"Hideously white:"

When I quoted below the parody "New Report Finds Britain is 'Hideously White'" from the brilliant Joy of Curmudgeonry website, I didn't realize that Deogolwulf hadn't made up the phrase "hideously white." From the BBC News in 2001:

BBC director-general Greg Dyke has described the corporation as being "hideously white". Mr Dyke did not say the corporation was racist but acknowledged that, like the Metropolitan Police, it had a problem with race relations. He admitted the organisation's management structure was more than 98% white. And he said it was unable to retain staff from ethnic minorities and questioned if they were made to feel welcome. ... Mr Dyke said: "I think the BBC is hideously white."

The situation is similar in American media enterprises that aren't so big and rich that they have to have an affirmative action plan.

Steve Gilliard points us toward an article in the New York Observer by Lizzy Ratner called "Vanilla Ceiling" on the editorial and writing staffs of New York glossy magazines:

Still, the results of the survey revealed a world that looks little like the streets of New York, where nearly 65 percent of the population identified itself as nonwhite in the 2000 census.

Of the 203 staffers and contributors listed on the Vanity Fair masthead, six—or less than 3 percent—are people of color.

At Condé Nast Traveler, the swank travel monthly, 11 of the 85 staffers and contributors listed on the masthead are people of color. Of those 11 staffers, three hold editing positions and two are contributing editors, while six hold lower-masthead positions as researchers and assistant editors.

The New Yorker doesn’t publish a masthead, but based on conversations with sources and available published information, the magazine has a pool of some 130 editors, critics, copy editors, fact checkers, editorial assistants and outside contributors—of whom 11 are people of color.

At Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, four members of the magazine’s 73-person editorial staff are people of color.

Six members of New York magazine’s 90-person team of editors, writers, contributors and editorial assistants are not white. ...

At Forbes, an estimated seven people out of a pool of 116 editors, writers, reporters, editorial assistants, copy editors and bureau correspondents are people of color.

And the non-glossy Nation lists eight people of color among its 99 writers, editors, editorial-board members and Nation Institute fellows.

Awhile back I tried to explain to Jared Taylor that his white ethnocentrism wouldn't fly in the U.S. for the paradoxical reason that whites remain so dominant in many of the top jobs in the more desirable industries that no sense of white solidarity could emerge because the top people see themselves as engaged in clawing their way to the top over other whites (for example, 99% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 94% of Hollywood screenwriters are white), and so they look upon minorities merely as tokens or as props they can use to engage in a little moral one-upmanship over their white rivals.

Of course, some media outlets, especially big city newspapers, have strict affirmative action plans. This means that their staffs instantly become hostage to the minority editors and reporters if they even dream about deviating from the line of political correctness.

In either case, honesty about race is the worst policy for the self-interested.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer