White-Counting

Last week, The New York Times complained that whites now make up only three-fifths of the population but still hold four-fifths of the most powerful jobs in America:

Faces of Power: 80% Are White, Even as U.S. Becomes More Diverse

These are 922 of the most powerful people in America. 180 of them identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, multiracial or otherwise a person of color.

Turnabout is fair play, so please note that the five staffers who undertook this race-counting project number one African-American and four Asian-Americans:

By Denise LuJon Huang, Ashwin Seshagiri, Haeyoun Park and Troy Griggs, Sept. 9, 2020

…A review by The New York Times of more than 900 officials and executives in prominent positions found that about 20 percent identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, multiracial or otherwise a person of color. About 40 percent of Americans identify with one of those groups.

Bodyguard Inverted Umb... Buy New $22.99 (as of 03:44 UTC - Details) In other words, even in 2020, whites are overrepresented in important jobs like congressman, media mogul, CEO, and sports-team owner relative to the overall population by a ratio of four to three.

Of course, most of the NYT’s 922 powerful positions are held by older people. Among American residents 40 or older, 69 percent are non-Hispanic white. And many of the nonwhite residents are not citizens (in fact, some are illegal aliens, although we aren’t supposed to care about that).

So, probably a little under three-fourths of the American citizens in the relevant age range are white, and they hold four-fifths of the powerful jobs.

Judging from that ratio, America in 2020 is remarkably not white supremacist, but you aren’t supposed to recognize that.

You may be wondering how accurate is The New York Times’ list of the powerful. I’d say it’s hit-or-miss, but not unusable. I’ve always enjoyed analyzing lists for my purposes that other people have made up for their own purposes, so I can’t be accused of cherry-picking data. The “Faces of Power” has its problems, but it’s good enough for my needs.

Ironically, the NYT project appears to have started off as an attempt in this Summer of George to argue that blacks get themselves in trouble with the police so often because of too much white power. Thus, the first two categories tabulated in the Times are police chiefs and district attorneys.

But that plan quickly came a cropper because only 44 percent of the chiefs in charge of the 25 biggest police forces are white. Another 44 percent are black and 12 percent are Hispanic.

Lejorain 54inch Large ... Buy New $26.99 (as of 03:44 UTC - Details) The NYT gripes (using the hilarious new reverential capitalization of “Black” but not of “white”):

While half of the 25 largest police forces are run by people of color, the shootings and killings of Black people by white officers this year are a painful reminder of systemic bias. The rise of people of color to positions of leadership has not been a guarantee against the targeting of marginalized groups.

Similarly, only 59 percent of the top district attorneys are white and 28 percent are black, even though the percentage of those who pass the bar exam who are black is much lower.

Interestingly, some of the pro-criminal district attorneys recently elected with the help of funding from George Soros, such as Larry Krasner of Philadelphia and Chesa Boudin of San Francisco, are white men, while some of the more successful DAs at fighting crime, such as Los Angeles County’s Jackie Lacey, are black women. The Times kvetches:

Almost half of the district attorneys in the cities with the largest police forces are people of color. Jackie Lacey, Los Angeles’s first female and first Black district attorney, has been criticized by the Black Lives Matter movement for resisting efforts to reduce prison populations, which often have disproportionately high numbers of Black and Hispanic people. Black Lives Matters activists have endorsed Ms. Lacey’s challenger in a closely watched race for November.

The Soros candidate George Gascón in Los Angeles looks rather like Steve Martin.

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