THE MEDIOCRE WHITE BOY
It has never failed to make me laugh that Vice President Mike Pence refers to his wife, who is three years older than he, as “Mother.” The laughter reflects my own particular sense of humor, and also the fact that Mike Pence refers to his wife as “Mother.”
In a March 2017 Washington Post profile, Karen Pence is called her husband’s “prayer warrior.” Once, while he spoke with reporters, she did what any dutiful mother would do: she stood silently nearby holding a silver tray of cookies. When he was Indiana governor, she gave him a red telephone as a gift, which he had installed at the statehouse. Only she had the number. The profile also revealed that Pence did not dine alone with women who were not his wife, an edict that originated with Billy Graham but would become known as the “Pence Rule.”
Then came the moment when Pence and Mother weren’t so funny. As the #MeToo movement intensified, fueled by NBC broadcaster Matt Lauer harassing female coworkers and buying them dildos as gifts; CBS/PBS deep thinker Charlie Rose walking around naked in front of female assistants; and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby descending from moguls to alleged (and in Cosby’s case, convicted) sex offenders, so many other ostensibly male right thinkers—some of whom I like to call friends—decided the only way to protect themselves from career-destroying sexual harassment accusations wasn’t to be professional and simply refrain from masturbating in front of female coworkers (as the comedian Louis C. K. admitting to doing) but to adopt the Pence Rule.
Many said they were reluctant to resort to such extremes but the acidic combination of the women and the times left them no choice. To clarify: powerful men abuse and assault women in the workplace; Charlie Rose walked around his female assistants without clothes in a professional environment; Cosby was accused of drugging actresses, sixty claims in all. Disgraced CBS executive Les Moonves allegedly canceled Cybill Shepherd’s television show because she would not sleep with him, and in response many men concluded from this carnage that instead of standing with their humiliated female colleagues they needed to be protected from them.
The actors in this drama betrayed a profound intellectual dishonesty. In many instances these exchanges sounded not too dissimilar from racial conversations, where the dominant group, white people, refused to see their basic culpabilities, opting instead to engage in that fruitless search for any explanation except to confront American racism directly. (See: anxiety, economic.) The men who adopted a similar position to explain why it was necessary to protect themselves in today’s climate found themselves unwilling to distill their concern: either they believed a substantial number of women in the workplace—A quarter? Half? A plurality?—were actively plotting to engineer false sexual harassment charges against men or knew they were incapable of coexisting with women without making sexual advances toward them. If the men were not trying to get into their coworker’s pants and also believed their female colleagues weren’t irrationally conniving to destroy them, then no danger would exist. There is no third way.
Yet very few men (the actor Idris Elba, who said navigation was difficult only if you “have something to hide,” was a notable exception) have summoned the courage to admit to these options—or even explore them. In most public examples, men have generally rejected both scenarios as naturally preposterous, even as they continue to lament the perils of a suddenly unsure world where even a friendly smile risks career catastrophe. “I won’t even say ‘Merry Christmas’ to a woman for fear it will be misconstrued,” a fellow journalist gravely told me.
In the spirit of “punching down” at the very people who are suffering the injustice, instead of “punching up” at the ones doing the administering, a 2019 Harvard Business Review piece titled “The #MeToo Backlash” profiled a 2018 University of Houston study led by Leanne Atwater that concluded, “In the wake of #MeToo, many people expected men to become more reluctant to engage with women at work in certain ways—even though such activities can be crucial for advancement. (A follow-up survey in 2019 showed that the backlash was even worse than anticipated.)” In Atwater’s study, “Looking Ahead: How What We Know about Sexual Harassment Now Informs Us of the Future,” 5 percent of men admitted to having harassed a colleague, another 20 percent said “maybe” they had, but 41 percent thought men in general would be “more reluctant” to have a one-on-one meeting with women with no others present.1 Fifty-seven percent of women thought men would. They know.
