This was great. Broadly speaking, affirmative action was probably necessary to bootstrap the culture after the civil rights era, but the nature of politics means that its ending was guaranteed to be messy.
I was talking with my sister a few weeks ago about this. Gen Xers grew up watching shows like Good Times, the Jeffersons, What's Happening and (ahem) the Cosby Show. For us, those weren't "Black" shows, they were just TV. And I think that was good for the culture.
IMO the single best thing that could happen in race relations is for a Republican presidential nominee to win ~40% of the Black vote.
In the 1970s, we had "Julia" (with Diahann Carroll), the first Bill Cosby show, (where he played a cool bachelor dude in LA), "Room 222" (which had several black characters), the cartoon "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids," and the Roots miniseries, which was a national event. As a kid, I knew that there was something special about these shows and that they represented a kind of integration of our full national experience, but they lacked the evangelical, hectoring vibe of programming of the past few years.
The question they pose is whether this whole policy of banning white men from certain jobs actually led to any high quality creative output that wouldn't otherwise have happened. I struggle to think of plausible examples.
So much of the conversation around affirmative action assumes that it actually works.
Based on the TV shows you listed, Im guessing we are approximately the same age (mid 50s).
I agree with your statement but with the caveat that we have to consider the great fragmentation of the TV audience, regardless of color. When those shows were in their heyday, we had three networks and PBS. Now there are literally hundreds of choices. Any semblance of a monoculture is long dead.
I’d love to hear Monica Harris’s take on all this—not just as the Executive Director of FAIR For All (FAIR), but also given her background as a top-flight Hollywood lawyer with experience at Disney, Viacom, and NBC. She’s also a Princeton alum, like Jacob.
The issue they raise where there's a certain sort of left-leaning white male who has no counterargument to the piece but just thinks that it shouldn't be said is something I feel qualified to comment on. For want of a better term, I just think it's "internalized misandry".
I found it really hard to think any of the sorts of thoughts from this piece that are now fairly de rigeur. It took me years, but I've had a head start on most people in this space because I've been dealing with this cultural pathology in one form or another for twenty years.
desire to belong is so strong. I know a few personally liberal white women that were happy to kneecap white men delighted to see the kneecap, even though they themselves had white sons. And they were happy to run around, exposing all this anti-white male rhetoric, even though they had white sons and even though they had white fathers and brothers, that were good men.
It sounds like the guest has experienced an extremely mild dose of what my mother lived through as a single parent during the 1960s and 1970s.
All of this handwringing about the inevitable over-correction for extremely unjust and blatant marginalization in recent history suffers from a lack of acknowledgement of those social realities.
The University in my city has just cut its DEI program. This is a good thing and a sign that the overcorrection is coming to an end.
In the meantime, I would appreciate it if the members of the groups who were formerly carried into positions of power, wealth and influence at the expense of others might frame it as a recognition or how life was for women, POC and same-sex attracted people in very recent times.
Overcorrection implies that something was corrected. The evidence that affirmative action or any form of DEI helps people who are actually subject to hostile discrimination is not great. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that its main beneficiaries are wealthy immigrants from non-white countries and upper middle class women. They talk about this in the episode.
If you believe nothing has improved for women, same-sex attracted persons and visible minorities in the time period I cited, you are not arguing in good faith.
I didn't say that at all. I think there's been a ton of improvement.
I just don't think it's likely that much of it, if any, was due to affirmative action, DEI, or any other administrative policies, social protest movements, or academic departments trumpeting diversity as a cause.
In medicine, even with the ability to run tightly controlled clinical trials, establishing causality is difficult. In the policy world, there is abundant opportunity for bad actors to take credit for social change that would have happened anyway. In my view, DEI is a grift that is riding the wave of social progress, not causing it.
I agree that DEI is a problem and I am happy to see it being removed from our local university, even while do-gooders wring their hands that it is all a right wing conspiracy.
I note a double-standard, however, when it comes to the amount of attention paid in popular media to the plight of caucasian-appearing men. While they have been subject to an unfairness that should be corrected, I would appreciate an acknowledgement that what they are experiencing is similar to, and in many cases a much gentler version of, what other groups were forced to navigate for decades if not centuries.
Group-based thinking is part of the problem. A lot of the old bigotries that did exist are really outside the memory and experience of many young adults today. It’s also untrue that “white men” as a category, ever had it good. Historically, most of them were subsistence farmers, cannon fodder, serfs, etc.
