White, Male Writers Need Not Apply

The first time I wrote about the topic of wokeness invading the publishing industry was back in January 2019, more than six years ago. We’ve had several more posts on this topic since then. So this isn’t breaking news but it is an ongoing problem that gets less attention than it deserves. 

For all the caterwauling about “book banning” on the left, all it usually boils down to is taking some R-rated images out of elementary school libraries. Meanwhile, the actual machinery of publishing ensures that conservative books and books that might upset progressives never get published in the first place.

Last week, Compact Magazine published an article looking at the numbers which show a clear trend away from publishing and giving awards to white, male authors. 

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six. 

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man).

The lack of awards or notice, especially since 2020, obviously isn’t random. This was the same moment that every corporation endorsed DEI and promised to become anti-racist. No doubt that signaled the end for nominating white male writers for awards or praise.

But the article suggests the problem is actually worse than that. It’s not just that these writers can’t win awards, it’s that their view on the world is considered irrelevant or maybe even problematic by default. The unwritten rules say they can only write about the white, male perspective and that perspective is one we’re not supposed to be hearing from right now.

Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them. Instead they write genre, they write suffocatingly tight auto-fiction, they write fantastic and utterly terrible period pieces—anything to avoid grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America…

If your own internal monologue can’t be adapted to the page, what can?

Even worse than that, many left-leaning potential authors have bought into the negation of their own experience. If they get rejected, some think maybe they should be. Maybe even asking if this is fair is wrong-think.

“I mean, white guys still run the world, especially in that gross nexus of higher ed and yawny high lit,” one millennial writer wrote me, as if reassuring himself of phantom powers he no longer possessed. He had just been fired from his adjunct teaching job, and his agent had told him his latest novel was unlikely to sell. But he insisted my line of inquiry was unsavory. “What’s the point in even being upset about such supposed indignities as not being published as a white guy?”

It’s not hard to see how we got here. Identity politics says simultaneously that race is a social construct and that race is critical to how everyone is treated. There are oppressors and the oppressed and you are effectively born into one of those categories. For any white, male author who adopts this worldview, his voice is automatically the voice of oppression. Any defensiveness on this point, as Robin DiAngelo says, is further proof of guilt.

That’s not a promising starting point for encouraging white, male authors to express themselves (or for publishers to amplify their voices). It sounds more like an invisible sign hanging over the industry that reads ‘White males need not apply.’