White men need not apply
A think-piece on Substack, Hollywood's New Rules by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, exposes a new pattern of discrimination, in a land in which it's been rife for decades. This is yet another tit-for-tat, boot's-on-the-other-foot situation, in which people are awarded work not strictly on merit, but simply for not being heterosexual white men.
Just Some Guy reviews the article. In an otherwise well-balanced analysis, rather than calling out hyocrisy for what it is, he offers this fairly lame sins of the father
justification.
Yeah, what [Rochée] Jeffrey said is a real fucked up thing to say. And for all those white people bothered by it, see what it feels like when it happens to you? Rochée is a douche, but she's not wrong. For decades, black people; women; gay people; asians; hispanics; basically every group you can imagine, had to put up with the exact same shit. They were only cast in certain roles, rarely allowed to write or direct, often not given credit for the work they did. And they have to suck it up and take it, or risk being branded a troublemaker or a problem, and never getting work again. The thing about disenfranchising people is that, eventually, some of those people will get power. And if enough of them do, some of them are going to return the favor. And they're going to be really good at it, because they learn from the best. That's what we have happening here. They're doing to you what you did to them, and now you see how much it sucks.
Just Some Guy, Hollywood: The Desert of the Woke
It puts me in mind of a little adage from my childhood, so it's been around for a while: two wrongs don't make a right.
The real problem here is that the victims of this reverse discrimination
are not the perpetrators of prior discrimination themselves. So, to say: They're doing to you what you did to them
…ummm, nope, and to say so is bigoted. Rochée Jeffrey and her ilk are simply hypocrites; they're no better than those who they rage against, and are only creating more victims. Is that a good thing?
Most paying customers, the audience, only really care about the quality of the output, not the ethno- and sociopolitical status of the writers. In many cases, the audience are ignorant of, and uninterested in, the names behind the scenes. So, in a sane world, positions would be awarded on merit, and the quality of the writing would be paramount.
The hypocrisy of reverse discrimination aside though, does it matter if work is awarded by checkboxes? If quality drops, for whatever reason, no one's forced to watch it and the audience will look elsewhere. We still have past work to enjoy. Let the rest burn.