The White Man Who Pretended to Be Black to Get Published - "A young poet pretended to be ‘a gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,’ and wrote intentionally bad poems. He says he got 47 of them published... He has pretended, he said, to be Dirt Hogg Sauvage Respectfully, author of poems such as “non-b god or: what deity would be a TERF?,” as well as Adele Nwankwo, a “gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,” who has published dozens of comically bad poems in a wide array of indie literary magazines across the Anglosphere in the past three years, including one about a lesbian WWE-style wrestler... In April, the man behind these identities came clean, writing on Substack that he’d “assumed a series of ‘attractive’ pen names” to “test the limits of the poetry industry and just how much buffoonery it was willing to permit in the present day.” He claimed he’d spent two years tricking editors into thinking that his pronouns or skin color were less “regular” than they actually are; and in that time, he said 47 of his intentionally bad poems had been published in numerous indie literary magazines. His name, he wrote, was actually Jasper Ceylon... Several years ago, the man calling himself “Jasper Ceylon” was trying to break out as a poet, writing under his real name—which I’ll share in due course—and he noticed that certain journals had what he described as “really weird, and quite specific requirements”: “I just was not in the demographic they would even consider accepting in some cases. They were openly advocating on their websites for the voices of the disenfranchised and all of this stuff. I’m like, Wow, it would probably be a lot easier to get in if I had some sort of connection to one of these identities.” Ceylon is far from the first person to argue that English-language publishing is overrun with what my colleague Coleman Hughes calls “the new racism”—that is, instead of giving everyone equal opportunities, regardless of the color of their skin, editors actively perceive certain races as worthier than others. (This view of the publishing industry has been disputed.) Nor is he the first person who’s attempted to expose it. In 2015, Michael Derrick Hudson, a middle-aged white librarian in Indiana, saw his poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” rejected by publishers 40 times. This inspired him to try submitting it under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou. After that, his poem was promptly published and included in that year’s annual Best American Poetry anthology. When he was found out, Hudson was accused of “yellowface.”... Ceylon told me he was inspired by various literary hoaxes, including the 1943 Ern Malley hoax, where conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart published many, many parodies of modernist poetry, to make fun of a genre they found superficial and stupid. He also mentioned the more recent so-called Grievance Studies Affair, where the academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose published a number of bogus papers in academic journals between 2017 and 2018—including one that claimed dogs engage in rape culture, and another that included passages from Mein Kampf rewritten in modern jargon. They, like Ceylon, were trying to prove that in their intellectual sphere, you could get anything published if its politics were progressive, even if it was bad... “I spoke to the head editor at the publishing house for the [first] novel, and they dropped the project because I was a white male author”... His name, he told me, is Aaron Barry... Barry claims he’s concerned for the future of poetry. “People can’t engage with it,” he said. “They’re almost intimidated by it, or they’re just confused by it. And this exclusionary attitude only contributes to that further. It’s a shame.”... White, who’d edited Barry’s debut novel, pulled Femoid off the shelves. “He told me I was a terrible person,” Barry said. “He said, ‘I haven’t published a white male author for two years because I don’t want to deal with you guys, and if I had known you were a white male author I would not have accepted the book.’”... Australian writer Matthew Sini, who interviewed Barry in the guise of Jasper Ceylon on his literature podcast Getting Lit, told me: “Ceylon’s project reveals a growing rot at the heart of publishing.” “Vogueish privileging of increasingly arcane identity categories,” he said, “not only hurts the arts in general terms, it hurts budding artists, especially those who are from ‘marginalized’ groups . . . The soft bigotry of low expectations quite often cosigns these writers to an embarrassing spectacle of publishing undercooked and poorly constructed work. The Echolia Review project has proven that identity fetishization in the poetry world literally comes at the expense of the art form.”"