Nevertheless, whether it is the men who live in fear that tomorrow will be the day they are exposed for trying to kiss the intern at the awards banquet twenty years ago, their coworkers who are proud of having a clear conscience and the Right Politics, or the women who laugh at the jokes and are even harder on fellow women to prove they can make it on the boys’ turf without calling human resources every fifteen minutes, the sentiment remains that women lie secretly in wait to revenge-torch the careers of their male coworkers. It remains despite overwhelming data to the contrary, statistical and anecdotal, despite the lack of frivolity in so many allegations. It remains within men. It remains within women. (The “Women for Kavanaugh” placards during Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court confirmation will not soon be forgotten.) It remains despite its moral bankruptcy, and it remains even as the numbers of prominent men revealed as sexual harassers continues to rise, and it remains even as at least seventeen women, as of July 2019, have accused Donald Trump, the sitting president, of sexual assault. Trump debased the presidency by legitimizing Pence, Kavanaugh, and the persistent attitude that the powerful are under the most threat. “It is a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump said on October 2, 2018. A similar sentiment has permeated the white mood for the better part of the past four decades, visible in exit polls, attitudes, and litigation: it is harder to be white in America.
THE NEUTRAL ARBITERS
The term “the best defense is a good offense” is one of those rare clichés whose application is more appropriate outside its realm of origin. In sports, teams or players with tremendous offensive capabilities that don’t play defense eventually lose. Ask Mike D’Antoni in basketball, John Isner in tennis, or Chip Kelly in football. Even their best offense won’t be good enough often enough. In sports, the cliché loses, defeated by its more historically accurate rival defense wins championships.
Outside of sports, however, or more specifically in politics and in cultural perception, the cliché works. Repeating a position, even when (or especially when) it is untrue, with the intention of it becoming embedded into dialogue or becoming an effective filibuster to the truth, is difficult to overcome. So much time will be spent debunking a heavily repeated untruth that the public, busy with work, parent-teacher conferences, and Game of Thrones, eventually will stop seeking the truth. The opposition, meanwhile, will find itself spending so much time on the defensive that it will never have a chance to redirect. The battering of the public with a false position is the cornerstone of misinformation, the base layer of propaganda.
Politically, it’s an odious winner. The attack phrase “identity politics” is so overwhelming that, despite its obvious inaccuracies, defense cannot beat offense. It now ascribed only to the minorities, the women, the transgender, the others. Like the dreaded “fake news,” it is so ubiquitous that even people whom the term insults use it. White men use “identity politics” as a bludgeon, to remain on the offensive, branding the rest of the electorate as emotional while securing for themselves the default position of neutrality and reason. While the rest of the public in their various factions are positioned as incapable of seeing beyond their personal characteristics, it is white men who treat themselves as reasonable.
It is a spectacular con, as if being a white man was not in and of itself an identity. In America, being a white man is the identity of power, status, luxury, control, and respectability. Yet no matter how much defense to reroute the narrative is employed by politicians, academics, pundits, or barstool experts, it is never quite successful, quite likely because it is the white men who are overwhelmingly in front of the camera and the microphone and on the laptops. The label sticks but only in one direction. Only the left-leaning, the black, the women, or the queer voted or acted based on what it saw in the mirror. In July 2019, the Brennan Center for Justice released a report stating that thirteen US states have never in their history seated a person of color as a state supreme court justice, and though white men make up less than one-third of the country’s population, 56 percent of the state supreme court justices in the US were white men.2 The white man was clear-eyed and level-headed. His identity did not factor into his decision-making. He was blind justice. He was reasonable.
The spectacular nature of the con is amplified by the volume of occupations that hire women or minorities in positions only where one is needed. In sports, black receivers who can run forty yards in 4.2 seconds can be covered only by defensive backs, a position also overwhelmingly black, who can do the same. In publishing, doors are so often closed to women and writers of color who want to write about “neutral” subjects because their value stems only from their unique racialized or gendered experience. The end result becomes the ultimate lose-lose: women and minorities are hired in positions specifically because of their identities, then castigated by white men for expressing them. As Willie Randolph, the great Yankees second baseman, once told me, “No one talks to me about baseball. They only ask me about race, then accuse me of playing the race card.”
