldn’t get a job doing postdoctoral research or teaching. My research was scholarly, but passé: There was no trendy theory to speak of, apart from some leaven from my previous training as an anthropologist at Cambridge, nor did I touch on “important” present-day concerns like gender, race, white privilege, colonialism, the patriarchy, disability, and so on.
(During my viva voce exam, the final, in-person, test that decides whether you get the doctorate or not, I remember being asked, “Where are all the women?” The questioner was, of course, a woman herself, and her remark was intended to be devastating, somehow. I simply replied that my sources didn’t say much about women’s religion as opposed to men’s—which was actually true—and so of course I had my work reflect that, rather than pretending otherwise. As an answer, it was simultaneously right and wrong.)
There was something else, too. It’s hard to know, because of course you never really know. Nobody says, “Sorry, you’re a white man: We’re not giving you the job.” You simply never get the interview, no matter how many applications you write. But I was in no doubt that my plummy voice, Willy Wonka name (Charles Cornish-Dale) and (relative) lack of melanin counted against me.
Never mind that my family has strong working-class roots; that nobody has ever paid a penny to send me to a public (i.e. private) school; that all my achievements were my own, through hard work and, of course, some native intelligence—none of that mattered. There was no place for special pleading on those terms.
Mine is hardly a sob story. I quickly landed on my feet, and ended up doing something far more interesting and engaging than writing about obscure saints’ cults in medieval England.
But anyway. That’s enough about me.
There’s much to be praised about Jacob Savage’s essay. It’s well researched, well fleshed out with anecdotes, interviews and human interest, in addition to plenty of plain hard fact and numbers.
It’s impossible to doubt the phenomenon he describes. Here’s one particularly striking set of numbers, for example:
“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 2013to 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.”
Anybody who raises awareness of any facet of anti-white racism deserves praise. The original tweet announcing the article got something like 10 million views. Even the Vice President was talking about it.
But what’s also clear is that Savage is only telling part of the story—the part that directly concerns him and his own personal interests.
Some of the most perceptive criticisms of Savage’s essay have come from Jeremy Carl, who wrote a fantastic book, The Unprotected Class, about the history and trajectory of anti-white racism in America.
As Carl points out, so many white-collar whites and white liberals like Jacob Savage had little to say “with respect to the travails of earlier generations of White working class men, who had their blue-collar jobs shipped overseas and who were chased from their neighbourhoods decades before.”
I’m reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s immortal remarks in The Gulag Archipelago about Soviet Russia’s intellectual class. The exact phrasing escapes me, but the gist is this: the intellectuals only started giving a shit about the existence of the gulags when they started being sent there themselves. For over a decade, millions of stolid peasants had marched grimly and silently into the freezing wastes of Siberia, never to return. Great hecatombs were offered up to the Dialectic and the Materialist Conception of History, and nothing was written or said. It was only when Stalin came for the wordcels, who assumed their position as the vanguard and apologists of the regime would last forever, that suddenly—suddenly!—the Revolution, the Class Struggle, the Utopia had been betrayed.
Not so.
Because of Savage’s narrow focus on the world of his own experience, he sees the key moment as being about 2014, the beginning of the so-called “Great Awokening.” And when it comes to blame, he assiduously avoids blaming all the groups who have benefited at the expense of white men—women, minorities—and instead blames the previous generation of white men for essentially “pulling up the ladder” and preventing millennial white men from following in their footsteps.
They did so, Savage claims, through a misguided wish to improve the world, and also through moral cowardice, in not speaking out.
There is some truth to this, of course. I know from my own experience at Oxford, where my supervisor—a liberal white boomer—barely lifted a finger to help or mentor me. Jeremy Carl, who was a graduate student in the 1990s, also agrees.
But it wasn’t just pusillanimity. It was also malice and genuine ideological fervor that led the left, in particular, to create, over many decades, a towering edifice of anti-white racism that made white Americans, in many cases, second-class citizens in their own nation, whether they were intellectuals or factory workers. A nation their forefathers built from nothing.
This process began in at least the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, creating evil institutions like the Community Relations Services—that’s the one that used to cover up anti-white crimes by forcing the families of victims to deny a racial motivation in public, until Trump disbanded it.
But we could probably go back even further if we wanted to, to trace the roots of anti-white racism in America, and the horrible idea that white people, and especially white men, should be dispossessed, disenfranchised and, ultimately, replaced.