Having said that, I don’t think there’s a double standard at all, at least not in the way you describe. I can walk through the downtown any major American city and step over the living or dead bodies of various people, most of them men, many of them white, who our society has disposed of. Are they the most disadvantaged people ever? No. But social justice-y movements have never been interested in people who have serious, difficult to solve problems.
Humanity is an endlessly dynamic negotiation between the individual and the collective. Collective consideration is what gives us laws and customs that regulate individual behaviour for the well-being of others. An extreme emphasis on either the collective or the individual tends to lead to poor outcomes for the community.
I doubt you have had much exposure to the people who are working to support the very people you mention. Those "social justice-y people are working against an almost intractable issue of addiction and mental illness on one side and dumb fashionable politic rife with the hollow performative morals that I believe you are citing on the other. The empty rhetoric of DEI, etc is a fact. However, it's a fallacy to paint all efforts to serve the disadvantaged with the same brush.
As for the notion that white men have never enjoyed an advantage in our culture, we'll have to agree to disagree. Thanks for the exchange.
Actually, white men coded as conservative, eg, did not work on a Dem campaign, edit the Princeton liberal paper would not have gotten even a first interview. And they would not have been at all surprised.. This guy ticked many left hand boxes and was still passed over. Obviously, it was unexpected. Barry Weiss, like 3 years ago, said that DEI, which I believe implies various shades of Divide, Exclude, Intimidate, had to be destroyed. She is more heterodox than most center Dems but I was still shocked. She had a point many in unexpected places may now support.
Calling a Princeton University graduate ordinary or mediocre is absurd. Princeton admits about 4.5% of applicants. Only elitists would make such a comment.
Nice..... helped me understand more fully from a person in the middle of it. Just how to be helpful to my crew of influence people that find themself in this age group dilemma.
We'll never know what research would have been done. The overall profligation of low-quality and biased research in recent years is bad, but it has many causes and while I think there's definitely a case that DEI is in the mix, it's hard to assess empirically.
This was great. Broadly speaking, affirmative action was probably necessary to bootstrap the culture after the civil rights era, but the nature of politics means that its ending was guaranteed to be messy.
I was talking with my sister a few weeks ago about this. Gen Xers grew up watching shows like Good Times, the Jeffersons, What's Happening and (ahem) the Cosby Show. For us, those weren't "Black" shows, they were just TV. And I think that was good for the culture.
IMO the single best thing that could happen in race relations is for a Republican presidential nominee to win ~40% of the Black vote.
In the 1970s, we had "Julia" (with Diahann Carroll), the first Bill Cosby show, (where he played a cool bachelor dude in LA), "Room 222" (which had several black characters), the cartoon "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids," and the Roots miniseries, which was a national event. As a kid, I knew that there was something special about these shows and that they represented a kind of integration of our full national experience, but they lacked the evangelical, hectoring vibe of programming of the past few years.
The question they pose is whether this whole policy of banning white men from certain jobs actually led to any high quality creative output that wouldn't otherwise have happened. I struggle to think of plausible examples.
So much of the conversation around affirmative action assumes that it actually works.
Based on the TV shows you listed, Im guessing we are approximately the same age (mid 50s).
I agree with your statement but with the caveat that we have to consider the great fragmentation of the TV audience, regardless of color. When those shows were in their heyday, we had three networks and PBS. Now there are literally hundreds of choices. Any semblance of a monoculture is long dead.
I’d love to hear Monica Harris’s take on all this—not just as the Executive Director of FAIR For All (FAIR), but also given her background as a top-flight Hollywood lawyer with experience at Disney, Viacom, and NBC. She’s also a Princeton alum, like Jacob.
Meghan... how COULD you???? "platform" a "white man"!!!! the only thing worse would be if he were dead!
That's next week.
Shakespeare? Twain? Hemingway? Wilde?
Eliot? Pee Wee Herman?
The issue they raise where there's a certain sort of left-leaning white male who has no counterargument to the piece but just thinks that it shouldn't be said is something I feel qualified to comment on. For want of a better term, I just think it's "internalized misandry".
I found it really hard to think any of the sorts of thoughts from this piece that are now fairly de rigeur. It took me years, but I've had a head start on most people in this space because I've been dealing with this cultural pathology in one form or another for twenty years.
desire to belong is so strong. I know a few personally liberal white women that were happy to kneecap white men delighted to see the kneecap, even though they themselves had white sons. And they were happy to run around, exposing all this anti-white male rhetoric, even though they had white sons and even though they had white fathers and brothers, that were good men.
