Colorblindness is How We Address Anti-White Discrimination

A viral essay shows a real problem. The solution isn’t different favoritism.

Courtesy Dylan Gillis/Unsplash.

Like many, I read Jacob Savage’s viral essay, “The Lost Generation,” with a profound sense of concern. Over nearly 10,000 words, Savage documents how he and other white Millennial men were penalized for their race and gender in media, the Academy, medicine, and other high-prestige fields. He argues that this trend, which began in the 2010s and skyrocketed following the “Great Awokening” of 2020, was driven by an elite desire to increase the number of racial minorities and women in these spaces, often at the expense of merit.

The essay had no shortage of troubling details. In one instance, a veteran journalist named Andrew recounted a years-long struggle to secure a reporter job, simply because he is a white male. In another, Savage noted that at the University of California at Berkeley, white men were recently 48.2 percent of faculty applicants in the physical sciences, but just 26 percent of hires for assistant professor positions. At Yale, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired since 2018 have been white American men.

Because I’ve closely followed the reporting of my Manhattan Institute colleagues Chris Rufo, Ryan Thorpe, John Sailer, Heather Mac Donald, and others—all of whom have documented anti-white discrimination in American public life for the better part of the last decade—none of Savage’s examples caught me by surprise. What did alarm me was his conclusion:

To feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorientating. We millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind meritocracy, which for all its faults—its naivete about human nature, its optimism in the American Dream—was far superior to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.

No one should overlook the discrimination that Savage and those he profiled faced. It should be forcefully condemned as both unlawful and immoral, an affront to America’s promise of equal opportunity.

That said, Republicans should reject the urge to meet one form of discrimination with another. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is stop discriminating on the basis of race.” To dismiss the ideal of race and gender-blind meritocracy as a total farce and pivot toward a new grievance-based politics—wherein white men or so-called “Heritage Americans,” as opposed to racial minorities and women, are lauded as the victims of an unjust system—is a political miscalculation of the highest order.

First, public opinion is clear: Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have long opposed the use of racial and identity-based preferences. While this trend extends to employment, I’ve studied it extensively in the context of college admissions. The data underscore Americans’ strong support for colorblind meritocracy.

One year before the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether an applicant’s race or ethnicity should be a factor in the college admissions process. 74 percent of respondents said that it should not, including 79 percent of whites, 59 percent of blacks, 68 percent of Hispanics, and 63 percent of Asian Americans. By way of comparison, 93 percent of Americans said that high-school grades should be a factor in college admissions, and 85 percent said the same about standardized test scores. Several surveys since then have produced similar results.

A May 2023 study that I co-authored with my Manhattan Institute colleague Michael Hartney reinforces this point. Through an original survey experiment on the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we asked Americans to play the role of an admissions officer and decide between two competing medical-school applicants. While the applicants’ accomplishments were randomly varied, the specific pair of applicants that respondents saw always consisted of an Asian American male and a black male.

Our objective was to determine whether, and when, Americans believe diversity should take precedence over merit in medical-school admissions. We found that even when respondents were informed that the medical school lacked diversity, the vast majority made their admissions decisions based on merit—in this case, college grades and MCAT scores—not race.

A few months prior to the publication of that paper, for a separate report, I reviewed hundreds of survey questions on affirmative action stored on the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s online database. I found that Americans are most likely to say that they oppose “affirmative action” when survey language explicitly describes the policy as providing “preferential treatment” or “preferences” for a given group. This suggests a deep American aversion to racial and gender-based favoritism—which is why Democrats, when pushing policies rooted in such ideology, tend to rely on euphemisms. Republicans should not do what even Democrats know doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, they have sounded like they might. Several prominent Republicans have taken to the social media platform X to argue that “Heritage Americans”—those who can trace their lineage to the Founding era—are inherently superior to more recent arrivals. In doing so, they suggest that the former are entitled to preferential treatment on the basis of ancestry. Here, the logic is that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Republican leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, should reject such grievance-based politics. These ideas were unpopular when Democrats pushed them, and they will be unpopular when Republicans try them, too.

Republicans currently possess the moral high ground on the topics of colorblindness, meritocracy, and equal opportunity. Indeed, it is a steadfast commitment to these quintessentially American ideals that has helped drive, in recent years, a number of new voters away from the Democrats and into the arms of the GOP.

History has shown us, time and time again, that the beneficiary of race-based policy one day can become its victim the next. The safest politics for every group is equal opportunity for all.