A Lost Generation?

Things were bad for white men long before 2014

When I read Jacob Savage’s widely praised essay on “the lost generation” of young white men in America—a generation of men who, like himself, have lost out on prestigious jobs in media and academia for no reason other than the lightness of their skin and the equipment dangling between their legs—I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of recognition. More than a tinge, actually.

You see, between 2015 and 2018, I was a DPhil student at the University of Oxford. My research was on the Reformation in England, the great schism that produced the Protestant and Catholic Churches and set the modern world on its course in so many different ways. I focused on how ordinary people experienced the momentous changes set in motion by Henry VIII’s marital problems and whether really, on the local level, much changed for them at all. My answer was—yes and no. It was more interesting than that, of course.

By most obvious metrics—the ones that are supposed to matter—my research was a success. It was entirely funded by scholarships, and I finished within three years. I passed with minor corrections, nothing more than a few spelling and formatting errors in a 100,000 word document. While doing my research, I also published more than half a dozen peer-reviewed articles. Most graduate students publish none. One of them was in an international journal established academics would be lucky to appear in.

Once upon a time, I would have been well on my way to a comfortable, safe career as an academic, probably at Oxford or Cambridge, or at least a very good second-tier university (a.k.a. a “redbrick”).

But 2018 was not that time.

It was clear to me from very early on that I wouldn’t get a job doing postdoctoral research or teaching. My research was scholarly, but passé: There was no trendy theory to speak of, apart from some leaven from my previous training as an anthropologist at Cambridge, nor did I touch on “important” present-day concerns like gender, race, white privilege, colonialism, the patriarchy, disability, and so on.

(During my viva voce exam, the final, in-person, test that decides whether you get the doctorate or not, I remember being asked, “Where are all the women?” The questioner was, of course, a woman herself, and her remark was intended to be devastating, somehow. I simply replied that my sources didn’t say much about women’s religion as opposed to men’s—which was actually true—and so of course I had my work reflect that, rather than pretending otherwise. As an answer, it was simultaneously right and wrong.)

There was something else, too. It’s hard to know, because of course you never really know. Nobody says, “Sorry, you’re a white man: We’re not giving you the job.” You simply never get the interview, no matter how many applications you write. But I was in no doubt that my plummy voice, Willy Wonka name (Charles Cornish-Dale) and (relative) lack of melanin counted against me.

Never mind that my family has strong working-class roots; that nobody has ever paid a penny to send me to a public (i.e. private) school; that all my achievements were my own, through hard work and, of course, some native intelligence—none of that mattered. There was no place for special pleading on those terms.

Mine is hardly a sob story. I quickly landed on my feet, and ended up doing something far more interesting and engaging than writing about obscure saints’ cults in medieval England.

But anyway. That’s enough about me.

There’s much to be praised about Jacob Savage’s essay. It’s well researched, well fleshed out with anecdotes, interviews and human interest, in addition to plenty of plain hard fact and numbers.

It’s impossible to doubt the phenomenon he describes. Here’s one particularly striking set of numbers, for example:

“In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.”

Anybody who raises awareness of any facet of anti-white racism deserves praise. The original tweet announcing the article got something like 10 million views. Even the Vice President was talking about it.

But what’s also clear is that Savage is only telling part of the story—the part that directly concerns him and his own personal interests.

Some of the most perceptive criticisms of Savage’s essay have come from Jeremy Carl, who wrote a fantastic book, The Unprotected Class, about the history and trajectory of anti-white racism in America.

As Carl points out, so many white-collar whites and white liberals like Jacob Savage had little to say “with respect to the travails of earlier generations of White working class men, who had their blue-collar jobs shipped overseas and who were chased from their neighbourhoods decades before.”

I’m reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s immortal remarks in The Gulag Archipelago about Soviet Russia’s intellectual class. The exact phrasing escapes me, but the gist is this: the intellectuals only started giving a shit about the existence of the gulags when they started being sent there themselves. For over a decade, millions of stolid peasants had marched grimly and silently into the freezing wastes of Siberia, never to return. Great hecatombs were offered up to the Dialectic and the Materialist Conception of History, and nothing was written or said. It was only when Stalin came for the wordcels, who assumed their position as the vanguard and apologists of the regime would last forever, that suddenly—suddenly!—the Revolution, the Class Struggle, the Utopia had been betrayed.

Not so.