In the end, Savage has no real prescription for the problem. He can only describe one part of it. Thankfully, others do. I’ll leave the final, blistering words to Jeremy Carl.
“The establishment that denied opportunities to Savage and his millennial and Gen-Z White male cohort are not, as Savage seemingly implies, basically good people who had the single moral or intellectual flaw that they happened to discriminate against White men. They are horrible people, people who are totally unworthy of controlling the commanding heights of our society. They are moral monsters, racists, sexists, and intellectual cowards. And they, and the corrupt institutions they have run for decades, must either be reformed completely with their incumbent leadership ousted—or else destroyed.”
The article recounts the author's personal experience as a millennial white male screenwriter in Hollywood. After years of struggling (including scalping tickets to pay bills), he and his writing partner nearly landed staff writing jobs on a TV show in 2016, but were ultimately passed over because the writers' room already consisted of higher-level white male writers, and the network sought to avoid an all-white-male room to promote diversity.
The author argues that this rejection marked a broader pattern: starting around 2014, when DEI initiatives became institutionalized in American industries, opportunities for millennial white men in elite professional fields sharply declined. He cites statistics showing declines in white male representation, such as lower-level TV writers (from 48% in 2011 to 11.9% in 2024), The Atlantic's editorial staff (from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024), and Harvard humanities tenure-track positions (white men from 39% in 2014 to 18% in 2023).
He contends that DEI efforts, while portrayed as benign or corrective by some, effectively discriminated against younger white men entering the workforce, as diversification mandates targeted entry- and mid-level positions rather than displacing established older white men (Boomers and Gen X). This created a "lost generation" of millennial white men who faced closed doors in media, academia, and other prestige fields, while remaining largely silent on the issue. The piece contrasts this with older white men's relative security and criticizes the lack of cohort-specific analysis in discussions of diversity.
White Males have specifically been discriminated against since the start of “Affirmative Action” about 55 years ago.
This isn’t something that just started in the last 10 years.
Are you kidding me? White men have been almost completely replaced by H1B visa holders that have swamped our country over the last 10 years. Don’t believe the numbers that are being reported. Try applying for a tech job if you don’t believe me.
White male tech workers.
I’ve found out multiple times over.
never say you are ,” White, non-hispanic” on any form. No need anymore to tell people you are White. You are puerto-rican or cherokee, or whatever-just not White. It doesn’t benefit you at all anymore to be White.
After Hubby had been in Berkeley he was kicked aside for “more colorful” people.
This long form essay has already received over ten million views (and that was a couple of days ago). Indeed, one of the most important pieces written.
Savage's article was posted over here in a thread that died on the vine at 37 replies (complete with no shortage of "these young whippersnappers just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and try harder" flavor of Boomer replies).
The Lost Generation (Free Republic)
The Third Rail that few want to talk about is that in almost every metric things have gotten measurably worse since white men were driven from these fields.
Indeed, we should all identify as "African-American" in alignment with modern anthropology which posits that humanity originated from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
Throw a wrench into the machine.
women smh
Correct.
Yes. I was discriminated against throughout my 40 year corporate career. I figure AA cost me 500k.
This is the same thinking which says "98% of the FBI are good agents, but they other 2% just ruin things." It's totally false.
Organizations do not reform themselves unless the people inside the organization stage a revolution. IF the organization were "basically good people", then the organization would be actively ousting the bad people. If you do not see the bad people being ousted, then the organization is rotten and should be uprooted and destroyed and a brand new effort should be started. We need big changes.
Liberal definition of diversity: different on outside, same on inside.
How do you make a small fortune as a doctoral student?
Start with a large fortune.
I would say 60 years, not 55, but, yes, white males have been discriminated against in this country. Luckily for everybody else, we did not agree that whining about it was acceptable.
I'm 55. There was never a time when I was not discriminated against.
Explicitly. You don't have to go trying to invent hidden, subconscious, systematic, etc etc. No. The discrimination was overt. In fact it was required by law.
I was discriminated against so that an incompetent woman could be promoted over me. I stayed long enough to find another job to jump to. Best job ever was a small business with 6 men. No infighting, no drama, just get results. Made good money without the worry of being replaced by some goofball and checked a box.
Yep. The one kind of diversity Leftists cannot stand is diversity of thought - the only kind of diversity that really matters.
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