Savage, a 31-year-old (at the time of his near-breakthrough) screenwriter who relocated to Los Angeles in 2011, opens with his own near-miss: in 2016, he came agonizingly close to joining a television writer's room, only to be told the production couldn't risk "an all-white-male room." That moment, he argues, marked the beginning of the end for his Hollywood aspirations. Despite early optioned scripts and networking successes, he has since survived by scalping tickets and tutoring, never again breaking into a staffed writing position.
The author extends this personal anecdote into a broader indictment, presenting statistics from media, academia, Hollywood, journalism, and even adjacent fields like law, medicine, and tech. In television writing, white men comprised 48% of lower-level writers in 2011 but only 11.9% by 2024. Journalism outlets underwent similar transformations: The Atlantic's staff shifted from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024, with post-2020 hires heavily favoring women (two-thirds) and people of color (50%). In elite academia, Harvard's humanities tenure-track positions for white men dropped from 39% in 2014 to 18% in 2023, while Yale's recent millennial-era hires included just one white man among 16 tenure-track professors.
Savage highlights how older white men (Gen X and Boomers) largely retained their positions of power, often serving as gatekeepers who enforced DEI mandates while protecting their own status. Younger white male millennials, expecting a meritocratic system after growing up in the Obama-era promise of fairness, instead encountered explicit preferences: "women and diverse only" mandates in Hollywood fellowships, regression analyses in university hiring to minimize white male candidates, and newsroom obsessions with racial quotas following the 2020 George Floyd reckoning.
Through anonymized profiles—such as "Andrew," a stalled journalist, and "Ethan," a social scientist repeatedly reaching finalist status only to lose out on DEI grounds—the piece conveys a sense of quiet despair. Careers stalled, family milestones delayed (marriage, children), and dreams deferred to gig work or alternative spaces like crypto and Substack.
The tone is one of disillusioned reflection rather than overt rage. Savage directs blame not at the women or people of color who advanced, but at the systemic shift itself and the older generation that "pulled up the ladder." He portrays DEI not as benign inclusion but as a deliberate reordering that betrayed liberal faith in merit, ultimately weakening the very institutions it aimed to improve—leading to less-trusted media, diminished cultural output, and a cohort of talented individuals quietly withdrawing.
As the Trump administration's on going 2025/6 dismantling of federal DEI structures looms in the background, Savage's essay stands as a retrospective on a decade of profound cultural and professional realignment. Whether this "lost generation" will fuel lasting political realignment or simply fade into anonymity remains an open, haunting question for the 3.6% of the white population in America out for work according to the latest available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
