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Notes -
Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.
A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:
Edit: typo
The cohort-based analysis is a really important point that not many people raise. Institutions almost never reach diversity goals by laying off existing employees, they only do it by applying pressure to the hiring and promotion pipelines. So what looks like a small difference in the total composition of employees can be the result of a titanic shift in the composition of incoming cohorts, which did happen in many institutions around 2014, as Savage pointed out.
Its frustrating when older white men in powerful positions in institutions enthusiastically support policies that would have prevented themselves from being successful, had the policies been in place when they were younger…
Can you blame them though? That's just the power of mass-media in action: the media told them something was true, therefore it was. People do not believe an idea is true because they've done a calm, rational analysis of the facts of the matter; they believe something is true because it has to be true according to their world-view, which is given to them by their "community."* After-school specials and sitcoms about how racism is bad (and that white people are responsible for it all), while holding up only the most contemptible examples of contrary belief as representatives of the whole, completely conquered the Western mind. They have no choice but to support DEI, how could they not?
It was ever thus; it took DeBeers less than 20 years to convince virtually every American that a proposal was not legitimate if you did not buy a diamond ring (that they would be the supplier for). Think about this; people of all walks of life:
And yet, believed the advertisement was gospel truth! This included people that had lived their entire lives without this "rule," not merely those who had grown up with the campaign. This belief is so internalized that even bringing up "Hey, did you know diamond engagement rings was all a marketing ploy by DeBeers" will get you attacked as an incel or mysogynist; even when the nature of marketting is acknowledged, "the message" will still be defended as it is unassailable.
Tangential, but while browsing this thread, I opened Twitter, and in what I'm sure is just coincidence, and not pernicious data surveilance, my For You is literally this post, commenting on this article. I remember this event, and laughing at the frumpy Asian girl's insistence that White men simply surrender to their own genocide. That's crazy, right? Your whole strategy is demanding your enemy not fighting back, and them just complying? Wait, that's literally what happened!?
*Of all the Great Lies of modern society, possibly the most pernicious is the insistance that children, upon reaching adulthood, must leave their familial community behind and find out "who they are." Your identity will always be given to you, and if it is not by a community you have roots in, and is invested in your success, it will be by mass culture, which is not; in fact, it wants to exploit you.
DeBeers may have popularised the idea of "you too can and should buy her a diamond ring" but they did not invent engagement rings:
Sure, not everybody had a diamond engagement ring, but there were betrothal rings and other items used/given as tokens of "now we are a couple who intend to marry and are not free to mess around with other people".
The DeBeers campaign was aspirational and worked on that, when people were all rising to the middle-class and expectations were rising with that. "Now you, too, can have some at least of the trappings of the rich and high-class! Demonstrate your success in life and how you're making it!"
Gender reveal parties are probably the modern equivalent of this, I'm still baffled by them. Baby showers were an exotic enough notion to me, now there's this new trend and of course, like all trends, it has ballooned into bigger, better, flashier showing-off.
That doesn't mean babies are a bad thing, and "DeBeers sold you on the idea of diamonds mean love and diamonds are forever, you poor boob, you sap, you credulous mark, you" does not mean getting engaged and married is a bad thing, either.
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It really grinds my gears as well. I had a conversation with an older white male physics prof at a social event a while ago, and he was giving this rather sanctimonious monologue about all the work they were doing to make the field more "diverse", and how they were rectifying the issues that led to women being excluded from the field. Of course he isn't giving up his job to a 60 year old women who was passed over for tenure in the '80s - but he apparently thought it was perfectly reasonable to have a lab with exactly one token white guy. It's just perpetuating the same problem on another generation, with different victims.
Getting cynical, there's another reason old men might prefer hiring young women to hiring young men.
Sexual harassment lawsuits?
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