Janice Fiamengo responds to Jacob Savage’s essay on the “lost generation” of young white men who have been subject to open and explicit discrimination in education, employment, and loudly denounced for noticing this:

Most people who have discussed Savage’s essay accept his time frame: that the exclusion of white men took place mainly over the past ten to fifteen years. But this is not true. It has been going on for much longer than that, as Nathan Glazer made clear in his comprehensive Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, first published in 1975 and updated in 1987. Government initiatives to provide jobs for women and racial minorities, particularly blacks, were rooted in the equal rights legislation of the 1960s, implemented later that decade and aggressively expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Organization for Women under the leadership of Betty Friedan, for example, brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force it to comply with federal legislation, and sued the country’s 1300 largest corporations for alleged sex discrimination.

Anyone wishing to read a detailed prehistory of what Savage has chronicled can also consult Martin Loney’s extensively documented The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (1998), which shows how what was called equity hiring in Canada spread across areas such as the police force, firefighting, the civil service, crown corporations, law, teaching, academia, and elsewhere, beginning in the 1980s. What Glazer’s and Loney’s research shows is that discrimination against white men in employment is far more deeply embedded than most people realize and has affected many more men than is currently recognized.

It is ridiculous to castigate Boomer white men, as it seems popular now to do, for allegedly implementing and benefiting from diversity policies. The last thing that should be encouraged is for younger white men to turn their anger on older white men. Many of these older men themselves faced active discrimination, psychological warfare, divorce-rape, and immiseration. Every organ of the culture told them it was time to change, get with it, stop being Archie Bunker, recognize the superior merits of the women and racial minorities their people had allegedly oppressed for so long. White women were by far the majority and most enthusiastic architects and proponents of equity hiring, bullied in turn by the black and brown women with whom they originally formed their alliance against white men (and all men, with a few exceptions).

Older white men may have secured (tenuous) positions of power, but they had no power in themselves as white men. Most of them knew they could find themselves disgraced, friendless, and jobless as the result of an unpopular decision or an unguarded statement. Accusations of sexual misconduct to take such men out of their positions were not confined to millennial males.

I was in the academic job market in 1997, and diversity hiring was already commonplace then. Everyone knew it was going on, and it was signaled both explicitly and implicitly in the advertisements that encouraged applications from women and visible minorities. My friend Steve Brule remembers when affirmative action was brought in at the large chemical company where he worked in 1984. At the beginning, it was said that these programs would be time-limited, lasting only for a short season. Instead, they lasted for well over 40 years and are still going strong.

It is foolish to imagine that such discrimination is now going to lie down and die. There have been a number of occasions over the last few years in which that was confidently predicted (remember Claudine Gay?) and did not occur. Already the diversity advocates, who are legion, are marshalling their counter-arguments and nit-picking the evidence, finding (or lying about) the ways in which what Savage described hasn’t really happened, recalibrating numbers, rationalizing and justifying them. Thousands of academics will spend years joining forces to discredit claims about discrimination, recasting them as a MAGA or Groyper lament and a dangerous attack on the legitimate (but still inadequate!) gains made by valiant women and long-oppressed racial minorities. Recently for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, in an ostensibly critical article, is still playing with false justifications and outlandish untruths, saying the following about the rationale for equity hiring:

… One could say of course it’s unfair, but repairing the legacy of slavery and sexism is a hard problem, and sometimes hard problems have unfair solutions. It wasn’t fair to round up huge numbers of men born between 1914 and 1927 and send them off to fight the Nazis, but that was the only way to win.

One might argue that, but I haven’t seen anyone do so. No one seems brave enough to state baldly that we should penalize White men born in 1988 for hiring decisions that were made in 1985 by another White guy who was born in 1930. Instead what I’ve seen is a lot of deflection.

What bizarre nonsense, what spurious claims even if her point is that such logic is ugly. Discrimination in favor of white men has been illegal since 1964, and affirmative action/equity hiring was already fully in place by the mid-1980s when the “white guy who was born in 1930” was allegedly discriminating in his hiring practices. As McArdle inadvertently shows, we’ve been operating on the basis of deliberately-perpetrated false beliefs for years, beliefs that the intelligentsia adhered to and promulgated.

On the City Journal Substack, Renu Mukherjee argues that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is correct that “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is stop discriminating on the basis of race”:

First, public opinion is clear: Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have long opposed the use of racial and identity-based preferences. While this trend extends to employment, I’ve studied it extensively in the context of college admissions. The data underscore Americans’ strong support for colorblind meritocracy.

One year before the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether an applicant’s race or ethnicity should be a factor in the college admissions process. 74 percent of respondents said that it should not, including 79 percent of whites, 59 percent of blacks, 68 percent of Hispanics, and 63 percent of Asian Americans. By way of comparison, 93 percent of Americans said that high-school grades should be a factor in college admissions, and 85 percent said the same about standardized test scores. Several surveys since then have produced similar results.

A May 2023 study that I co-authored with my Manhattan Institute colleague Michael Hartney reinforces this point. Through an original survey experiment on the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we asked Americans to play the role of an admissions officer and decide between two competing medical-school applicants. While the applicants’ accomplishments were randomly varied, the specific pair of applicants that respondents saw always consisted of an Asian American male and a black male.

Our objective was to determine whether, and when, Americans believe diversity should take precedence over merit in medical-school admissions. We found that even when respondents were informed that the medical school lacked diversity, the vast majority made their admissions decisions based on merit — in this case, college grades and MCAT scores — not race.

A few months prior to the publication of that paper, for a separate report, I reviewed hundreds of survey questions on affirmative action stored on the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s online database. I found that Americans are most likely to say that they oppose “affirmative action” when survey language explicitly describes the policy as providing “preferential treatment” or “preferences” for a given group. This suggests a deep American aversion to racial and gender-based favoritism — which is why Democrats, when pushing policies rooted in such ideology, tend to rely on euphemisms. Republicans should not do what even Democrats know doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, they have sounded like they might. Several prominent Republicans have taken to the social media platform X to argue that “Heritage Americans” — those who can trace their lineage to the Founding era — are inherently superior to more recent arrivals. In doing so, they suggest that the former are entitled to preferential treatment on the basis of ancestry. Here, the logic is that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

Republican leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, should reject such grievance-based politics. These ideas were unpopular when Democrats pushed them, and they will be unpopular when Republicans try them, too.