Once upon a time a young Richard Cohen benefited from being a white man by working in offices where no black people were hired, ever. And from being a white man working in journalism when women had virtually no chance at certain high-status assignments. Speaking from his comfortable berth as a Washington Post columnist today, a berth he reached on the basis of a career built when a whole lot of potential competition was excluded from jobs available to people like him, Cohen thinks all that old stuff was regrettable—but that it’s time to get past that and talk about how unfair the world is to white men like him.
"Privilege is real. But being a white man shouldn't disqualify me," he writes. While he wants women to know that “I’m on your side,” Cohen’s real point is this:
… when I see op-eds, such as the one recently in the New York Times that states in the headline that the Metropolitan Museum of Art should not have appointed “yet another white, male director,” I recoil. That’s just another way of saying that white and male is a disqualification. Diversity in the workplace is an overdue goal, but it can amount to a quota by another name. Choose a woman because she’s a woman and you’ve eliminated a man because he’s a man.
Yes, by gum, if you’re concerned when a top job that has only ever been held by men goes to another man, with the powerful people responsible for that choice reacting with scorn to the idea that they think seriously about hiring a woman, you’re discriminating against men. If you think there’s a problem with, to quote the op-ed Cohen found so offensive, “the underrepresentation of women, and particularly women of color, in leadership posts in the country’s top museums, despite outnumbering men in positions that typically lead to top jobs,” you’re discriminating against men. Men like Richard Cohen, who knows a thing or two about being discriminated against:
Once I was passed over for a newsroom position I very much wanted. “We needed a woman,” an editor told me. I said nothing, although I seethed. In short order, I was made a columnist, so I didn’t even get a chance to cry. But the instant rush of utter unfairness lingers. The woman chosen was qualified, but her qualification had nothing to do with her sex. I was told she was just a needed statistic.
You seethed, huh. On whose behalf? The qualified woman who simply because she was a woman was dismissed as deserving the job less than you, Richard Cohen, exemplar of incisive thought, or your poor pitiful passed-over self? Did it occur to you that “We needed a woman” is a thing men get told because “You came in second to a girl, fair and square” is awkward to say? Or that newspapers get to the point where “We needed a woman” because they spent a long time not hiring any f*cking women, no matter how qualified, instead filling their newsrooms with mediocrities like, yes, Richard Cohen.
Cohen—like so many other men of his generation—has a career and record of achievement built when women and people of color were not allowed to compete with him for top jobs. Yet he looks out at a landscape in which white men continue to occupy a wildly disproportionate number of powerful positions and make a wildly disproportionate number of the decisions about who will join him, and he frets that women’s advancement will somehow be sullied by pressure for a major museum to consider breaking its unbroken string of men on top. Or by office gossip that he, Richard Cohen, really should have gotten that job that one time shortly before he was given the opportunity to spew his mediocre opinions forth in column form. This is the fruit of the mind of a man whose job entails writing around 700 words a couple times a week for one of the nation’s top newspapers. Talk about perfect examples of why white men shouldn’t be allowed to get too comfortable in their own (self-perceived) superiority.
But really, ladies, he’s on your side.