America Has a White Liberal Problem: Notes From a Screenwriter's Self-Exile
In the wake of Renée Nicole Good's murder, can we finally talk about why Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and other so-called liberal institutions refuse to take on fascism?
It’s November 2012, a few days before Barack Obama will be re-elected. I’m living in Los Angeles, four or so years into my professional screenwriting career, and a white male producer shares a novel with me called Coyote. It’s by Allen Steele and I fall so hard for it that I read it and its three sequels within a few days. These books posit a near-ish future in which a conservative coup has transformed the United States of America into the United Republic of America. When a habitable moon is identified in a nearby galaxy, the president decides to enshrine his country’s greatness by colonizing it…except a group of wildly diverse intellectual dissidents, led by a military descendant of Robert E. Lee more than a little guilty about his family’s legacy, decide to steal the spaceship instead and start over on a distant world. Eventually, a new kind of Earth fascism catches up with the colonists, resulting in a war for the moon’s ideological identity. The “good guys” win their revolution.
Another way to describe Coyote is: the American foundation myth repeated in a science-fiction setting.
It’s January 6th, 2026 as I begin to write this essay, the fifth anniversary of a Far Right attempt to overthrow the United States government. Evidence abounds that the sitting president at the time, Donald Trump, desired and encouraged this failed coup. This week, Trump, once again in the White House, succeeded in overthrowing another government – Venezuela – and by the time I publish this, it’s entirely possible he will have repeated this criminal act elsewhere in the world. Masked ICE agents sweep across the country like stormtroopers, disappearing people of color. Democratic leaders shake their fists, as politically impotent as the actors who will one day play their parts in a TV mini-series about the fall of America.
How did it come to this?
It’s December 2016. After Donald Trump’s first election, my wife and I have decided to trade Hollywood for London. She has her own reasons for this move, but I make no attempt to hide the fact that I believe this is the beginning of the United States’ final act and it won’t be long before people are being disappeared from the streets. I haven’t believed in the country for a long time, not since I was a kid, but now that I’m a parent, it feels dangerous to not look elsewhere – as my mother and great-grandparents once did – for a better life. I feel I’m just keeping up my family’s immigrant tradition.
My American friends don’t understand my fear even after I remind them that I grew up around the kind of white people who have surrounded the new president like he was the leader of a new reich. I’ve witnessed their racism, misogyny, queerphobia, and general disdain for education and the rest of the world. I also remind these friends this is why I have long called the Republican Party a death cult – not just the politicians, but so many of its supporters who clamor loudly for Biblical End Times. These people are chomping at the bit for violence and won’t stop until they get it, I say.
By the way, whenever I made any claim like this in the past, these same friends would tell me I was crazy. They would insist conservative white Americans were, by and large, good people and this was simply a difference of political values. A month after Trump’s election, they again tell me I’m crazy for moving abroad and risking my screenwriting career doing so.
Sorry, I should clarify something. The friends I just described are all white like I am. My friends of color – but mostly, my Black friends – all know what I’m talking about.
It’s February 2013. Barack Obama has been sworn in for a second time. I return to the producer’s office and declare my undying love for the Coyote book series. It’s brilliant, both a terrifying warning and a beacon of hope about our potential as a species – exactly the kind of story I think the United States and the rest of the world needs right now, I tell him.
The producer expresses confusion. “But Obama won,” he points out. The anxiety of a conservative takeover of America, of any kind – even electorally – has passed and even somehow seems delusional now.
I chuckle, probably too loudly. Because it’s such an absurd suggestion that the U.S. had somehow just fixed all its problems, including racism, and its future is nothing but bright.
This is the problem with many white liberals in America, I find. Not all, of course. Just a lot. Their vision of the future always involves quick, easy, and even symbolic fixes. They high-five and move on, never looking back or considering how what was gained could be lost without vigilance. The real struggle – the idea that change is ongoing, generational, and often painful – confuses them, which is why they’re so quick to politically lose their way when they start feeling comfortable.
On the other hand, Black Americans have been doing this for so many centuries that the state of the country 14 years from now, in 2026, is just par for the course. If they ever need a reminder about what’s at stake, they just have to talk to their grandparents who didn’t have the same rights as them whose own grandparents were enslaved and whose enslaved ancestors are never forgotten.
It’s April 1963. Eight white clergymen write an open letter that is published in The Birmingham News. Birmingham, of course, being in Alabama where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has centered so much of his efforts for Black civil rights in the 1960s. The clergymen, who have previously called for "law and order and common sense” to address the injustice of Black Americans, now call for “unity”. They implore the aggrieved to instead use the courts to assert their rights.
To be clear, the aggrieved here are second-class citizens being terrorized and murdered by their white neighbors – many of whom are also law enforcement agents.
King, sitting in a jail at the time for violating a court injunction against nonviolently protesting again racial segregation, writes his now-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in response. Included in it this paragraph:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
In this case, “white moderate” can be said to refer to any white person who is sympathetic to Black Americans’ plight but don’t support direct action and the immediate recognition of Black Americans’ most fundamental human rights. The kind of white folks who think everything is going to work out if you’re just patient and go about things “the right way” – which is according to their level of comfort.
It’s November 2008. Barack Obama has just become the first Black person elected president of the United States. I celebrate like almost everyone else I know. I dumbly believe the country is about to change. Then, I return home to Michigan for the holidays. I listen to the way white people in Macomb County talk about him. Even after he bails out the auto industries that built the county and so many of these lives still rely on, their animosity builds and builds. Eventually, it will seem to me like all people here can talk about is what they don’t have, not what they might have some day – which was the kind of aspirational thinking I grew up around.
Trump will win Macomb 53.6% to Hillary Clinton’s 42.1% in 2016; he’ll win 53.4% to Joe Biden’s 45.3% in 2020; and, by 2024, 55.8% of voters pick Trump over 42.2% who prefer Kamala Harris.
Between the 2012 and 2024 presidential elections, Macomb County slides further and further Right with every election. A bellwether county for America’s heartland if ever there was one.
It’s not as if I always knew for sure this was going to happen, but it was always a concern for me and I constantly wondered why nobody else could – including prominent Michigander and political Lefty Michael Moore, who endlessly insisted Michigan’s sudden shift Right was only about economics and had nothing to do with race.
Whenever Moore would make these claims, I’d wonder how few UAW build floors he had visited lately, whereas I had worked on several across Michigan and in other states throughout the first five years of the century. I heard almost as many racist slurs and sexist jokes there as I had from police and U.S. service members who existed in my family’s sphere.
It’s not something the Left likes to admit, but electing a Black man was always going to be too much for a lot of white Americans who would’ve never supported equal rights for people of color to begin with. They hated women in power almost as much, even a lot of them who were women themselves, which is one of the key reasons why Hillary Clinton didn’t mop the floor with Donald Trump in 2016.
This is why I chuckle in a couple of months when that Hollywood producer suggests that a second Barack Obama term promises America’s future is something to look forward to. It will strike me as the kind of thing someone would say who hasn’t left a city in years. Everyone in the media industry – mostly white people so often branded the liberal elite in some coded way or another – love talking and opining about “the rest of America”, but never seem to visit it or talk to anyone who lives there.
It’s April 2015. I’m asked to consider running for the Writers Guild of America West Board of Directors – which might seem like a strange thing to bring up in the context of this already time-bending essay that’s pivoted from a book property I want to adapt for TV to America’s decline into fascism to the Civil Rights Movement, but I’m hoping this all comes together by the end. We’ll see.
Anyway, when I’m approached about serving the Guild, I share my experiences creating “Dracula” for NBC and Sky, specifically how difficult it was to get agents to send me writing samples from people of color and how a key player in the production demanded we not hire a single woman for the writers’ room. I want to try to do something about the system that continues to perpetuate this, I say.
Several white liberal screenwriters warn me I will never win an election running on a diversity platform. Yes, the WGA is a very progressive union, I’m told, but the reality is there are a lot of older white men who vote and historically resist this kind of change. All you have to do is look at the history of TV, where women and writers of color were almost entirely excluded from writers’ rooms by their fellow writers – white male showrunners.
This advice pisses me off, so I do it anyway.
It’s 2019. I’m living in the United Kingdom for more than two years. By all measures, my quality of life and mental health has improved since leaving the United States behind. I also feel safer than I have for years. From possibly getting shot while dropping my kid at preschool to my kid getting shot at preschool to, yes, even the police — having grown up around them — I have been terrified of Americans for a very long time.
And yet, there is no getting around the fact that the world still feels in terrible decline. Donald Trump’s first term in the White House had blown up so many political norms and normalized so much hate. There is no doubt in my mind that his second term will further destabilize America’s democracy, leaving it unable to recover even if there is another fair election to follow.
When I discuss this with my white liberal friends in the U.S., I’m told the courts are working. The Constitution’s checks and balances are doing what they were supposed to.
In short: I’m still crazy and it’s time to come home.
Instead, I decide to reach out to Allen Steele, the author of the Coyote series. This time, I ask to option the property myself, so that I can go find a way to set it up. Surely, three years into Trump’s presidency, Hollywood will now agree with my concern about America’s troubling relationship with the Far Right.
It’s August 2015. On the night before the WGA Board election, one of the most prominent voices within the WGA pulls me aside and tells me I’ve helped change the diversity conversation within the Guild. Because of my willingness to rely on female and diverse members for votes rather than chase the white male base, they’re confident I’m going to win a seat. They thank me for my bravery – which kind of annoys me because all I did was act on what so many white liberals around me insisted they believed in.
The next day, I lose.
It’s August 2019. For the four years that follow my failed WGA Board of Directors campaign, I use my considerable WGA mailing list to advocate for diverse candidates – specifically, non-white cishet male candidates. My argument is that a more diverse Board would be better suited to represent an increasingly diverse Writers Guild, but really, I’m an angry progressive who wants his union to begin fighting for the future rather than endlessly try to preserve a past that will never be again. It sounds too much like Make America Great Again to me when I listen to the white men who typically speak like this.
During this year’s campaign, I receive an email from an Oscar-nominated white woman who tells me my diversity position is offensive and she’s horrified that her “white straight sons” would be judged by the color of their skin. I try to explain they’re going to be just fine, but maybe we could worry about the people who are prevented from telling their stories because of the color of their skin. She then assures me she’s as liberal as they come, but my argument is racist against white men who need jobs, too.
After my final exchange with this white screenwriter, a message from Shonda Rhimes shows up in my inbox. Rhimes, a Black TV creator with a long history of advocating for diversity within the industry, just wants me to know that I wrote one hell of an email to our fellow membership.
It’s December 2025. I’m reading the latest UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report that measures who is telling our screen stories and what kind of screen stories are being told. Every number I see suggests all efforts to change narrative representation in the film/TV have not only come to a crashing halt, but they’ve begun to rapidly reverse course. 91.7% of the top 250 scripted shows of 2024 were created by a white person, with white men accounting for 79% of all show creators. Diversity casting is down. Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Lionsgate didn’t even release a single film directed by a woman. I’m not even scratching the surface of how bleak this data is.
DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs were largely ditched after Donald Trump’s re-election at the end of ’24, the year measured, which means the situation will only get worse. These programs, once hailed as transformative and which many people of color will tell you are responsible for helping them get their foot in a door that said “whites only” in invisible ink, were quickly traded to placate Trump’s white supremacy policies – telling you all you need to know about how seriously those at the top of these corporations took equality of any kind. Of course, this shouldn’t be shocking. The industry had spent the previous century almost entirely excluding people of color from the stories they produced and, when they let POC show up, largely relegated them to stereotypical roles.
In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described how white moderates in the United States felt that they could set the timetable for another person’s freedom. But his frustration might not make as much sense today unless you dig deeper into the demographical realities of the mid-1960s.
For context, consider the following:
Based on weighted averages of regional data from 1964 Gallup polls, estimated total white opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was 46 to 48%. Basically, one in two white Americans opposed equal rights for Black Americans.
But here’s where it gets interesting. By 1965, after two years of brutal confrontations showing up in the news every day, some 42% of all Americans still believed integration efforts were going too fast. No data exists for how only white people felt about this, but the number is obviously higher; I’d feel confident saying it was still around that 46 to 48% that opposed the Civil Rights Act the year before.
In May of ’65, 46% of all Americans side with white Southerners who violently refuse to let non-violent Black protesters march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Even after learning about so many Black bodies being savaged on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, almost half of Americans are on the segregationists’ “let’s not be hasty” side.
But let’s jump back to 1963 for a statistic that really drives home King’s point about white moderates and their timetables for Black rights:
In 1963, 60% of all whites disapproved of the March on Washington that King spearheaded in August of that year. Three in five white people thought a peaceful, highly organized protest demanding basic civil rights was too aggressive in the push for freedom.
The “uppity Negro” was still a problem even for white supporters of equal rights sitting in their comfortable homes.
I wonder how King would feel if he knew that in 2024, 57% of white Americans, a significantly greater percentage than opposed the Civil Rights Act eight decades earlier, voted for Donald Trump.
It’s June 2025. I’m on a Zoom with DEI pioneer Karen Horne, the former SVP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion North America at Warner Bros. Discovery. She’s an upcoming guest on my 5AM StoryTalk Podcast (listen here). I tell her:
“ Personally, I can’t help but feel a lot of white people who supported [diversity changes] within Hollywood – who were vocal initially about it – thought that people of color were just going to go off and make their own shows and not actually compete in the same space. Something more like the 90s where ‘Girlfriends’ was on television and ‘Martin’. ‘You’re doing your thing [over there] and we’re going to keep doing our thing. Wait, wait, you want to do our thing now? You’re [expecting to work on our shows and create] in our space now?’ I feel like that that was seen as an unwelcome incursion.”
Karen, a biracial woman who identifies as Black, is agog for a moment. I worry I’ve overstepped and give her a way out by adding, “If that’s even something you’re comfortable discussing.”
“Here’s the thing,” she says then, “you’re saying the things we” – people of color – “all thought, but I, you know, rarely hear because – there’s not a lot of white people who are going admit that.”
The dirty secret is: the white Hollywood liberal, a stereotype all by itself, vilified by the media for years – especially Right wing media – isn’t nearly as liberal as you might think they are when you begin to look at how studio heads, studio executives, producers, agents and managers, and the all-powerful showrunners – mostly white men – have actually conducted their business over the decades.
Slow and steady, familiar (read: white), and guaranteed to protect their careers and bottom line, is a lot better than living up to their purported ideals, I think it’s fair to say.
It’s a tricky thing to describe, too. Because individually, this isn’t necessarily true. Consider when I asked The Post screenwriter Liz Hannah whether Hollywood was up to the challenge posed by Trump. She replied that she thought filmmakers were, but not necessarily the institutions. Yet the institutions are perpetuated by people. It’s a shapeless fog of institutional inaction that makes assigning individual blame nearly impossible — and so you have no choice but to refer to Hollywood as this monolithic entity with a consciousness all its own.
But this historical strategy of “Hollywood” — the entity — resisting change for as long as possible has real world consequences, as the lack of representation on screens and diverse storytelling directly impacts wider cultural views, allowing bigoted ideas to fester and even multiply. By mass-producing screen simulacra of the U.S. where only white people exist – or rather ,where white people dominate every facet of everyday life – is it that surprising that so many white Americans ultimately fell for the guy who sold them the same idea?
It’s November 2019. Coyote author Allen Steele agrees to let me option his novel series, absolutely committed to my vision for his interstellar story. Let’s go set this thing up!
