Trump EEOC Scrambling To Find Actual White Male Victims Of Discrimination
Perhaps they were just an urban legend after all.
If you ask almost any Republican on the internet, they will assure you that they personally know at least five heterosexual white men who have lost jobs or promotions to women or people of color or LGBTQ+ people they were approximately 12,000 times more qualified than. At least! For years, they claim, companies have forgone hiring employees based on “merit,” and are now only hiring people based on the number of minority groups they personally represent. Every place, everywhere, is desperate to hire unqualified Black lesbians over extremely qualified white men, and they know this, because reasons. And vibes.
Thus, over the last year, the newly Trumpified Equal Opportunity Employment Commission has been openly on the hunt for these tragic male victims of discrimination. In December, EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas even explicitly put out a call on X the Everything App asking for white men to file complaints with the agency.
It was cheered by many men who claimed that they themselves were victims of reverse discrimination, including a notorious meteorologist from my hometown of Rochester, New York, who was fired just for being a white man who “accidentally” used a racial slur while referring to Martin Luther King Jr.; a firefighter whose chief was Black and promoted his friend (of undetermined ethnicity) over him; a guy who couldn’t get a USA Small Business Administration loan for businesses in low-income areas just because his business was not in a low-income area; a man who had trouble filing for unemployment because he’s a white man; and a 50-year-old man who claims he invented the smartphone and was directly told hundreds of times that he can’t work because he is Christian, which just seems incredibly true and plausible.
Not to mention the myriad men who were fired or disciplined just for being white men accused of sexual harassment by multiple women.
You’d think the EEOC would have an embarrassment of riches, given these responses, but a report from The New York Times suggests that this may not be the case.
The New York Times reports that there’s been a bit of chaos at the agency as the staff struggles to find enough cases that “fit the Trump administration’s priorities” — which are, specifically, cases involving discrimination against white men and anti-Semitism on college campuses (though, of course, not the wholesome, whimsical “Hitler was good, actually” variety practiced by the kind of white men this EEOC has set out to protect).
Staff have been instructed to prioritize these cases, along with cases of “discrimination based on religion and national origin; rooting out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and ending what [Lucas] has described as the improper elevation of gender identity over biological sex.”
The “national origin” in question here is, specifically, people born in the USA — a thing I will concede is likely a struggle for aspiring butlers.
In September, the director of one of the commission’s 15 geographic districts instructed staff to assign the agency’s top internal ranking to “all cases that fall within the chair’s priorities,” designating them for extra attention and resources, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times.
“As a friendly reminder, these cases should not be sent to mediation,” the email said.
Four months later, in early January, the same district director made the instructions more explicit, telling his reports that they should assign the top ranking to all cases claiming discrimination against white people, except those deemed to have major legal shortcomings.
The problem is, there’s just not enough of them, so staff have been told to try as hard as they can to keep pursuing any reports from white men who believe that they are being discriminated against for being white men, regardless of their actual merit. Because that’s what the White House wants to hear about.
In one instance described to The Times, employees had to justify abandoning the case of a white man who said he was the victim of discrimination because he didn’t get a job. The job, the office’s review found, went to another white man, and all the other applicants were also white men.
Hiring one white man over another white man is an absolutely classic way of covering up not hiring the first white man because of how he is a white man. In fact, it is perhaps one of the most common forms of discrimination against white men in this nation. After all, white people are 53 percent more likely to get a call back on an interview than are non-white people, and women are 30 percent less likely to get an interview in the first place, even when they are more highly skilled than the men they are up against. So, really, a white guy’s biggest competition is most frequently going to be “other white guys.”
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The agency is also currently dealing with a very high caseload and a record-low number of employees, which makes things even more difficult. It also makes it especially difficult to handle the very real cases of discrimination that are still regularly reported to the EEOC. Despite the most fervent beliefs of MAGA, employment discrimination against Black people has been at about the same level since 1989, so it would be pretty nice for those real cases to get some attention as well. Too bad they just don’t have the time.
Now, I personally think that the chaos at the EEOC is due to being understaffed and forced to focus on issues that are less “real issues affecting real people in real life” than they are right-wing fever dreams. But perhaps Lucas is right. Perhaps there is a white man out there who was far more qualified than she is for this job and who was passed over for it because of how he is a white man. If she’s really going to commit to the bit here, I think she ought to consider stepping aside and allowing whichever white male Fox News presenter Trump last saw on television to take over and show her how it’s done.
Well, either him or the guy who invented the smartphone. One of the two.
OPEN THREAD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Went fishing today and actually hooked a rainbow trout, started to reel it in and it flopped out of the water and off my hook. The only fish left in that pond are the smart ones! But it was still fun.
AND cat stuff of course:
Harry and his Q-Tip.
A cat can make anything into a toy.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-250624085?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
Sorry I haven't posted much lately. Having a girlfriend is such a distraction! Anyway, today is my 75th birthday, and I thought I'd post something about how things have changed since I was a wee lad.
https://substack.com/@plinytheyounger131364/note/c-250516597
I could have gone on and on, but this is enough of a TL;DR as it is.