DEI isn’t dead — and a ‘lost generation’ is still paying the price

While some conservatives believe we’ve won the battle against DEI, BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere thinks that couldn’t be further from the truth. And a new piece in Compact by Jacob Savage called “The Lost Generation” only echoes Burguiere’s sentiment — revealing that what has been done in the name of diversity has stolen livelihoods and ruined professional lives.

“In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024,” Savage writes.

“White men fell from 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023. In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life,” he continues.

“I had not really ever honestly thought about it this way, is why it’s such an interesting piece,” Burguiere comments.

“As the Trump administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. ... This may be how Boomer and Gen X white men experienced DEI. But for white male Millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed,” Savage writes.

“This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male Millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates,” he continues.

“If you were 40 in 2014 — born in 1974, beginning your career in the late '90s — you were already established. If you were 30 in 2014, you hit the wall. Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us,” he adds.

When institutions who heralded diversity lost a person of color, they would only fill that position with another person of color — white men or women need not apply.

“That’s just racism,” Burguiere comments. “OK? If you’re taking someone who is one race and replacing them with a person of the same race, you are making a decision based on skin color, that’s racism. That’s what that is.”

After George Floyd’s death in 2020, several news outlets promised to make a massive change to the color of their workforce, with NPR declaring that “diversity was nothing less than its ‘North Star.’”

“Shouldn’t the truth be your North Star if you’re a journalistic organization?” Burguiere asks. “If you’re NPR and your taxpayers are paying for your entire organization or at least a giant chunk of it, maybe your North Star should be America, right?”

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