Only the white man could be trusted to be neutral in a world of partisan hysteria and safe spaces. Go back, for a moment, to September 2018, when the New Yorker writer Ben McGrath profiled a new sports show called On the Clock. The show aired on Conservative Review Television, a new startup streaming network hosted by Steve Deace and Curt Schilling. In the years following his retirement from baseball, few athletes have been as outwardly political as Schilling, who was suspended by ESPN for his attacks on Muslims and transgender people. He once said Hillary Clinton belonged “under a jail.” His social media feed is unflinchingly partisan. A Republican, he is a racist and though he may argue the label, he does not hide this fact. Schilling was employed by the alt-right website Breitbart, run at one point by the white nationalist Steve Bannon. He is combative politically, publicly fighting with Democratic politicians and media members alike, and often blames his to-date unsuccessful Baseball Hall of Fame candidacy on his conservative politics. He made frequent claims that he would challenge Elizabeth Warren for her US Senate seat from Massachusetts in 2018—until it was time to show up and run.
Deace’s politics are equally unambiguous. He has written for the Conservative Review and the right-wing Washington Times and is the author of several politically themed books that do not pretend to be anything but right-wing Christian.
Neither Deace nor Schilling has ever made a secret of the identity of his politics, and yet McGrath and his so-smart, liberal magazine, against all available evidence, portrayed the pair of white men as neutral. McGrath noted in his first paragraph that a voiceover to start the show says On the Clock aims to “make sports great again.” The paraphrase is also part of the headline: “Curt Schilling and Steve Deace Try to ‘Make Sports Talk Great Again.’ ” The story is accompanied by a photograph of Schilling wearing a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” hat with a “TRUMP” campaign banner in the background. Under the photo is a caption of Schilling that says, without irony, that he “views the show as a response to a wearingly politicized state of mainstream sports talk.”
“The premise,” McGrath writes straightforwardly of the show, “is that sports talk, as brought to you by the mainstream media—especially ESPN, Schilling’s former employer—has become tiresomely politicized, and restoring its greatness involves embracing the attitudes of a time ‘before everybody decided sports was boring and everything was racist,’ as Deace says.” Deace is quoted by McGrath using political dog whistles such as “socialistic” and derogatory terms like “snowflakes.” And yet, at no point during the profile is either defined as a political ideologue, or their show as being as politically partisan as the positions they oppose. The profile uses Trump-speak throughout. If it is attempting irony or subtlety it fails miserably, for McGrath is direct in his description of the show’s premise but meekly indirect in its deconstruction (ignoring completely mentioning Schilling’s firing from ESPN for his racism). Even in a liberal publication—or especially in one—the white men were going to bring balance to an ostensibly politically imbalanced sports world. They were going to restore order. They were going to be reasonable.
INTERLUDE: WHEN BLACK PEOPLE PRACTICE WHITE SUPREMACY
Once, after playing tennis, I ordered sushi takeout. I took a bite of mackerel nigiri and felt a significant crunch, as if I’d bitten into a pebble. Mackerel is soft and certainly not crunchy. I rolled the hard item around in my mouth and, growing more horrified, spit out my food. I look down at what appeared to be . . . yes . . . a tooth.
There was a fucking tooth in my sushi!
I was nauseous. I was horrified. I was dialing the number of the restaurant to tell them how quickly I would see them in court—but only after the board of health shut them down. In mid-dial, I ran my tongue along the bottom right side of my mouth and felt a smooth space, a divot.
Wait . . . oh no . . . it’s mine. It’s my own tooth.
I hung up quickly.
I grind my teeth. Once I ground them so hard I cracked the back right molar. The dentist had tried to keep it together with a crown. It appeared I cracked the crown during my tennis match, clenching too hard while serving. The crown fell out, winding up in my mackerel.
While I was sitting in the dentist’s chair, my highly recommended oral surgeon, who was going to perform the root canal I now needed, entered. He looked at me and introduced himself. I looked at him with caution and disbelief. He was tall, professional, and . . . black.
Black professionals know the look. I have received it too many times, that millisecond it takes to readjust, to recalibrate to the disbelief that your doctor or lawyer or white-collar professional is black. He doesn’t look the part. He is in a space he doesn’t belong. For as long as I’ve had teeth my oral surgeons have all been white or Middle Eastern. My dentists have been white men, Asian men, and Asian women. My dental hygienists have all been white women.
Black professionals know the difference in the look when they receive it from another black person. Most times it is a welcome, periodically jarring surprise. In other cases, the presence of a black professional produces distrust. The black lawyer, author, doctor, or oral surgeon cannot be as competent as their white counterparts.
It was a fleeting impulse but it was there.
If not a momentary skepticism of his credentials, then a surprise at his presence. Perhaps they are the same thing. He didn’t look the part, and questioning even for a moment his competence never would have entered my mind had a white man shown up in his lab coat because that is what an oral surgeon is supposed to look like. He would have been another white man in an occupation where white men live. He might have been patently mediocre but he looked the part.
Numerous black professionals have expressed frustration to me about being routinely rejected by skeptical whites and especially by suspicious blacks for not looking the part. A black financial planner I know finds more difficulty attracting black clients because he senses their hesitation to trust a black money manager. “So, they’ll put their money in Bernie Madoff’s hands and let him steal from them because he’s white, but they don’t trust me,” he told me. I recall an optometrist openly remarking, “I would have never thought that by looking at you,” when I told him I was a journalist. Gary Washburn, a basketball writer for the Boston Globe, once told me he has seen several book collaborations fail to materialize because black athletes subconsciously or actively favor white writers, who represent the mainstream and appear more legitimate.
“Children of movie stars, like white people, have at—or actually in—their fingertips an advantage that is genetic. Because they are literally the progeny of movie stars they look specifically like the movie stars who have preceded them, their parents. They don’t have to convince us that they can be movie stars,” Fran Leibowitz wrote in a 1997 Vanity Fair essay on race. “We take them instantly at face value. Full face value. They look like their parents, whom we already know to be movie stars. White people look like their parents, whom we already know to be in charge. This is what white people look like—other white people. The people in charge. That’s the advantage of being white. And that’s the game. So by the time the white person sees the black person standing next to him at what he thinks is the starting line, the black person should be exhausted from his long and arduous trek to the beginning.”
IN THE NAME OF DIVERSITY
Imagine for a moment that the trek to the beginning was not met with collective triumph that America was meeting its promise but with total contempt, and that the journey of being twice as good—of joining the lost tribe—ended with the privilege of standing next to people who simply look the part. Those white people believe completely in their legitimacy, that they belong wherever they happen to be standing, and the public requires little more than the looks of their faces to be comforted by them. Imagine being the person, as the saying goes, who was born on third base but thinks he hit a triple—and being considered worthy of gaining the base. Imagine also being inundated for a lifetime with the rhetoric of meritocracy, working hard, pulling oneself up, calling oneself self-made, and recognizing, finally and painfully, that your black presence is not the triumph of the level playing field but the center of total resentment. Black people in the white-collar trades need not imagine very hard. They live it and know that more effort has gone into maintaining the protections that white men have gotten for looking the part than into ensuring merit. The diversity workshops and company directives and inclusivity seminars sound encouraging but their very necessity explains to the black employee the corporate landscape better than any human resources spin doctor ever could: while merit is treated as a natural recognition of ability, an entire corporate initiative is required to recognize you at all.
In the early to mid-1990s newspaper business, greater attention was being paid not only to the stories being told but to who was allowed to tell them. A common lament was heard in newsrooms and press boxes around the country: white reporters returning from unsuccessful job interviews claimed they were being passed over in favor of minorities—in the name of diversity. It was constantly repeated by white reporters even when the numbers did not support them, and while companies may have directed their managers to include a diverse pool of applicants, it was still the kingmakers, the white male editors, actually making the hires.
I remember a moment of peak frustration after hearing yet another white man complain to me he couldn’t get ahead while suggesting the fix was in against him. I naturally, was the fix, for the implication was that editors were being told to hire black reporters instead of good reporters. I was standing near the back of the Fenway Park press box looking at the rows of white male writers, the first two rows in front of me and two more behind. Many of them were colleagues with whom I’d shared beers and tall tales—and who believed and repeated often that diversity was eradicating their livelihoods. In 2018 the Columbia Journalism Review reported that the New York Times’ reporting team for the 2016 political season was 90 percent white and USA Today’s was 83 percent white. According to the 2018 Associated Press Sports Editors Racial and Gender Report Card, 85 percent of sports editors and 80.3 percent of sports columnists in America were white. As the only black person in the press box that day, I said loudly, “I thought black people were taking all the jobs?” A few looked up. Some gave a knowing touché. Others gave an eye roll. Everyone went back to work.
Recalling that day in the press box and so many others like them, when competitors and colleagues alike were convinced they were self-made, always returned me to Leibowitz’s essay. “And what it is like to be white is not to say, ‘We have to level the playing field,’ ” she continued, “but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with. White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense that to use the word ‘advantage’ at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist.”
THE ASSUMPTION OF COMPETENCE
Just as America’s fetishizing of police provides the misdirection for its true aim of protecting whiteness, fear of being called into human resources for making a drunken comment to a coworker during a long-ago Christmas party is not the primary rationale for men believing in the Pence Rule. Nor is it credible that with so much physical, obvious evidence to the contrary, white people really believe minorities assume a preponderance of jobs. In the history of the NBA, the supposed hallmark of black athletic success where 80 percent of the players are black, there have been just ten black coaches in the league’s seventy-three-year history who were not former players. This means that the average black coach has virtually no chance to be hired in the NBA, for unlike his average white counterpart, the overwhelming majority of black coaching aspirants must first possess the world-class ability to reach the NBA as a player, a talent an infinitesimal percent of the world’s black population possesses. It is an impossible barrier. In the history of the league, which dates to 1946, there have been two—two—black majority owners and the first one, Robert Johnson, sold his franchise to the second, Michael Jordan. The NFL went sixty-nine years without a black head coach and the reason that ended wasn’t the sudden recognition in 1989 that Art Shell was a rare football genius, but because two high-profile sports figures—the CBS broadcaster Jimmy “the Greek” and Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis—were fired for making racist comments publicly regarding the competency of black job candidates. Sports did not recognize meritocracy. They were responding to pressure.
When they are hired, black head coaches in the NFL are fired notoriously quickly. Neither the NFL nor MLB has ever approved a black-majority owner. Baseball, where to even have a shot at being a manager first required being a terrific player, embodies the twice as good edict. Established in 1869, Major League Baseball has hired fifteen black men to manage teams. Nine have been former All-Stars and three (Frank Robinson, Don Baylor, and Maury Wills) were former MVPs. The black players in baseball used to repeat the saying, “No blacks on the bench.” That meant that if baseball was going to admit black players, they had to be starter-level good.
None of this, it should be noted, is anything new. In the years before baseball integration in the 1940s the black players taking the white man’s job—which he acquired not through merit but exclusion—was the great fear. That, and a fear of competition. “The Negro players have eliminated the marginal white player,” San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark said in a 1964 interview. “Those good colored boys have run all those fine white boys to the mound where there is not that much competition.”
This is an example of Leibowitz’s “arduous trek to the beginning.” Black players were first challenged to overcome segregation on the field, for it wasn’t their lack of ability that kept baseball, football, and basketball white for decades but white edict. In the fifty-plus years since black coaches entered the ranks (Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics became the first black head coach in professional sports in 1967), they have had to overcome not looking the part without the weapon of superior speed or quickness. In baseball, no black manager has been hired who was not a former player at the big-league level and half never received a second opportunity after being fired. In the NFL, two-thirds of the black coaches who have been hired have never received a second opportunity. They are the original One and Done.*
The New York Times, established in 1851, has had two black general sports columnists in its history, neither of them women. The Boston Globe has hired two full-time black sports columnists, the Boston Herald and San Francisco Chronicle each has had only one, and dozens of others have not had any. When he was a player, Charles Barkley once said, “Every time you talk to a group of reporters, you’re talking to ninety-nine white guys and one black guy pretty much every day of your life.”
Both the #MeToo movement and diversity initiatives threaten the kingdom of male mediocrity, particularly white male mediocrity. There has been, essentially, one area in sports where black talent is vital and that area is on the field when black players are clearly the superior physical choice, such as speed positions in the NFL or most NBA positions. If there is a job that either a white or black person can perform—like, say, coaching or writing or evaluating—the doors are often limited or closed completely for black people.
The same is true when it comes to gender. Filling the breach are white women. Left out are black women. Our common language ensures this, creating for white women an exclusive lane, the carpool lane of diversity. “Women and people of color” really means “white women and everybody else.” There is a belief that the progressive NBA is comfortable with the game being overwhelmingly black in style, culture, and demographic and that the NFL is comfortable being 70 percent black. The opposite is closer to the truth. The game is comfortable with black talent playing but has never been comfortable with black coaches and commentators who were not former players. Black people know they’ve always been allowed to entertain whites but without much opportunity after the final buzzer. The racial hierarchy of sports has gone largely unchanged for a century:
White owners.