Weird. Left wingers keep telling us that DEI is not about lowering standards, and only racists think that
The Vanishing White Male Writer - "It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six. And then the doors shut. By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man. Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total). “The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience"... The more thoughtful pieces on this subject tend to frame the issue as a crisis of literary masculinity, the inevitable consequence of an insular, female-dominated publishing world. All true, to a point. But while there are no male Sally Rooneys or Ottessa Moshfeghs or Emma Clines—there are no white Tommy Oranges or Tao Lins or Tony Tulathimuttes. Some of this is undoubtedly part of a dynamic that’s played out across countless industries. Publishing houses, like Hollywood writers’ rooms and academic tenure committees, had a glut of established white men on their rosters, and the path of least resistance wasn’t to send George Saunders or Jonathan Franzen out to pasture. But despite these pressures, there are white male millennial novelists. Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists, but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist. The reasons for that go deeper. All those attacks on the “litbro,” the mockery of male literary ambition—exemplified by the sudden cultural banishment of David Foster Wallace—have had a powerfully chilling effect. Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them. Instead they write genre, they write suffocatingly tight auto-fiction, they write fantastic and utterly terrible period pieces—anything to avoid grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America... the social and political environment in which a white male novelist, in an article bemoaning the disappearance of male novelists, is forced to say the world doesn't need more male novelists, seems like it might be fertile ground for a work of fiction. White male boomer novelists live in a self-mythologizing fantasyland in which they are the prime movers of history; their Gen X counterparts (with a few exceptions), blessed with the good sense to begin their professional careers before 2014, delude themselves into believing they still enjoy the Mandate of Heaven (as they stand athwart history, shouting platitudes about fascism). But white male millennials, caught between the privileges of their youths and the tragicomedies of their professional and personal lives, understand intrinsically that they are stranded on the wrong side of history—that there are no Good White Men. "
Of course, he doesn't consider that discrimination is a possible explanation. It is notable that the proferred explanation assumes everyone must write about themselves, and that empathy is not possible and/or that all pieces must be politically relevant
We still get told that DEI is about ensuring "minorities" are treated the same as white men
Wesley Yang on X - ""Not one single white American born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in the New Yorker" I'm a bit surprised that this statistic didn't even have to be qualified by "straight."
I found this Buzzfeed listicle from 2015 still online, though they've removed all the photos of the people making comments like this one by Franny Choi telling straight white males in publishing "Sit down and let us abolish you." They said what they were going to do and did it, with no exemptions for gay white males."
Charlie Kirk on X - "Why are young men the most conservative they've been in decades? Because they grew up under liberalism, and they know its only unifying principle is constant anti-white and anti-male discrimination. Need proof? Not a single white male born after 1984 has published a work of fiction in the New Yorker, America's most famous literary magazine. Did they all forget how to write? Of course not. They're being kept out because of their race and sex. The left assumed young men would simply embrace being dispossessed and hated. They were wrong."
Opinion | The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone - The New York Times - "Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales. I see the same pattern in the creative-writing program where I’ve taught for eight years. About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female. When I was a graduate student in a similar program about 20 years ago, the cohorts were split fairly evenly by gender. As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, “the young male novelist is a rare species.” Male underrepresentation is an uncomfortable topic in a literary world otherwise highly attuned to such imbalances. In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” The public response to Ms. Oates’s comment was swift and cutting — not entirely without reason, as the book world does remain overwhelmingly white. But the lack of concern about the fate of male writers was striking. To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction"
I like how men need to be included not primarily because hating men is bad or that statistical underrepresentation is bad (that only goes one way), but because it will help push the left wing agenda and help women
