On The New York Times’ White-Guy Discrimination Case (And Bubbles)
It always comes back to the bubbles
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing The New York Times on behalf of a veteran journalist who claims he was denied a promotion due to being a white male. Both the lawsuit itself and the response to it are revealing.
New York Magazine’s “LOL Get a Load of This Loser” Approach Is Tired and Unhelpful
A useful entry point is New York magazine’s short write-up, in Intelligencer, by features writer and media columnist Charlotte Klein. The web headline that pops up on Google reads “The White Man Crying Discrimination at the New York Times” (the live headline on the story itself is milder).
Klein’s story does not devote any real space to helping readers understand whether and to what extent the suit has merit. Rather, the assumption seems to be that everyone reading the article is on the same page: This is ridiculous.
This makes a certain level of superficial sense given our political moment. Donald Trump really likes to weaponize the courts against his perceived enemies. He has used seemingly every conceivable legal lever, in seemingly every conceivable manner, to attempt to make life difficult for institutions and individuals he feels have wronged him. He has done this both in his personal capacity, launching plainly baseless multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against outlets like The Wall Street Journal (dismissed for now) and the Times itself. Perhaps more menacingly, he has sought criminal prosecutions against political enemies like New York attorney general Letitia James (repeatedly) and former FBI director James Comey (for posting a photo of seashells* spelling out “86 47” in seashells on a beach to Instagram, which contra Trump’s DoJ, is clearly not a violent threat unless you think “86 the scrambled eggs,” when overheard at a diner, is a waitress’s call to murder scrambled eggs). While these cases tend to falter one way or another because they are (to use the technical legal term) ridiculous, of course that doesn’t matter to the individuals and institutions targeted, who are facing a vindictive, erratic world leader with effectively unlimited resources at his disposal. (Correction: This paragraph originally said Comey himself spelled the offending numbers out in seashells. This is false: He says he and his wife found them already arranged like that. His is being charged for posting a now-deleted photo of the arrangement to Instagram. Thanks to the commenter who alerted me to this error.)
Trump and his deputies are also particularly outspoken about their desire to use the cudgels of federal authority to wage culture wars, most notably against the universities that they view as having been taken over by DEI lunacy. The same general trajectory applies to the EEOC, which, as Klein notes, is “now controlled by a Trump appointee who has vowed to help wage the president’s war against DEI culture[.]”
If I were coming to this controversy fresh, I’d probably assume this EEOC lawsuit was politically motivated and had no merit, simply because the Trump administration is basically a giant factory that produces meritless, politically motivated legal actions. And even despite what I’m about to say, I can’t even deny the possibility of a political motive here! You don’t think Donald Trump or anyone seeking to ingratiate themselves to him would lick their chops at a chance to sue the Times? The EEOC has significant discretion to choose which of the many complaints it receives to investigate and potentially elevate to full-blown lawsuits, and wherever there’s discretion, there’s the potential for politicization and other forms of bias.
The thing is, I’m not coming to this controversy fresh, and neither is Klein. She knows, as do I, as does anyone who worked in a progressive institution during the peak of the circa-2020 racial reckoning, that during this period there was a large amount of open, legally precarious talk endorsing employment discrimination against white people — particularly white men. Everyone in our world knows that this occurred, and in some cases, is still occurring. I cannot bold this enough! If you are from our circles, you should pause and consider the merits of a case like this — not immediately slot it in alongside Trump’s (and Kash Patel’s) many abuses of the legal system. (This article by Jacob Savage generated a lot of discussion when it was published late last year and is a good starting point for anyone skeptical that what I’m describing actually occurred.)
Now, legally precarious is not a synonym for illegal. We’ll dive a bit more into the complaint in a moment. It’s here, it’s just 17 pages long, and you can and should read it. (Klein doesn’t link to it, and as Robby Soave points out, this is an unfortunate tendency among outlets writing about litigation). But I want to linger for a moment on Klein’s coverage. Because if you read her piece, you will not find yourself edified one iota as to the underlying merits of the disgruntled employee’s claims. Rather, you will be immediately buffeted by politically loaded signifiers, giving this whole story the stench of yet another instance of Trump and his toadies unfairly attacking the media. That is, Nothing to see here other than more MAGA grotesquerie.
