“I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country,” - a NYT staffer in a private town-hall meeting in 2019.
One of my guilty hathos pleasures during the elite mass psychosis known as the Great Awokening was to read each year’s New York Times’ Diversity and Inclusion Report (which they first released in 2017 — Trump’s first year in office — but stopped last year). As documents of the time go, it’s hard to get a sharper insight into the worldview still held by much of our educated elites.
The place was suddenly obsessed with race and sex and identity. (Their 2014 Innovation Report, for example, didn’t use the word “diverse” once and was written by ten white people.) The D&I reports, however, divide all employees into two crude categories — “people of color” (good) and “whites and unspecified” (meh). And the goal was an explicit jump in the proportion of the good non-whites versus the white mehs. A 2021 “Call To Action” subsequently boasted about how well they’d done:
Last year, 48 percent of new hires were people of color. Since 2015, we have increased the overall percentage of people of color at the company from 27 percent to 34 percent; ... and of people of color in leadership from 17 percent to 23 percent. We have also increased the percentage of women at the company from 45 percent to 52 percent; and we have increased the percentage of women in company leadership from 40 percent to 52 percent.
They did this by, among others, these methods: “Adding new employees in the recruiting team to focus on outreach and building candidate pipelines among people of color... ; Ensuring that clearly defined [DEI] expectations are woven into all leaders’ assessment and compensation; and Judging senior leaders by how well they ‘create pathways’ for a diverse group of deputies to succeed them.” (Where is George Orwell when you need him?)
But here is the truly amazing part: according to them, they did all of this while never once using race or sex as a basis for hiring or promotion. The very idea! That kind of illegal thing could never, ever happen at the NYT. They reminded us this week that “our employment practices are merit-based and focused on recruiting and promoting the best talent in the world.” It just so happened to end up with dramatic racial re-balancing in just a few years.
Put it another way: almost half our hires in one year were people of color after an aggressive “Call To Action!” to hire people of color … nonetheless, at no point did we hire on the basis of color. It was a total coincidence. Fluke. Even though every year we congratulated ourselves on lowering the proportion of whites and cis men on our staff, we never thought of their race or sex.
Feel the cognitive dissonance!
Which is why a new EEOC case against the NYT is so interesting. It tests the dissonance. (You can read the court document here — which the NYT didn’t provide in its own coverage.) Here’s the EEOC’s summary of its case: There was a Deputy Editor position in the Real Estate section that opened up; two women were tasked with filling it; both had careers that focused on DEI — one as an editor and the other as a recruiter: one, for example, was co-chair of the employment resource group, Black@NYT, and the other had gone to the National Association of Black Journalists and advised the NYT afterwards on how to hire more African Americans.
Among the “basic qualifications” for the job in question was, natch, experience in covering real estate. And four candidates made it to the final interview: a white female, a black male, an Asian female, and a multiracial female. Internal emails show the editor had already selected the multiracial female before she’d been given a first interview. This person, who got the job, had been ranked in the bottom two of the last four candidates by the panel, with one interviewer calling her “a bit green overall” and “I don’t see her contributing to the expansion of the coverage in a significant way.” More salient: the EEOC says she had zero experience covering real estate, which had been a basic qualification for the job as listed.
So who sued? A white man already at the NYT with extensive experience in real estate journalism, who’d been Senior Staff Editor on NYT’s International Desk for over nine years, had worked for two years on the NYT’s Business Desk covering real estate, and had over 25 digital journalism awards. He’d had a first interview where he was asked mainly about affordable housing. But he never heard back and didn’t make the final four.
One more detail: the EEOC found some NYT higher-ups worrying on Slack before this hiring that the pace of racial change was slowing and they needed to “make some targeted efforts to have folks reset on this front.” They were worried Joe Kahn might not look too good if they didn’t. “Targeted efforts.” Hmm.
Is this race and sex discrimination?
(Read the rest of that piece here, for paid subscribers.)
(The full Dish this week also includes: my latest on the Cass Report; a pod with Adrian Wooldridge on the illiberal threats to the legacy of the Enlightenment; reader and listener emails on a variety of subjects; 11 notable quotes from the week in news; 16 pieces on Substack we recommend on a range of topics; a medieval “Take On Me” as a Mental Health Break; a bright window from Brighton; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a new paid subscriber this week:
I have been reading your writing for decades. The Dish is always thoughtful and interesting and fresh and insightful and honest and independent.
The Science Is Increasingly Clear
By far the most significant contributor to our understanding of “gender affirming care” for minors came from the 2024 British NHS’ Cass Report, which conducted the most exhaustive evidence-based review of the medical literature. The upshot is that it found no good evidence that supports transing children before they have even completed puberty. Nothing of any weight.
In this area, of course, there’s always a fuss, so almost immediately thereafter, the British Medical Association distanced itself from the report and promised its own review with a goal of “disavowing” the document. In the US, the TQ+ movement has also done all it can to cast aspersions on the study — which is why it is salient that the BMA has now definitively sided with Cass. The chair of the BMA’s Board of Science issued a report wherein he pronounced Cass had been “vindicated in the way she approached the data.” Asked to name one of her 32 recommendations he opposed, he replied: “I can’t.”
Slowly but surely, the grounds for transing children have evaporated into the air. As one of the pioneers of the practice said this year:
We had no basis for making these recommendations except our listening to the patient suffering and their wishes. We did not review any literature. We had a plastic surgeon, we had a psychologist, we had a trans person. We all just put our heads together and wrote 21 pages of Standards of Care.
Stop all of it now. Protect children. Protect gay and lesbian kids. And help and love kids with gender dysphoria; don’t harm them.
Adrian is a journalist and an old friend. We arrived in America on the same plane in 1984 and spent the first few days together in the same hotel room. After more than 20 years writing for The Economist, he became the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He’s the author of several books, including The Aristocracy of Talent, and the co-author of many more with John Micklethwait, including The Right Nation. Adrian’s new book is The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. It’s a terrific tonic for a philosophy as vital as it is in eclipse.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how Enlightenment ideas got corrupted, and Big Tech’s threat to liberalism. That link also takes you to listener comments on last week’s pod with Tom Junod and reader comments on Trump, the Voting Rights Act, Israel, and more. I respond throughout, especially to a dissenter over Israel.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. We have some real stars coming up: Ben Rhodes on Iran and speech-writing, Harvey Mansfield on modernity, HW Brands on the life of George Washington, John Gray on Trump’s new world, Bob Wright on the evolutionary force of AI, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Daniel McCarthy on conservatism, Stephen Grosz on the struggles of love, and Robby George on pretty much everything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Callais fallout, factory farming, and psychedelics in relationships. Examples:
Liza Featherstone asks, “How is Tucker Carlson more antiwar than leading Democrats?”
A 30-year-old right-winger has a good chance of leading France.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription. Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. An entry from last week:
I had a funny experience with the contest this week. I’ve achieved a lot of the VFYW goals (locate a city, a hotel, a window, get crowned winner, submit a view, a topic shared), but this week I thought I could accomplish another goal: having a child take a pic at the view. The only problem is I told her to take it at the Courtyard, not the Pendry!
She’s a student at USC, and she and her boyfriend had a planned date Monday to go to the Padres game against the Cubs. I was so excited for them to take the pic I forgot that the pic should be of the View! LOL. I hope I get another chance to add this VFYW accomplishment to my checklist, but boy did I let an opportunity slip this time!
Here’s a sneak peek of a sleuth’s remix of the current VFYW:
