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Opinion
Boy, Bye

Washington Post Columnist Shredded For Piece About A Woman Getting A Job He Wanted

By Rachel DickerApr 17th, 2018, 4:01 pm

You’d think that in the age of #MeToo, the Women’s March, and “The Future is Female,” the age in which a female candidate won the popular vote in the last presidential election, you’d stop finding confused white guys spouting their feels in a public forum and expecting women to placate them.

And yet, here we are, everybody.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen lamented in a column published Monday night titled – I kid you not – “Privilege is real. But being a white man shouldn’t disqualify me,” that he was passed over for a job that was given to someone else simply because she was female. (He got a writing job elsewhere.) He says this kind of practice dehumanizes everyone involved; so confident is he in his thesis that he actually addresses women midway through thusly: “All this is by way of saying to women: I’m on your side.”

Mmmmm, no you’re not.

It hardly merits explaining, but what Cohen fails to internalize is that affirmative action hiring is meant to balance out an inherently unbalanced world. He was passed over for that job because, so the logic goes, the woman chosen in lieu of him overcame more hurdles to achieve her position, and so, though it looks like she and a man crossed the finish line at the same time, she actually started several miles behind.

This isn’t always true. But it’s true, like, really, really often.

Given this, the prevailing opinion on Twitter is that Cohen should shut his face about not getting a super-duper-amazing prestigious job and instead snagging the super-duper prestigious job. They did not demur on making this point:

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Rachel Dicker on Twitter @rachelmdicker

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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