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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:21]
Mrs. Claus (Younger Sister)
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.
- [00:24]
Zoe
Zoe. This thing weighs a ton.
- [00:25]
James Clyburn
Drew Ski, live with your legs, man. Santa.
- [00:27]
Mike Pesca
Santa, did you get my letter?
- [00:29]
Zoe
He's talking to you, Bridges.
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James Clyburn
I'm not.
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Mrs. Claus (Younger Sister)
Of course he did.
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James Clyburn
Right, Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list.
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Zoe
And elf, I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile. You can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus?
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Mrs. Claus (Younger Sister)
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James Clyburn
Or give it as a gift.
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Mrs. Claus (Younger Sister)
And the best part, you can make the switch to T mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.
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James Clyburn
Nice.
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Zoe
My side of the tree is slipping.
- [01:00]
James Clyburn
Kimber.
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- [01:20]
Max Kerman
Visit t mobile.com hey Mike, forgive me for sending this voice note. I never send voice notes. But I felt compelled to send you this idea. Feel free to use it if you want. Okay. You could put this at the top of a show. It'd go like this. Hey. Hello listeners. This is Max Kerman from the band R. Kells. We're a Canadian band and I'm coming to you today because I'm a listener of the Gist. I listen every day and every day, if I accidentally click on the normal feed, I listen to Mike promoting the Gist list and Pesca plus. And to be honest, I'm both sick of it and inspired to make a pitch because frankly, I'm embarrassed for your listeners. If you're listening to this show, you know that you're getting world class journalism. And more importantly, I also know how you spend your money. You spend your money on all kinds of stupid stuff. It's Almost a crime that you're getting this show for free. So the least you can do is pay Mike for what he provides every single day. It's really the least you can do. The show is not only nourishing for our minds, but it's also wildly entertaining. I hosted the Gist once. It's impossibly hard to do that. And the Gist list and Pesca plus five days a week. I'm both in awe, but I'm also annoyed. The least you can do is sign up for Peska plus, because if you listen to Pesca plus, you stop getting ads for Peska plus, put it into your yearly budget, and you won't even notice it. And you also do this thing where text 777 or you give them the website. You don't need to baby your crowd by giving them instructions. They can Google Pesca plus and be a part of the program in 30 seconds.
- [02:53]
Mike Pesca
It's Wednesday, December 17, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the G, Mike Pesca. The other day, Wesley Moore, the governor of Maryland, vetoed a bill that the legislature passed authorizing the study of reparations by a task force. The legislature has since overrided his veto. Why? Well, what's wrong with studying? I'll tell you what's wrong with studying. It's what the study will inevitably find. Let us look to California, because in California, the same thing happened, and this was when Governor Newsom wanted to be the hero of progressives. They authorized a task force for study. The task force, I guess, took its job seriously and said, you know, how much American and Californian policies have hurt the black person in California to the tune of $1.2 million per black person, of which there are 2 million in California. So it would cost $800 billion, just based on that calculation, to pay the reparations that the task force recommended. This would be more than onerous on the state. The Pacific Research Institute in a study called Reparations a financially unrealistic proposal that will bankrupt California, said it will. Well, I don't want to. I don't want to withhold the findings. Bankrupt California? They have the cost of reparations at $2.8 trillion. You know, those California reparation recommendations came before inflation really hit. And they also factor in, you know, time value of money and how much it would cost to finance all of this. It's just unrealistic. And more than unrealistic, it's a political nightmare. And Wes Moore's a smart guy, and he wants to run for president. And he wants to appeal not just to the percentage of his state, which is a high percentage that's African American, he wants to appeal to all Americans. He wants to appeal to Latino Americans. And I've talked about this on the show before, but think about how the Latino American, which polls show favor reparations more than the average white American, which really do not favor reparations, but the average Hispanic or Latino American favors reparations for black people far less than the average African American. And it is the fact that black people are poorer than Latino people by and large, but not by much. So here's a way to think about it. If you take the wealth of a Latino American in the 60th percentile, so 60% of Latinos are wealthier than this guy is a little below average in Latino wealth. That is the equivalent. And I've looked at the statistics of the African American in the 40th percentile. So the African Americans a little wealthier than average. And compared to African Americans, the Latino or Hispanic American is a little less wealthy than average for Hispanic Americans, but they are equivalent. But it also means that the following sentence is true. There are tens of millions of Latino Americans who if a reparations bill were passed nationally, would be paying money to African Americans who are richer than they are. And that is politically unpopular. My guest on the show today, and we don't talk about reparations, but he's 85 years old. I think he has impeccable credentials when it comes to the African American community and civil rights and the idea of repairing some of the harm that American policies have visited upon African Americans, his people. He's James Clyburn and we're going to be Talking about the 19th century and people who served his state in Congress who were African American. But Clyburn, I think quite sensibly talks about reparations not as a black only program, but as a program. Obama did this. Many just progressive leaders do this that say we were, we are not going to take into account the explicit race of the people who get the benefit of our programs, but we will construct our program so that the people who need help the most get it. And because African Americans are, are disproportionately poor and the poorest of Americans are disproportionately African Americans, African Americans will benefit. Clyburn has the 10, 20, 30 Anti Poverty Initiative which won't pass, I don't think, but if it did, it would direct 10% of certain programs to persistent poverty, defined as 20% or more of the population has lived below the poverty line for 30 years. And this would largely but not only be African American communities, but it would also be Appalachian communities and white people would benefit. And it'd be a very American program because it was trying to be aspirationally race blind and it would help many African Americans if it were to pass as opposed to reparations, which would I suppose help African Americans, except for the fact that it won't pass. It is politically unpopular. And if it were to pass in the version that California passed, it would be very, very bad for the economy of the jurisdictions that passed the legislation. This is why Gavin Newsom now is against his reparation program. It was very trendy at the time to at least not oppose it or to present yourself as a champion of progressivism. But now that Gavin Newsom is the frontrunner, he is for the Democratic nomination, he's running away from reparations. Now that Wes Moore wants to run for president, it's quite clear he knows not to endorse reparations. And in in fact the idea of reparations was once unbelievably trendy among progressives. Now it's more of a cudgel that the real progressives can use to hurt the aspirations of Democratic politicians. But it's not popular and I guess quite luckily for the rest of us it is not going to pass. On the show today I spiel about another one could argue quite touchy topic it is the number of white men in cultural institutions. But first, as I teased, James Clyburn is a congressman from South Carolina and he has been since being elected to Congress in 1992. He has written a memoir about his life and now he is out with a second book. It is about the eight African Americans who serve the state of South Carolina before him. It is called the first eight and James Clyburn joins me next. True work is a jeans, shirts, jacket, everything doing it outdoor company that clads and clothes me extensively. It's founded by a trade professional. 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- [12:20]
James Clyburn
It.
- [13:11]
Mike Pesca
James Clyburn represents the 6th congressional district in in South Carolina. Now when he attained that position and years later when he was whip, he would run into people saying, oh, Representative Clyburn, great to meet you, the first black representative from the state of South Carolina. And he would correct them. Actually I'm the ninth. Who were the first eight? That is the subject of his new book called First Eight A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressman who who Shaped the Nation. Welcome to the gist.
- [13:46]
James Clyburn
Thank you very much for having me.
- [13:48]
Mike Pesca
When did you get interested in these first eight? Upon election or did you know about them beforehand?
- [13:54]
James Clyburn
Oh, I knew about them beforehand. My dad was a fundamentalist minister who grew up in a county of South Carolina where school was not provided for blacks beyond the seventh grade, but very interested in education. My dad was a ferocious reader. He self educated, got to the point where he could pass a college entrance exam, went to college, but was denied a college degree because he did not have a high school diploma and therefore he didn't get his college degree until 20 years after he passed away. So my dad didn't want anything like that to ever happen to his children and he insisted that we read, he insisted that we study about black people and he thought Robert Smalls was the greatest guy ever.
- [14:59]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [14:59]
James Clyburn
So I knew Robert Smalls as an elementary school student, but to be honest, I did not know all eight of them. Robert Smalls was number six among the eight. I also knew about number seven among the eight because number seven, Thomas E. Miller is the first president. I was the first president of South Carolina State University. So I knew about him. Richard Kane, number four in the list was AME minister and that pastor Emmanuel AME Church down in Charleston. And so I knew about these people early on, but a few of them I did not know as well as I knew others. But I decided that they had worked together in spite of their different backgrounds, in spite of their different stations in life, only three of the eight had ever been enslaved. And those three got their freedoms in three distinctly different ways. And I just thought all of this would be great for the people to know. And I started writing on that basis, except that in the middle of this book, or writing it, 2020 elections came. And then the aftermath to the 2020 elections, trying to stop the count up there in Michigan and Pennsylvania, trying to find those 11,500 votes down in Georgia. I recognize that as being exactly what happened after the 1876 presidential election. And I decided this book had to be more than just to inform. It had to be instructive. And I call it a cautionary tale.
- [16:52]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, resonances. So I do want to ask you about a few of the biographies, including Smalls, but I've seen you use this phrase and just heard you use this phrase. Fundamentalist minister. What was the manner of his fundamentalism? Did your dad think the earth was 4,000 years old and not believe in dinosaurs? Or how would he define it? Or you define it?
- [17:12]
James Clyburn
Well, you know, it's kind of interesting. My dad and I had those kinds of discussions throughout life. One of the reasons I probably didn't follow him into the ministry, because I could not place as much faith in things as he did. He believed very strongly in the book of Hebrew, 11th chapter, the first verse. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. When you've had enough science, you want to see things, you want to feel things. And so my dad had much more faith than I had, but he would say this to me all the time. Son, you pray for good health and strength, and if the good Lord gives you some modicum of both, get up off your knees and go to work. You must be an instrument of. Of God's peace. And so that, to me, is what shaped me. And so when I told him that I was not going to go to the seminary, as we had discussed, he said to me on that occasion, borrowing from the poem of Edgar Goetz, son, I suspect the world would much rather see a sermon than to hear one. And that's the last time we discussed religion. Uh huh.
- [18:32]
Mike Pesca
So that's interesting. Let's get to Robert Smalls, who was a bona fide war hero, and his exploits should, should one day make A great biopic. He is an enslaved crew member on a ship, a Confederate ship, but he commandeers it and takes it north and gives it to the Union and becomes a nationally renowned figure and meets Lincoln and convinces Lincoln, or helps convince Lincoln, who is clearly thinking about it, to allow black people to enlist in the army. And I'll quote for you the this from his last speech Lincoln ever gave. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer it were now conferred on the very intelligent and those who have served our cause as soldiers. So there you see how important it was, what Smalls did, not just in his personal exploits, but. But in the name of suffrage. But you take it from there. Take me to his time in Congress.
- [19:37]
James Clyburn
Well, absolutely. But let me say two other things about that. Lincoln also said that but for the service of the enslaved freedmen, that that war would have been lost.
- [19:52]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [19:52]
James Clyburn
Made that very clear. And the second thing I want to say, as most people remember Lincoln, Frederick Douglass was trying to get Lincoln to allow blacks to serve. And for some reason he had not carried a day. But General Saxton, who was managing the Union forces down there in Charleston, General Saxon, because of Smalls notoriety, he become this figure that everybody wanted a piece of. He thought that he might be the guy that would convince Lincoln. So six months, less than six months after he was freed, he was sitting down here in Washington with Abraham Lincoln. Convinced Abraham Lincoln to allow the enlistment of these freedmen and was authorized to go back to South Carolina and recruit 5,000. That grew to over 140,000 and 40,000 of them died. It might have been 170,000 and 40,000 died in that war. But Smalls turned all of that notoriety into a very productive life. He became a captain on that ship that he had absconded in a very interesting way. When that ship was under attack once and Smalls had this bounty on his head, the captain of the ship ordered Smalls to beach the ship and give up. Smalls knew that there was a binder on his head. He wasn't about to do that. He locked the captain up in the coal shed on the ship and took over the ship, won that battle. And when he turned that ship, returned that ship to their headquarters. And the authorities found out what happened. They fired the captain and made Smalls the captain of their ship. So Smalls becomes the first African American to be a captain in the Navy. And he was not even enlisted in the Navy because he was not allowed to enlist. So he's an interesting person. He gets elected to the state legislature after the war. He also gets elected to Congress. Spending about 10 years in both places. Smalls turned his wealth into a great business, though he had never been formally educated. He was the author of the resolution that established the first free public school system in. In the United States of America in 1868. Smalls was just an incredible person who, after he went back to Beaufort, he bought the house that he had been a slave in. And because his enslaver had lost his wealth. And when his enslaver died, Smalls took the widow back into that house and kept her there until she passed away in 1904. Just an incredible person. To me, the most consequential South Carolinian who ever lived. Now, that didn't give me a lot of kudos from some of my friends in South Carolina. But look at the record and get away from these other issues. Of skin color and gender. As well as cultural ethnicity. You'll have to conclude that no South Carolinian ever had a life more consequential than Robert Smalls.
- [23:36]
Mike Pesca
And the book fleshes out so much of the biography and the makeup. And I also did a little extra research. I know that you wrote a foreword to the biography of Smalls by Billingsley. And there. There was a phrase in that. Just trying to explain. How does a person become such a person? And it was an odd balance of privilege and bondage. In that he was ensl. Slaved. But he was favored by possibly his father. The. The owner. The master of these slaves. But his mother always knew that. He risked thinking life was too easy. Because his life was relatively easy. As a house servant, she would take him down to the jails and watch people whipped. So just. I mean, like I said, this would be a great biopic.
- [24:24]
James Clyburn
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It's amazing. You might be the 10th person that I've been interviewed with about this book that had the same conclusion. Why has there not been a movie about this man? And I understand that may be in the making, but if there's not, it should be in the making because he had all of this. His mother recognized him now. She knew who his father was. She never told. And like you, I've concluded from my own research for this book and from Billingsley's book that I wrote the foreword to. I've concluded that John McKee, his enslaver, was, in fact, his father. I am going to stick with that. That's my story, and I'm going to stick to it. No matter what anybody else will say.
- [25:19]
Mike Pesca
Now, all, all of the eight had amazing lives, but they weren't all so laudable. And I find it interesting you wrote about Robert Carlos delarge, who. You said it gave you pause. Or among the eight, he's the one who gives you the most pause. Because he came. He himself though, and this was a common phrase at the time, a mulatto was. Came from a family who themselves owned slaves. And he was. Yeah, he was. He exemplified what was going on then, which is there was a hierarchy of people in South Carolina, so such that someone like him who was brown and this was, you know, the societies that he. He was an officer of, would find it easier to advance by using the political system. But what I want to ask you is, is that, is that something to decry or is that just politics? Like, if we had a more or less on the up and up political system, then people like him would be able to get an advantage.
- [26:23]
James Clyburn
Other crier, in fact, number seven among this group is Thomas Miller. Thomas Miller, quite frankly, is not African American and not mulatto. Thomas E. Miller was white. His mother was the daughter of Thomas Hayward, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. But he was born out of wedlock and the African American family adopted him. And so he was raised as African American, but he was not African American. Although when he got the opportunity, he got conscripted into the Confederate army against his will. And he was incarcerated, was imprisoned down in Savannah, Georgia. And when he went north after the war up to New York, became free. He went to Lincoln University, HBCU there in Pennsylvania, where I was last night. I wasn't at Lincoln. I was in Pennsylvania last night. That's where he got his education. Here he is a white guy who went to an HBCU from New York. He didn't go back to New York and live his life as the white guy he was. He went back to South Carolina. So my point is, I don't decry that because he is a perfect example of having made a choice, irrespective of how he was born and who and what he was. And on page 229 of this book is his tombstone. I went and found his grave. I took a picture of the tombstone and I put it in the book. And on the tombstone he served. He wrote, I serve God and man. Not hating, not liking the white man less, but the Negro needed me most. He made a choice to be black.