White coaches.
White media.
White season-ticket buyers.
Black players.
White women provide the balm for sports that need diversity but must not risk being seen by white audiences as “too black,” lest the viewers retreat. On television the formula is as obvious as the Packer Sweep: a white woman hosting with three black ex-players on a panel, or with two black ex-players and a fired white coach who is using television to remain relevant, as a way station for his next job. In addition to show hosts, those sideline reporters who are not white men are mostly white women, as are newspaper columnists and beat reporters. White men dominate the sports radio airwaves, and when paired with an African American voice, it is usually a black male ex-player. In diversity studies and profiles, black women are rarely mentioned. Is it to be accepted that black women have nothing unique to add to commentary, news coverage, or a broadcast, that they have no voice of value? Black women are not often considered by the white men who do the hiring because to them, hiring white women has solved the gender issue and hiring black men solves the racial issue. Because sports and corporations in general crave diversity of color but fear diversity of thought, black women are erased without ever really existing.
No alliance is more fragile than that between white and nonwhite women. Progressive white women weary of men running things and controlling them, who saw the Kavanaugh hearing as the darkest days of their lives, also tire of a persistent, inescapable statistic: 52 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. As a bloc, white women represent the only demographic uncertainty. Ninety-four percent of black, 83 percent of Asian, and 69 percent of Hispanic women voted for Hillary Clinton.3 Some white women feel betrayed by their own. Others redirect, refusing blame for votes they did not cast, asking instead why white men are so easily excused for not being better allies. Some of the best writers deal with the subject by not dealing with it at all.
In September 2019, Hasbro released a post-#MeToo, #TimesUp version of the board game Monopoly titled “Ms. Monopoly: The First Game Where Women Make More Than Men.” The star was Mr. Monopoly’s niece, a “self-made investment guru.” Hasbro trumpeted it as a victory. A black woman friend in the fight found the entire concept of Ms. Monopoly absurd as a tool toward equity, and engaging with a white female coworker she asked, “So, at the end when it all collapses, a woman will be holding all the money? Is that the goal here?”
Her coworker responded, “I’d be okay with that.”
White women, alas, remain a powerful second on the American food chain of power. They are fluid, able to be friend or foe of both whiteness and patriarchy. They can maintain whiteness, take power for themselves, and consider it success. They can win with or without change. They can simultaneously claim to support diversity while their ascension erases it, oppose patriarchy politically while safely marrying or, in the case of the fictional but metaphorically very real Ms. Monopoly, being born into it. They can say the right things while becoming its heir. They can triumph by defeating patriarchy while leaving the cultural dominance of whiteness intact. Many white women would “be okay with that,” their excluded dark-skinned female allies forced to accept such a victory as yet another defeat. This must be confronted.
Clinging to the Pence Rule, now the men don’t trust white women, either.
If men believe they cannot trust women not to destroy their careers, what, exactly, are these women gaining for all their conniving, for their obvious attempts at entrapment? What is their prize? Where is their throne? In sports they gain admittance to a club that does not want them and never has, one that has never in large measure respected their intellect. They get to step on a Major League Baseball field to interview a player, only—as I personally recall one exchange—to have that player wink and say, “I fucked her” as she walked out of earshot. They get to have another player, as I remember personally witnessing, implore a female reporter to come to his locker in the visiting clubhouse in Cleveland because he had something really important to tell her, and when she approached he opened his laptop and showed her a porn video of a woman on her knees performing oral sex on two men. As she tried to walk away, the player grabbed her arm and said, “Wait, wait! This is the good part.” They get, after a 49ers-Eagles game in 1992, during my first year in the business at the Oakland Tribune, to have Reggie White, the Eagles’ superstar defensive end, emerge from the shower wearing a towel but refuse to address the media until the lone female reporter, Michelle Smith, left the room. The male reporters did not stand up for her, did not allow her the opportunity to do her job. They waited for her to leave and then they asked their questions.