McKinsey’s Diversity Fog - "Last year, McKinsey & Company released a study purporting to demonstrate that corporations with more diverse leadership—more women and racial minorities in executive positions—were also more profitable. The consulting behemoth’s findings were consistent with those of its previous three diversity studies, in 2015, 2018, and 2020, each of which had been cited across industries and government institutions as proof of the supposed financial benefits of race- and gender-conscious hiring policies. Now, a new paper raises questions about McKinsey’s methodology and suggests that its advertised findings may have gotten the causation backward: financial success may lead corporations to embrace diversity efforts, rather than the other way around... journalist Christopher Brunet flagged a paper in the March 2024 issue of Econ Journal Watch, a biannual publication edited by George Mason economist Daniel Klein that publishes article-length responses to other economists’ errors. The paper, written by accounting professors Jeremiah Green, of Texas A&M, and John R. M. Hand, of the University of North Carolina, addressed the first three of McKinsey’s four-installment series of diversity studies. Green and Hand sought to test the replicability of McKinsey’s findings. Could another set of researchers, using the same data, come to the same conclusions? Since McKinsey refused to turn over its numbers, Green and Hand had to reverse-engineer the firm’s 2015, 2018, and 2020 datasets. The results were startling: Green and Hand couldn’t replicate the results of McKinsey’s first three studies, which monitored the profitability and executive demographics of an undisclosed group of S&P 500 firms and claimed to have found a positive correlation between diverse leadership and firms’ performance... Green and Hand not only were unable to replicate the studies’ findings; they also found that each of the three studies had analyzed the data backward. Instead of looking at a firm’s diversity policies in the years leading up to a given year’s financial performance, McKinsey had reviewed each firm’s financial performance in the four or five years leading up to the year in which its researchers snapshotted their executive demographics. In other words, according to Green and Hand, the positive correlations that McKinsey researchers observed may have reflected “better firm financial performance causing companies to diversify the racial/ethnic composition of their executives, not the reverse.” Wouldn’t this methodological problem have been obvious to McKinsey researchers? Apparently, it was. Buried in the firm’s 2018 study, its researchers concede the possibility that “better financial outperformance enables companies to achieve greater levels of diversity”—in other words, that more profitable firms may pursue diversity-hiring policies as a result of their profitability. McKinsey’s public presentation of its results, however, has not been so nuanced. As Green and Hand record, Dame Vivian Hunt, a McKinsey managing partner and a coauthor on each of the firm’s diversity studies, claimed in 2018 that “the leading companies in our datasets are pursuing diversity because it’s a business imperative and driving real business results”... Despite these methodological concerns, major corporations and government entities have cited the McKinsey studies to justify antimeritocratic hiring practices... The hyping of these McKinsey studies reflects progressives’ inability to grapple with or even admit the existence of tradeoffs. They do not consider their preferred programs to be the best of a set of imperfect options; rather, their policies represent definitive advances that come with no corresponding downsides. They don’t see the debate over diversity-hiring programs, for instance, as being between inclusion, on the one hand, and meritocracy, on the other. They think that firms can hire candidates at least partially for reasons having nothing to do with those candidates’ qualifications and not suffer any corresponding drag in performance. It can’t be that diversity-hiring programs correct for past injustices and are worth their inherent costs—a straightforward and honest (if misguided) argument—it has to be that diversity programs actually make corporations richer. Progressive proponents of decarceration do the same thing. They may want to make the normative case that America’s legal system is wholly unjust and ought totally to be torn down, but they feel compelled to make an instrumental case as well, one that denies the most obvious tradeoffs of their preferred policy—that it would free murderers and other dangerous criminals. So they insist instead that arresting and incarcerating criminals actually “makes us less safe.”"
Commentary on previously linked study. Left wingers don't care about correlation not meaning causation or non-peer reviewed studies when they push the left wing agenda. This is related to the moralistic fallacy too
Meme - "Well yeah you can't leave anything in your car or leave your garage door open for 30 minutes and there's stabbings all the time but have you had an authentic street taco?"
CEO of German software giant SAP defends scrapping women's quota - "The chief executive of the German multinational software firm SAP has defended his company's decision to abolish a quota stipulating that at least 40% of its workforce should be women, citing the company's competition in the United States... SAP's recent decision to scrap various diversity targets has caused discontent among its workforce and some shareholders. In addition to abolishing the overall women's quota, women at SAP will no longer be specifically promoted to management positions at certain levels... Since taking office in January, the administration of US President Donald Trump has advocated for diversity, equity and inclusion programmes in government agencies and businesses to be scrapped, arguing that favouring certain groups puts others at a disadvantage and is harming a skills-based selection process - without presenting any evidence... "We operate large parts of the US government's software and technology, which insists on these requirements," he said."
