27. "The fact is that it was the mid-90s and most of the people at that magazine — especially management — seemed very pleased with themselves and in no mood to hear my or others' analyses of the racial politics of the entertainment (or the media!) industry."

I started out in print media in 1995, after graduating from New York University with a degree in journalism. (For more of my thoughts on that, click here.) It's interesting, looking back on the beginnings of my career. My first job, as an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly magazine, was a rewarding one — assistants were encouraged to pitch and write and report short items for the front of the book, and some even got features placed in the magazine — but the workplace was also a very white and very male one, which meant that there was a certain default, what Rebecca Traister, in her great New Republic piece from last week described as "calibrated to dude," that I had to learn to understand, and then, internalize and adhere to. It's easy for me to say that I wish I'd recognized that part of what made me valuable to the magazine was the fact that I was neither white nor male, and that I wish I had drawn upon my experiences and interests as a woman of color during the course of my time there. But I don't think any of that would have done much good: The fact is that it was the mid-'90s and most of the people at that magazine — especially management — seemed very pleased with themselves and in no mood to hear my or others' analyses of the racial politics of the entertainment (or the media!) industry.

Anyway, that was then and this is now, and things have changed, and for the better. When I was a rookie, there was less room, literal and figurative, in which writers of color could assert themselves: There were fewer outlets in which their bylines could appear, and less of an understanding among editors that cultivating diversity in a newsroom or on a masthead was in their publication's best interest. That said, young writers of color should be careful not to make their experiences as people of color the sole focus of their work; they need to diversify, because as thrilled as I am by the increasing visibility of talented minority journalists, I worry that some may find themselves pigeonholed by lazy media gatekeepers who only look to them to weigh in on issues of race and ethnicity. I'm seeing this happen in some instances already.

I want to get a to a point where, say, an African-American writer of cultural criticism feels as free to weigh in on the oeuvre of Tolstoy or Bronte sisters as she does the discography of Janelle Monae. I want to see a black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or Native American man or woman take the reins of a magazine like The New Yorker or Vanity Fair or Elle and explode our ideas of what an editor-in-chief can, and should, look like. It's happened before — look at Mark Whitaker's tenure at Newsweek — and will happen again. In the meantime, up-and-comers should remember to work hard, dream big, and be patient: Change doesn't happen overnight. But it IS happening, and a lot of us have your backs.

—Anna Holmes, Editor, Fusion; Columnist, New York Times Sunday Book Review; Founder, Jezebel.