In the press box, women lose. Should a woman break a story, almost without fail she will be accused of having sex with an athlete as the explanation for her success. If women do not break stories (even though most of the mediocre male reporters who surround them also do not), it is considered proof they weren’t qualified to have their job in the first place. If they are pretty, they were hired for that reason (and therefore must be fucking somebody, right?). If they are not, they are ignored, and weren’t likely to advance, anyway.
And they earn less.
What is done with their loss? The men scratch their collective heads—confounded, detached from any personal responsibility—over the fact that so many women appear to have a dream job but wind up leaving the business unfulfilled, even though for generations many of the same head-scratchers were the ones telling them their presence was unwanted. They were offered sympathy but not solidarity because their very presence was a threat to the mediocre white boys who run the industry and now also to the trickle of mediocre black boys who have been granted (temporary) access to the club.
The threat is so great that a woman with a pad and pen cannot be trusted to sit alone in a room with a male coworker or supervisor without witnesses. The threat to men is real but it’s not a threat of entrapment. It’s a threat to their remaining unchallenged, remaining comfortably mediocre without competition. An unspoken motive of refusing to include women in after-work dinners, individual meetings, and hybrid businesssocial occasions is to slide them directly out of competition, for it is in those quasi-social settings that promotions and confidences and all the intangibles of the corporate climb really take place. “If I didn’t have frequent dinners/drinks with men,” the historian Keri Leigh Merritt told me, “I wouldn’t have a career.”
White men afford themselves the assumption of competence. It is how they protect their position and mediocrity—for in any profession, there are precious few exceptional talents of any race or gender—from competition. As smug in the press box as they are in the front office, the classroom, and the boardroom, they assume their collective competence while assuming the incompetence of the black and the female, spending ample time undermining the credentials and professionalism of both. White men often compete with one another for jobs in the press box; some may believe they are the better candidate but rarely, if ever, do they suggest (as they often do with black people) that their white male colleagues are unqualified to even be in the profession. At a 2019 diversity seminar hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, one of the featured CEOs told an overflow crowd of women and minority professionals that managers often find it easier to promote white men because they know a white man passed over in favor of a minority candidate might create unrest, while black and female candidates are less likely to create a similar stir if they are the ones passed over. These white men assume their own professional qualifications, which justifies their anger at potentially being overlooked for a promotion. They are convinced that only force—via diversity initiatives such as the NFL’s Rooney Rule and baseball’s Selig Rule, Title IX, and sexual harassment lawsuits—is the only way minorities and women could advance. They assume their own competence. Everyone else arrived via handout and they will not stand for it.
The value of the mediocre white boy to the company cannot be underestimated. He is a prime asset. He does not complain. He fits in. He doesn’t file discrimination lawsuits—unless it is against the black people he feels are taking his God-given job. He has no ambitions and no expectations, and thus is not a problem. And because he looks the part and poses no threat, he and the boys and the bosses can all go to the Irish pub or the strip bar or the game, laugh at the diversity and inclusion seminars, bitch about Dick Lapchick and his race and gender report cards, comply begrudgingly with company directives, and keep everything intact.
The Pence Rule as self-protection against #MeToo may sound pragmatic but it is, quite simply, misdirection. It is Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. The true aim is to eliminate female competition for jobs—or at least reduce it and make advancement for women more difficult, the work environment for them even more hostile, increasingly isolating them from an industry’s social and political nerve centers, punishing them because Louis C. K. couldn’t just masturbate in private. Of course, as MacGuffins go, we have been here before, a quarter century ago when the white boys in the press box making jokes about niggers (yes, they used the term blatantly) were suddenly fearful of losing their jobs for making those jokes and their lament was the racial and generational equivalent of refusing to being alone in a room with a female reporter. The world had gotten too politically correct and the inability to joke as openly as they had before meant the end of civilization. It wasn’t only their world anymore. The formula remains unchanged: diversity means competition and competition threatens mediocrity, and the two combined mean accountability, an end of the white boys’ club as it has been known. (Side note: to the black people in the press box who had spent their careers putting up with the insults as part of the job, it was a day long overdue.)
* Fifteen black men have been hired as manager in the history of Major League Baseball. One, Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers, remains with his original team and thus has not yet had the chance to be hired by another team. The same is true in the NFL of Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin. Thus, though the NFL has had twenty-one black head coaches, thirteen of the nineteen who have been fired never received another opportunity.