Obeying the law is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda
If a company had a quota for men or white people, the media wouldn't be claiming there was no evidence that this was bad
Peter MacKinnon: U.S. Supreme Court's DEI decision has lessons for Canada - "The United States Supreme Court is seen to be sharply divided between conservative and liberal jurists so it is noteworthy when it speaks with one voice. In Ames v. Ohio, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a unanimous decision that is viewed by some as resetting the diversity, equity and inclusion debate. Marlean Ames is a heterosexual woman employed by the Ohio Department of Youth Services, initially as a secretary, subsequently promoted to program administrator and applying in 2019 to enter management. Her application was unsuccessful when the department instead hired a lesbian and demoted Ames from her administrative position — restoring her to a secretarial post — and replacing her with a gay man. Alleging discrimination because she is straight, she sued under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, unsuccessfully at trial and in the circuit appeals court, but successfully on appeal to the Supreme Court. Justice Jackson observed, with emphasis, that the Act makes it unlawful “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge ANY INDIVIDUAL, or otherwise to discriminate against ANY INDIVIDUAL with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin.” That Ames was a member of a non-gay majority did not affect the result; “the law’s focus on individuals rather than groups (is) anything but academic.”... It is individuals who have equality before the law and it is individuals who must be protected from discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin... Taken along with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling affirmative action unconstitutional, it is clear that the United States and Canada part ways on issues of equality, discrimination and affirmative action. Their laws on these subjects are similar: the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment, and Canada’s Charter Section 15(1) and its equivalent in provincial human rights codes, guarantee equality before the law and protection from discrimination based on immutable conditions. But here the similarities end. The unconstitutionality of affirmative action and the emphasis on individual rights in the U.S. stand in marked contrast with the extensive practice of affirmative action and emphasis on group rights in Canada. The American experience has lessons for Canadians; we, too, need to reset the DEI debate. Although some group rights are recognized in our Constitution (e.g. Indigenous peoples and minority languages), they do not mandate special treatment apart from their specific texts. The issues here are broader and more fundamental: do we see affirmative action, sanctioned by Section 15(2) of the Charter, as an exception to a general rule prohibiting discrimination, or does its extensive practice in our public institutions suggest that the exception is becoming the rule? Should we re-emphasize individual rights as a unanimous Supreme Court did in Ames v. Ohio? Is DEI a benign practice or an ideological cover for discriminatory practices? If we do not face these questions, test them in our courts, and develop a social consensus around them, differences among Canadians that we have seen to date will pale beside those to come."
Cambridge University ‘discriminates’ against white job seekers - "Guidance issued at the world-leading university advises departments to “try to ensure” that at least one candidate from “under-represented groups” is invited for every interview. The “diverse recruitment framework” further encourages recruiters to readvertise positions if the longlist of candidates “is not diverse”, such as if it is all white or male. The guidance, currently in use at the university, also says interview panels should be “diverse both in gender and race” and composed of individuals who have taken training courses in equality, diversity, inclusion and unconscious bias. Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter and the director of the Committee for Academic Freedom, said the policies were “tantamount to discrimination against white applicants”. He said: “This is one of the worst cases we have come across of EDI interference in what should be a purely academic process. “Favouritism towards women and non-whites demeans them, and encourages the very prejudices it is intended to overcome.”... The framework advises academics that recruitment panels should not be made up entirely of “white males” or “people with a particular career track record”... members were told “don’t worry about it” when they raised questions about the policies’ legality. The source said: “I joined the committee, wanting to see what was actually going on and maybe prevent things from going off the rails. “When I got there, I discovered it was already off the rails.” The source added: “If you criticise it, you’re just seen as a bad person.” They went on to claim that they had witnessed colleagues from backgrounds that are not under-represented – such as white people and men – being actively discouraged from applying to positions because of their race or sex... Prof David Abulafia, the professor emeritus of Mediterranean history at the University of Cambridge, said the guidance was “arrant nonsense”. He said: “The sheer fanaticism of the bureaucracy at Cambridge and the craven submission of academics to their arrant nonsense spells the end of a once great university.” Prof John Marenbon, a philosopher and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, added: “Academic appointments should be made solely on the basis of academic merit. Academics who do otherwise betray their calling.” The university’s diversity “plan for action” includes a target to increase ethnic minority applications to “academic and research posts to 8 per cent or higher” and “for professional services roles to 30 per cent”."