Naturally, there are quotes from Times insiders supporting this view:
The paper itself was the first to break the news of the suit but did not name the employee who made the complaint. Reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee’s identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press. “You’re giving the Trump administration a weapon while they’re trying to persecute journalists,” said one reporter.
“This has been kind of a shitshow behind the scenes — people trying to figure out who the aggrieved person is,” said another Times staffer.
. . .
People at the paper say the claim is absurd. “I’m sorry, there are plenty of white guys at the top of the New York Times. Not really something that’s holding you back,” said the reporter. To name one prominent example, Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, is a white male, as are many members of the masthead.
That last graf tells you all you need to know about Klein’s approach to this story. First, “People are saying/People say” is a classically suspect journalistic construction, not to mention a pretty funny one to use in this context. “People” say a lot of things! Especially nonrandom samples of them.
The quote which follows is, as Soave notes, a total non sequitur. This case centers on one staffer/applicant’s claim that he was discriminated against. At no point in the suit do the EEOC attorneys claim that the Times doesn’t have white men in positions of senior leadership. This blatantly fails the turnabout test: Klein would never cover a lawsuit claiming anti-black discrimination at a company by quoting a skeptic pointing to the existence of black higher-ups at the company in question. Because Klein does not take this complaint seriously, entirely different standards of evidence and reasoning apply.
I don’t doubt that there are employees at the Times furious that this employee filed this complaint. They are the ones most likely to speak to Klein about it. But I do doubt that that’s the whole story. For years, there’s been an ongoing conflict within the Times — sometimes rather heated — between staffers who take a more swashbuckling approach to matters of social justice and staffers whose views on the proper roles of newspapers and journalism are a bit more traditional, and it would be surprising if we didn’t see the same cleavage here.
I’m positive that, especially among staffers who think that social justice activism within the Times became unreasonable and interfered with the paper’s mission (a sizable group that was able to assert itself a bit after the reckoning had crested, as this earlier coverage by Klein makes clear), the reaction to this lawsuit is significantly more complex than anger at Yet Another Aggrieved White Man. I would bet significant money that there’s a cohort of them rolling their eyes not at the complaint, but at the sloppiness of the Times’ approach to DEI — that they view this more as an inevitable instance of the chickens coming home to roost than as an employee acting in a reactionary or unreasonable manner.
The Bubble
Back in 2021 I wrote about epistemic bubbles, about how in certain communities members are socialized to believe that certain arguments are compelling. Outside those communities? Less so. So one of the downsides of being inside an epistemic bubble is that you come to believe things that — whether or not they are true — are unconvincing to outsiders. (See also my more recent column in The Dispatch.)
In communities centered on social justice, the inspiring, unifying sense of being “on the right side of history” can sometimes overshadow more terrestrial concerns. And if you disagree with the community’s preferred approach to some issue on the grounds of those more terrestrial concerns, that calls into question whether you are, in fact, on the right side of history in the first place, which in turn calls into question the legitimacy of your group membership. This can, in the most extreme cases, bring reputational or even professional consequences.
Within progressive institutions, the racial reckoning was quite intense. I would argue that — as is often the case during periods that feel revolutionary — the decisions institutions made about how best to meet the moment were not particularly well thought out. At the time, it was actually quite difficult to openly disagree with whatever the activist-minded members of your organization were saying, simply because it was so unpleasant to find oneself on the wrong side of that revolutionary fervor.
The reckoning brought with it accelerated demand for certain preexisting diversity policies. One such demand centered on diversity trainings, which, as I argued in the Times in 2023, might do more harm than good and be legally problematic, especially in their more intense, psychologically demanding circa-2020 incarnations (indeed, these trainings did spark some legal complaints). But it was very hard to say so as interest in these interventions was peaking! Revolutionary fervor and all that.
Another long-standing demand, newly reenergized during the reckoning, was to diversify workplaces — the subject of the EEOC complaint. The question of which sorts of interventions to diversify a workplace are legal is complicated. It centers largely on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which contains a straightforward proscription on hiring, failing to hire, promoting, or failing to promote someone on the basis of their “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Over the years the courts have carved out some exceptions, but they’re quite narrow. So if a complainant can prove that race was a factor in their suffering a negative employment outcome, in theory they could have a strong Title VII case. Race doesn’t even need to be the only factor.
Of course, countless institutions have tried to become more diverse while staying within the boundaries of this law, and it’s the courts that make the final kosher/haram determination. This has never been a simple matter but it has become more of a moving target at the moment because of a couple of Supreme Court cases: First, there’s 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which effectively ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions and which may come to have significant ramifications in employment settings as well. More straightforwardly, 2025’s Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services (that one decided 9–0) rejected a “background circumstances” rule that made it harder for members of majority groups to bring successful Title VII challenges. That rule assumed that discrimination against majority groups in employment settings was “unusual” and imposed a higher burden on members of these groups seeking to argue that they had been discriminated against. Absent the obstacle posed by that rule, it became significantly easier to claim anti-white discrimination in employment settings.
All that being said, a newspaper like the Times does have options at its disposal to increase workplace diversity that are probably legal if certain precautions are taken. A newspaper is allowed to beef up its recruitment at historically black colleges and universities, to invest heavily in developing pipelines that extend all the way down to (say) majority-minority high schools, and so on. Efforts to expand the pie of potentially qualified applicants have been generally blessed by the courts as legal under civil rights law, though there are always potential landmines: If you send a rep to an HBCU career fair as part of your diversity efforts, for example, but that rep refuses to let a white student write down their email address to be notified about job openings, that could be legally risky, because it could be seen as a proscribed form of discrimination on the basis of race.
Much more legally problematic are policies like rigid quotas, which clearly entail discrimination in decision-making for a given position. (A super-simplified example: A company has two manager-level positions and has decided one of them should be black. If there’s an opening for one position at a time when the other is held by a white employee, then, definitionally, anyone applying for the open position who isn’t black will be discriminated against on the basis of their race.) And of course you, the employer, face grave legal risk if you enact or express preferences — in either direction — about the racial identity of the successful applicant for an advertised position. Should a complaint arise, that could be seen as explicit evidence of discriminatory intent.
In many cases, the question of whether a given intervention is on safe legal ground has to do with a fiendishly complex array of legal, regulatory, and political factors. The NFL, for example, instituted the so-called “Rooney Rule,” in which NFL teams are required to interview candidates for certain high-level coaching and management positions who are external to the organization and who are female and/or members of minority groups. This creeps right to the line of at least a certain sort of quota, albeit a quota involving a given applicant pool, not final employment decisions. In theory, this is legal under Title VII — probably? But you don’t know for sure until you test it in the courts, and testing it in the courts usually requires a plaintiff with “standing” (that is, someone who has grounds to sue). No one has challenged the Rooney Rule on the basis that it discriminates against white applicants, which doesn’t, on its own, really tell us much about its legality. It would be difficult for a rejected white applicant (the only sort of person with standing to bring such a case) to prove they had been discriminated against, and it would be career suicide to do so given that the NFL is a tiny and hypercompetitive labor market. (That said, Florida’s conservative attorney general recently threatened to sue the league over the rule.) All of which is to say that the absence of lawsuits does not mean a given diversity policy is on legally sturdy ground.
There are clearly a ton of complexities here, especially given the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to waging the aforementioned battles and, longer-term, a conservative-dominated Supreme Court that has expressed a severe allergy to race-based decision-making in academic and employment settings. The present case doesn’t really involve these complexities, though.
