For the Love of God, Bring Back Blind Hiring Processes
We should be able to agree on this
One reaction to Jacob Savage’s viral essay in Compact magazine about discrimination against white men in entertainment and media over the last decade or so has been to deny that anything happened. Here’s Matt Bruenig committing statistical crimes against humanity to wave away the phenomenon; Bruenig looks at measures that are obviously too broad to capture what Savage alleges, which is like responding to possible euthanasia at a nursing home by saying “the global population is holding steady, so I guess everything’s fine.” And here’s Nikole Hannah Jones refuting the claim that people deny that anything happened by…denying that anything happened.
As someone who worked in entertainment during the time in question, the idea that there wasn’t an intense effort to hire more women and non-white people — and conversely, fewer white men — is utterly insane. For Christ’s sake: Much of this was public, companies bragged about it, my union developed new measures to track diversity and successfully lobbied New York state to change its tax code to disincentivise hiring men. To now argue that none of that happened is like arguing that Delaware doesn’t exist…it does — oh how I wish that it didn’t, but it does! And I frankly can’t believe that we’re having this conversation.
A second reaction to Savage’s essay has been to call him a butthurt loser who simply didn’t have the chops to make it in Hollywood. On the question of Savage’s talent, we’ll never have an answer — how could we determine if Savage was “good enough” to make it? What are we going to do — send his Two and a Half Men pilot script to the International Committee On Chuckles for an official scoring? What does “good enough to work in entertainment” even mean? If it means “can reliably craft an interesting story with compelling characters,” then I would argue that perhaps 50 people worldwide are “good enough” to work in Hollywood, and maybe 20 of them actually do. But if “good enough” means “more talented than the least talented person drawing a steady paycheck in the field,” then everyone qualifies except for babies born in comas. Savage has become Schroedinger’s Screenwriter, simultaneously good enough and not good enough, with his true state ultimately unknowable.