DEI just ensures that anyone who isn't a straight white male can get hired
Rob (No FBPE please) on X - "No MI5, MI6 or GCHQ internship if you're white. "We’re confining the applications for this internship to those within this demographic [Black, Asian, mixed heritage or ethnic minority background] due to a current underrepresentation in our workforce." The THIRD year in a row."
Kyle Becker on X - "Mayor Brandon Johnson just boasted about preferring to hire black people to run Chicago because they are "the most generous race." This is blatant racial discrimination and Americans should have no patience for it."
RAMZPAUL on X - "I live in an area with 0 diversity. People don't bother to lock their doors. The local store does not lock their merchandise. Life is wonderful without diversity."
TMU doubles down on race-based admissions - "Toronto Metropolitan University remains committed to medical school admissions through “equity pathways” (admissions streams for Black, Indigenous and other equity deserving groups) though it has developed a vocabulary that obscures their discriminatory impact: “excellence, inclusion and innovation;” students “from the community, for the community.” But according to TMU vice-president and dean of medicine, Teresa Chan, the university remains “committed to admitting a majority of students through equity pathways.” It would at least be informative to hear an explicit acknowledgment that the policy discriminates against white applicants, but no, there is no mention of discrimination and its prohibition in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Code; it is as if these provisions do not exist or matter, or do not apply to TMU. How did we get here? This is an important question in the Canada of 2025 and in no area is it more troubling than in the practice and acceptance of discrimination we would have thought unimaginable in the not-too-distant past: race-based admissions processes; race-based hiring of professors and others; race or gender requirements for researchers who receive grants from federal agencies; requirements that job applicants disclose how they would support DEI initiatives that focus on identity; university spaces set aside as lounges only for students of colour. In part the answer lies in Orwellian newspeak that substitutes ambiguous or superficially inoffensive language — as in the TMU vocabulary — for the explicit recognition of discrimination that at one time we would have heard. In part, too, the answer lies in affirmative action that extends well beyond what might have been anticipated when it was protected in Section 15(2) of the Charter. It is past time that we reaffirm the primacy of the first principle of non-discrimination in Section 15(1) of the Charter and its equivalent in provincial human rights codes, and require a strict interpretation of the scope of affirmative action under Section 15(2). In the United States affirmative action was accepted after a century of post-Civil War discrimination against Blacks, but what were seen as its excesses led the Supreme Court in 2023 to declare it unconstitutional. That will not happen in Canada but we should not tolerate the extent of discrimination undermining Section 15(1) that we have seen in recent years. But for TMU there is a remedy at hand. The school’s discriminatory admissions led Ontario Premier Doug Ford to demand that it educate qualified individuals regardless of their race or background. He should see its continuing commitment to admissions through equity pathways as unwillingness to accede to his demand, and his government should impose appropriate consequences upon the school, including withdrawal of funding until it abides by the principle of non-discrimination."
Ford demands TMU's new med school educate qualified students 'regardless of their race' : r/ontario - "These spots are so competitive anyways the admission cutoff is just arbitrary. An "affirmative action" admission that got in with only a 98.8% grade average isn't going to be a worse doctor than someone who got in normally with a 99% GPA. Besides, the current admissions system at most med schools is heavily biased towards people who could afford to take summers off and pay thousands of dollars for MCAT prep courses - not the people who are actually the smartest or hardest working"
Another example of the left wing cope - it doesn't matter if you don't take the best, as long as you take someone good enough.