He's lucky (in this day and age) that he doesn't have such a Jewish last name
It sounds like the guest has experienced an extremely mild dose of what my mother lived through as a single parent during the 1960s and 1970s.
All of this handwringing about the inevitable over-correction for extremely unjust and blatant marginalization in recent history suffers from a lack of acknowledgement of those social realities.
The University in my city has just cut its DEI program. This is a good thing and a sign that the overcorrection is coming to an end.
In the meantime, I would appreciate it if the members of the groups who were formerly carried into positions of power, wealth and influence at the expense of others might frame it as a recognition or how life was for women, POC and same-sex attracted people in very recent times.
Overcorrection implies that something was corrected. The evidence that affirmative action or any form of DEI helps people who are actually subject to hostile discrimination is not great. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that its main beneficiaries are wealthy immigrants from non-white countries and upper middle class women. They talk about this in the episode.
If you believe nothing has improved for women, same-sex attracted persons and visible minorities in the time period I cited, you are not arguing in good faith.
I didn't say that at all. I think there's been a ton of improvement.
I just don't think it's likely that much of it, if any, was due to affirmative action, DEI, or any other administrative policies, social protest movements, or academic departments trumpeting diversity as a cause.
In medicine, even with the ability to run tightly controlled clinical trials, establishing causality is difficult. In the policy world, there is abundant opportunity for bad actors to take credit for social change that would have happened anyway. In my view, DEI is a grift that is riding the wave of social progress, not causing it.
I agree that DEI is a problem and I am happy to see it being removed from our local university, even while do-gooders wring their hands that it is all a right wing conspiracy.
I note a double-standard, however, when it comes to the amount of attention paid in popular media to the plight of caucasian-appearing men. While they have been subject to an unfairness that should be corrected, I would appreciate an acknowledgement that what they are experiencing is similar to, and in many cases a much gentler version of, what other groups were forced to navigate for decades if not centuries.
Group-based thinking is part of the problem. A lot of the old bigotries that did exist are really outside the memory and experience of many young adults today. It’s also untrue that “white men” as a category, ever had it good. Historically, most of them were subsistence farmers, cannon fodder, serfs, etc.
Having said that, I don’t think there’s a double standard at all, at least not in the way you describe. I can walk through the downtown any major American city and step over the living or dead bodies of various people, most of them men, many of them white, who our society has disposed of. Are they the most disadvantaged people ever? No. But social justice-y movements have never been interested in people who have serious, difficult to solve problems.
Humanity is an endlessly dynamic negotiation between the individual and the collective. Collective consideration is what gives us laws and customs that regulate individual behaviour for the well-being of others. An extreme emphasis on either the collective or the individual tends to lead to poor outcomes for the community.
I doubt you have had much exposure to the people who are working to support the very people you mention. Those "social justice-y people are working against an almost intractable issue of addiction and mental illness on one side and dumb fashionable politic rife with the hollow performative morals that I believe you are citing on the other. The empty rhetoric of DEI, etc is a fact. However, it's a fallacy to paint all efforts to serve the disadvantaged with the same brush.
As for the notion that white men have never enjoyed an advantage in our culture, we'll have to agree to disagree. Thanks for the exchange.
Actually, white men coded as conservative, eg, did not work on a Dem campaign, edit the Princeton liberal paper would not have gotten even a first interview. And they would not have been at all surprised.. This guy ticked many left hand boxes and was still passed over. Obviously, it was unexpected. Barry Weiss, like 3 years ago, said that DEI, which I believe implies various shades of Divide, Exclude, Intimidate, had to be destroyed. She is more heterodox than most center Dems but I was still shocked. She had a point many in unexpected places may now support.
Calling a Princeton University graduate ordinary or mediocre is absurd. Princeton admits about 4.5% of applicants. Only elitists would make such a comment.
why'd you'd delete the "microsoft stuff"?
Thanks.
Nice..... helped me understand more fully from a person in the middle of it. Just how to be helpful to my crew of influence people that find themself in this age group dilemma.
Great interview. I'll believe Hollywood has moved on from its current era when The Lost Generation is optioned and turned into a series.
Half joking but I wonder if he's been approached by anyone? Could be a documentary as well.
I wonder if by discriminating on characteristics instead of ability will lead to a paucity of high-level medical research, etc. How will anyone know?
We'll never know what research would have been done. The overall profligation of low-quality and biased research in recent years is bad, but it has many causes and while I think there's definitely a case that DEI is in the mix, it's hard to assess empirically.
don't you worry, the best "research" is by definition "diverse". At least that's what I was taught at the uni :)