Interesting if counterfactual contention from Matthew Yglesias about the mega-viral Jacob Savage article in Compact Magazine that career-stunting discrimination against white men took place only over a “brief but intense period.” The reality is that the period of maximum intensity was arguably somewhat brief, but that the slow-boil determination to kneecap that particular demographic dates back decades, depending on the field, and continues unabated today.

I am blessed to have had a range of prestigious opportunities despite being a heterosexual male of European descent, but as an elder millennial who graduated from a fancy college in 2007 was more or less on the last helicopter out of Saigon. I owe everything in my career from having started out working for Bill Moyers on PBS, but I was never supposed to get that job: I learned after I started that the people who hired me (ironically two of the only minorities in the company) had wanted to hire someone else (a different white guy) months earlier and company leadership had dragged their feet on approval for so long because they didn’t want a white person that he’d ended up taking a different job. My colleagues were only able to hire me because I have a racially ambiguous name (Jesse Adams) and they avoided looking at my social media so that they could honestly tell their bosses that they didn’t know what my ethnicity was.

It’s been interesting to see much of the center-left commentariat’s muted reaction to the Savage article, since they primarily want to minimize the issue and get back to electing Democrats by any means necessary. A more constructive approach would be to forthrightly acknowledge the vast scale of discrimination and outright vilification that took place against human beings for their immutable characteristics by people who claimed to be enlightened. The behavior of prestigious American institutions over at least the past twenty years can best be contextualized in terms of Rwanda: Hutus, Tutsis, and need for a truth and reconciliation commission.