Yesterday, when Vanity Fair released its New Establishment list—which first debuted in 2008 as "a collection of kingmakers and innovators"—it included a sub-list of nine men and two women. Among the herd were Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, Bill Simmons of Grantland, Ezra Klein of Vox, and Gawker's own Sam Biddle. This apparently new breed of swashbuckling, journo-entrepreneurs was dubbed News Disruptors.

Like most dumb lists, this one successfully pissed a lot of people off. My Twitter timeline lit up with confusion and anger. "Where are all the women?" many wondered. "Why are there no people of color on this list?" others asked. Annie Lowrey—who is married to Klein—found fault in the list and published a piece for New York ("Why Disruptors Are Always White Guys"), writing:

It's happening again. There's a list of "media disruptors." It's predominantly white dudes. It need not be...

The research is broad and deep on the "glass walls" that keep women from becoming entrepreneurs, or the profound discrimination that many people of color face when starting their own businesses. Investors like a pitch coming from a man better than coming from a woman — even when the pitch is the same. Minority-owned firms get rejected for loans at twice the rate of white-owned firms, and often pay higher interest rates when they get them, too.

There's a single discriminatory phenomenon underpinning all three of these issues, sometimes called "think manager, think male."

But this raises an important truth that Lowrey ignores altogether: white men cannot be "disruptors." Or, put another way: How can white men "disrupt" the tech or media landscape if, essentially, they run it? That's just a new idea, with a new, white face on it, in a marketplace run by men who were afforded many of the same opportunities as you. The gospel of disruption is a lie. You cannot disrupt a system you inherited. That is not disruption. That is privilege.

The term "disruptive innovation" was first coined by Clayton Christensen. The belief was that companies at the bottom were able to emerge because established companies found the lower tiers of the market "unattractive." In doing so, larger companies ignored a "population of consumers" and, perhaps unknowingly, opened up the door for smaller companies to provide access to "a product or service."

In the last decade, as tech and media have expanded and companies like Facebook became central to our daily lives, the idea of creating a product or service that would upend traditional structures became appealing. Privileged kids dropped out of privileged universities with the hopes of becoming the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Jill Lepore, writing for The New Yorker, captured the growing trend in all its ridiculous glory:

Ever since "The Innovator's Dilemma," everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: "The degree is in disruption," the university announced. "Disrupt or be disrupted," the venture capitalist Josh Linkner warns in a new book, "The Road to Reinvention," in which he argues that "fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, and political unrest," along with "dizzying speed, exponential complexity, and mind-numbing technology advances," mean that the time has come to panic as you've never panicked before. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, who blog for Forbes, insist that we have entered a new and even scarier stage: "big bang disruption." "This isn't disruptive innovation," they warn. "It's devastating innovation."

Things you own or use that are now considered to be the product of disruptive innovation include your smartphone and many of its apps, which have disrupted businesses from travel agencies and record stores to mapmaking and taxi dispatch. Much more disruption, we are told, lies ahead.

Kevin Roose also alluded to this in June, writing, "The idea of disruption has become gospel in the tech sector, and it's spreading." The same is now true of new media. And yet emerging media companies that aim to disrupt the system—Vox, FiveThirtyEight, Grantland, Medium, The Intercept, among others—are still run by, and largely employed by, white men (including Gawker Media). The great disruption myth is that white men can break into or disrupt a system they already belong to.

I was speaking with a friend earlier, and he raised a salient point. Business evolves, he said. But there are two constants. One is that business—regardless of the type—will change no matter what. The other constant, he said, is that the people allowed to make that change are white men. It was, and is, no wonder people leaving traditional journalism jobs to set off on their own was a trend put in motion as soon as Wordpress became a viable option. But do you think a black woman from, say, Kansas City, or a Mexican guy living in Chicago, could get the same founding to start their own business as any of those white dudes? Eight times out of ten, probably not.

In the media world, real disruption looks like Shani Hilton, the deputy editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, who is slowly changing the color and coverage of the company's newsroom, which reaches over 8 million people daily.

Real disruption looks like Shonda Rhimes, the TV showrunner, who is aggressively altering the gender of the stories told on major networks run by white men.

Real disruption looks like Jesse Martinez, who founded Latino Startup Alliance, an incubator and support network for Latinos in the United States who dream of developing their own businesses.

Real disruption looks like Tristan Walker, who founded Code2040 and launched Bevel because he felt young black men deserved quality grooming products, too.

Real disruption looks like a friend of mine who worked her ass off and recently got into Stanford's MBA program so she could one day found a company of her own. A company that will employ workers who reflect the cultural vibrancy of America.

These are the people we should be talking about when we talk about disruption.

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