- [28:28]
Mike Pesca
What about Ulysses S. Grant? Because you and I both admire him. But he also always thought the south should have its dignity and did not impose too harsh peace terms on them. Is that regrettable in retrospect, or was he making the best choice of a bad situation?
- [28:47]
James Clyburn
Well, he made a choice and it was a bad situation. And like you, I admire and respect him. He married into a slave family. He was not sensitive or he was very sensitive to that fact. However, there was an opportunity after the Civil War, even when all of the stuff was going on in the south and these guys were trying to get help, Ulysses S. Grant did not give them the help that they needed. And on one occasion he gave it too late, in fact, that big massacre down in Hamburg.
- [29:34]
Mike Pesca
Hamburg.
- [29:36]
James Clyburn
He could have prevented that, and he didn't prevent it. And so I think that I'm mixed on Grant, though. I think on balance, he was a great general, as Lincoln once said. Not in this book, but other stuff. I read that Lincoln was one time asked who was his greatest general during the Civil War. He said, when he's sober, Ulysses Grant. And someone asked him, well, who was the second greatest? He says, when he is drunk, Ulysses Grant.
- [30:16]
Mike Pesca
Coming from the background that you do or what you do in your day job, do you think you looked at some of the stories you were telling differently than, say, an historian might have? Question is, did you ever say, oh, that's an interesting choice politically? Or I might have played that differently? Or knowing what you know about how Congress works, did you get into the minds and choices of some of these eight?
- [30:40]
James Clyburn
I did it throughout the whole book. I was looking at stuff. One guy that didn't get treated too well in the book is because he was served on one term and did not do a whole lot. He was just a great guy, just a good guy and a PSA who died penalist. He died working as a street cleaner was Alonzo Rancia, who was vice president. I'm sorry, he was lieutenant governor of South Carolina at one time and served a term in Congress. A great guy. He was a very intellectual guy. He organized all these things we talk about now, like the Divine Nine and these other groups. This man formed these societies, literary societies and that kind of stuff, and used them as his political foundation. And so sometimes I look at him and wonder whether or not they could have been a little differently, been done a little differently. I really believe that there should have been some effort to organize along with other groups, you know, the same way you would look at the debate between W.E.B. du Bois and Booker T. Washington. I don't think that had to be one or the other. It could have been both. And in so many instances, we have to learn that all of us have roles to play. And I think that they didn't give enough room for each other that played each other's individual roles. Richard Cain, as I say, was a minister. He used to pastor Emmanuel AME Church, and that's his foundation for politics, was through the church. And so even today, people argue we shouldn't have religion in the church. Well, I'm sure glad that Richard Cain didn't believe that.
- [32:33]
Mike Pesca
Representative Jim Clyburn is the author of the First Eight A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressman who Shaped the Nation. Thank you so much.
- [32:44]
James Clyburn
Well, thank you very much for having me.
- [32:46]
Mike Pesca
And we talk more to the congressman because he is a congressman, a very important congressman. In fact, we don't talk about the 1800s in the bonus portion of the episode. We talk about what's going on right now. We talk a little bit about Jasmine Crockett. I asked him about Nancy Mace's latest op ed in the New York Times, one South Carolinian politician assessing another and just the frustrations of being in Congress right now. And I will give you a discount code if you go to subscribe.mike pesca.com and use the code Laser Focus LA S E R F O C US no spaces. I'll give you a $75 yearly subscription. This offer ends right after the new year. Laser focus@subscribe.mike pesca.com you get an ad free show. You get bonus episodes. Best way to support the gist. Laser FOCUS.
- [33:44]
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- [34:02]
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- [34:47]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. About 10 years ago, white men were effectively shut out of the culture industries, or so argues Jacob Savage in a widely discussed essay in Compact Magazine. It's an essay, but it's very detailed, excellent stats, widely reported, also celebrated and denounced all across America, actually mostly in Twitter and media Twitter, some academia Twitter. And it's often denounced and celebrated or at least rebutted in a celebratory way for the same reasons. It confirms the priors of those who read it. For those who supported deliberate diversification of academia, journalism and media fiction media, the essay reads as validation. They're not arguing with the statistics that show that all of these professions were once white and then became very much non white and not male. But this is what the correction looks like for critics. It's another data point in what they see as a broader campaign against men, particularly white men. And there are those who use it as political fodder to try to explain why men, white men, have been drifting away from the Democratic Party, which is the party that has championed those changes. I don't know how much of that is true. I am interested and have been interested for many years in the numbers themselves. And I have been, I will admit, hesitant to talk about all this because it risks sounding whiny or navel. Gazi an obsession with media is something I think maybe those of you not in media are a little sick of. I in media am somewhat sick of it. I don't believe, for instance, that let's take an imagined guy, a white guy who starts off and he's published in Harper's, then writes for the Atlantic and eventually wants a job and gets a job in the New York Times. And that all happened when his career started in 2002 or 1998. I don't think that this couldn't happen in 2024, but it quite clearly didn't happen with anything near the frequency that it did 20 years ago. But whether it happened or whether it didn't happen, it is very hard for me to see how that guy, that Harpers to Atlantic to New York Times guy has really anything to say about the rise of Andrew Tate or voting for Donald Trump. It might have something to say with general sympathies in the electorate or the part of electorate, the electorate that would be the cultural industry. But I think that there is a lot of grasping for dot dot dot and this is why Hegseth bombed the Venezuelans. Still, the statistics are the statistics and a lot of them are striking. So Savage cites figures, but I bring some of my own. One was in 2023, Bloomberg did a really eye opening piece titled Corporate America Promised to Hire a lot more people of color. It actually did. The year after the Black Lives Matter protest, The S&P 100 biggest, most successful companies in America added more than 300,000 jobs. 94% went to people of color. Wow. Here are some stats from the compact essay by Jacob Savage in 2021. And these are not about S&P 500. These are about media industry and eventually gets to academia. In 2021, new hires at Conde Nast were 25% male and 49% white. A huge corrective, or at least a change. Corrective is a little thumb on the scale from what Conde Nast had been before the L A Times and San Diego Union. New hires were 31% white and 39% male. ProPublica, the journalism firm that does a lot of investigations, hired 66% women and 58% people of color. And mild shop NPR after declaring that diversity would be its North Star. At NPR, 78% of new hires were people of color. So 22% white people. In a country that's around 66% white people. In 2022, Savage Rights. There were 728 applicants to tenure track jobs in the humanities at Brown University, 55% of whom were men. So mostly men applying to these jobs. And he takes you through the process. The long list, those who made the first cut down to 48% men. The short list, 42% men. The interview round, 34% men. Job offers, 29% offered to men. The social sciences. Similar. Another stat again at Brown. They hired 45 tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Three were white American men. Okay, that's an elite Ivy League school. Then he looks at UC Irvine. They had 64 tenure track assistant professors hired in humanities and social sciences since 2020. Of those 64, three were white men. And he's not cherry picking. He's going to big institutions with available data Brown's made available, I think because of a lawsuit. He talks about the Sundance Institute, which seeks to mentor and rise the careers of young screenwriters. Since 2018, those offered a slot. 138 were welcomed into the Sundance Institute. Eight of the 138 were white men. Every year the Atlantic comes out with diversity statistics. So in 2024, I remember opening this up saying, yep, this is on trend. New hires for 2024, all staff, 26% men, 71% women. Same thing. That was very consistent with the editorial side. Racially, 31% in the editorial side of the new hires were white. Again, country, 66% white. Not going to say you're wrong to make all the arguments about this. Change was needed. This is a corrective. It's because there was a bottleneck of women and people of color who never got a chance before. I'm just saying Compact magazine is saying that these are the statistics. It's helpful to know the statistics. I also every year look at who wins a MacArthur genius grant and they put out a press release and I notice year after year after year, many more people of color than white people, many more women than men. So between 2019, in 2025, and again, this doesn't reflect what the overall point of the compact piece was, which is the opportunity for young or youngish white men to establish themselves in elite fields. This is more a reward for people who've made it, but it is a reflection of the MacArthur staff, the people who give the awards of who we should be conferring the award to. And again, maybe a corrective. Early days of the MacArthur Genius Grant, most of the geniuses were said to be men. But between 2019 and 2025, they gave out 161 MacArthur Genius Awards. Of the 161, 18 went to White men. I counted all of them and this does not include, and I guess you could argue a couple of Iranian or Persian professors, people of Persian descent, Mohammed Said, Ahmed Dodds and Kivon Stassen. They're light skinned. But we are not going to count for these purposes the recipients as white men. Good. Maybe you're hearing this and saying good. That's fine to say good. These are, I'm just again relaying the statistics, the panel that votes for the Pulitzer Prizes, and these are the most established people in the field and it used to be obviously dominated by white men. They have a list and a picture of all the people who voted for the pulitzers since the 1910s. You could go on their site and see the board and see the list. And in 1918 it was Nicholas, Solomon, John, Victor, Charles, Edward, Ralph, Ralph Pulitzer, Melville, Charles and Samuel. I could tell you now of the board that grants the Pulitzer, two of the 19 are white men. To back to younger journalists. There is an award called the Livingston Award. And I looked up all the winners. It's for young journalists. I looked up all the winners since 2019, 25 recipients, 20 women and five men. So unlike the Pulitzer board and the MacArthur's, which are 90% nonwhite men, in the case of the Pulitzer board, more than 90% in the case of MacArthur recipients, there's 20% men. And I'm not saying more men deserved it, and I'm not saying that every woman on this list wasn't a fantastic journalist and isn't a fantastic journalist. It just exemplifies the point that Compact Magazine is trying to make, which is that they, the culture industry, the elite, the industries that mine are cultural elites, promised to change and they delivered a change. Now what hath that change wrought? Been thinking a lot about this. Ross Douthit writes that while Savage's argument focuses on the creative class, he points out that white men shot out of the culture industries didn't surge into other high status fields because the general pattern held everywhere from medical schools to corporate middle management, white male enrollment and employment fell sharply under woke conditions. Douthat's words. If you weren't an absolute peak talent, it was a bad time to be a young, ambitious, well educated white guy. Certain schools and jobs and industries, especially tech, especially crypto, became hubs for men displaced by other sectors and thus natural hotbeds of reaction. And everyone ends up a little more radicalized, a little more open to extreme appeals. That last sentence, it doesn't seem crazy to assert that, but I think it might not be true. White men might be more disappointed, white men might be more depressed. Also, there's another phenomenon of Latino and black men benefiting, but their vote also going more to Trump in the 2024 elections. If you want to use open to extreme appeals as a stand in for voted for Trump in 2024, I think we could all agree the clearly mapping on of this phenomenon in the cultural industries to exactly what's going on in America. Turning populist and angry and supposedly anti man is at the best inexact. And then at the end is that it did happen. The fact that it very much happened in a very big way and that has to have and come with it some consequences. So the author writes, near the end I spent a decade insisting the world treat me fairly. When the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so again, a certain reader would say, great, now you know how it feels. Or a certain reader would say, oh, now the world finally is treating you fairly, you mediocre white man. Which is the cliche, or was the cliche of the moment. But I was thinking about this idea of the world treating white men fairly. I can't say that he's right or wrong about his definition of what being treated fairly was. I'm not going to weigh in on that definition, but it is more or less of a reasonable definition of what an American who is raised to value the power of merit of what an American has been told was fair. We have been inculcated in the idea that fairness depends on a number of things, but a lot of it is how much actual value you bring to an enterprise and the content of your mind and your contribution as opposed to your immutable characteristics. And I know that when the immutable characteristics play a very key role in defining you out of your dream profession, it does not feel good. And I further know when that happens, it does tend to show up in discernible and profound ways that we are all, to some extent, living through now. And that's it for today's show. Cory Warra produces the gist, Michelle Pesk is the coo, Leah Yan is our production coordinator, Jeff Craig runs our socials, and Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Doom Peru. G Peru. Do Peru. And thanks for listening.
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