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.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The left’s new moralism will backfire]
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.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab?]
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.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: To see how America unraveled, go back five years]
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.
The post The Wrong Kind of Black appeared first on The Atlantic.
