Savage's 'Lost Generation', or: Thoughts on the DEI scam and what happened after 2015

 Jacob Savage’s long piece on “The Lost Generation” has been making the rounds for a week now. It feels like everybody has written a response, and here I am going to write my response.

If you’re among the few who hasn’t read Savage’s article, you probably should. In it, Savage addresses the aggressive enforcement of DEI hiring norms from the mid-2010s, particularly in what he calls the American “culture industry” – fields like journalism, screenwriting and academia. The upshot is that after around 2014 (a year Savage calls “the hinge”), radical demands for greater minority representation came at the cost, almost exclusively, of white male millennials. Members of this “lost generation,” with exceedingly few exceptions, found themselves systematically shut out of the careers they had trained for, while companies and institutions hired every last black female with a pulse they could find. Older, more established white males of the boomer and X generations enabled and presided over this system of racial exclusion, which affected them not at all.

This is recent history that I experienced first-hand. I got my first and only professorship in the early 2010s, just before the hammer came down. Of all the white men among my graduate school acquaintances, I’m the only one I know of who got a tenure-track job at all. Then, after I took up my appointment, I had the dubious pleasure of watching my university go crazy. After 2015, intense pressure from the administration and an increasingly powerful minority bloc within my own department made it all but impossible to hire white men, whatever the situation. In some cases merely interviewing a white guy was enough to risk veiled accusations of racism from the diversity enforcers. After I was nearly cancelled a few times, I decided that near-daily racial harassment wasn’t worth the salary. I abandoned my job and moved back to Germany, just a few years into the glorious American cultural revolution. I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough to recentre my professional life around the tiresome intellectual pretensions and imaginary racial grievances of undertalented, overpromoted angry black women.

Don’t let anyone tell you they didn’t know what was going on back then. Right now, many of the progressives who cheered this nonsense on at the time …

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/savages-lost-generation-or-thoughts?publication_id=268621&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

...This basic paradox – whereby antiracist policies serve merely to magnify the more racist aspects of reality – was anything but new in 2015. I suspect the insanity that took off in that year was merely the distant echo of an earlier wave of diversity hiring initiatives from the 1990s. By then, these minoritoids were about 20 years into their careers and making their way into the upper rungs of the faculty and administration. Some of them landed in key decision-making roles, but even in the more numerous cases where the provosts and the deans of the faculty and the university presidents remained lamentably undiverse, the dangerous minoritoids were senior enough to pose a threat and demand an apologia for allegedly unearned privilege. The boomers and gen X’ers of Savage’s article saved their skins by sacrificing the next generation of white male academic hopefuls. That’s how they proved they weren’t racist.

Just because some centrist-trending progressives profess mild regret over this era today, and just because some DEI administrators have received new job titles, does not nearly mean that these practices are over with. Meritocracy, we must admit, is a weak position, and one that can never be fully realised – not least because ethnic preferences are intuitive, powerful and self-perpetuating. These people are now fully entrenched, and many of them will continue to agitate for special racial privileges until they retire.