Anti-White Racism is Probably Boosting All Racism

Which is bad unless you enjoy racism

Last week, there was a dustup about race on Twitter (there’s an evergreen sentence if there ever was one). A recap of the whole predictably-stupid episode can be found here, but in a nutshell: An academic named David Austin Walsh complained about his inability to land an academic job, and said that part of his problem is that he’s white and male. The ensuing discussion touched on topics including the academic job market, privilege, and the possibility that David Austin Walsh is a gigantic douche-planet. But, of course, the most intense parts of the dialogue involved race.

Many people denied that white males face a disadvantage in academic hiring. Whenever someone makes this argument, it reminds me of the running gag on 30 Rock where Jenna lies about her age and then stares down the person she’s talking to, daring them to contradict her.

Of course it’s common for universities to prefer non-white and non-male hires. We know this because there has been a very public decades-long effort to implement exactly this system. That doesn’t mean that bias exists in every case, or that there aren’t contexts in academia in which being a white male is an advantage, or even that such a system shouldn’t exist. But the effort to prioritize non-white and non-male hires isn’t a secret: It’s a public initiative that most schools talk about more than the Charmin bears talk about their scat. It’s obnoxious for people who support these policies to pretend they don’t exist. I support Obamacare, and I don’t respond to criticism of Obamacare by saying “What effort to expand health insurance through Medicaid and subsidized exchanges? It doesn’t exist! I am outraged that you would suggest that the policy I publicly supported — and which was, in fact, implemented, as everyone knows — exists!”

When the chattering classes talk about hiring practices, we usually talk about academia, journalism, and entertainment. This is because we’re narcissists: Those are the fields in which we work, so that’s what we talk about. Those fields have historically been disproportionately white and male, so they’re also fields in which there is intense pressure to diversify. As a result, many of our discussions are about parts of life where the field is tilted against white men. And I think that’s distorting our dialogue and promoting racialized ways of thinking that hurt everyone.