Let's Do the Math on 'The Beached White Male'

Not just two white men are without jobs, though they’re the nice anecdotal evidence for the cover of Newsweek, which announced “The Beached White Male.” Oh, you do not say: “Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed.” Oh but wait, do not make fun: “It might be tempting to snark at these former fat cats suffering lean times. But when Beached White Males suffer, so do their wives and children.” (There are about 52 million married white men in the U.S., by the way.) But it’s still safe to say this thesis doesn’t have anything to do with numbers in the real world.

There are about 154 million Americans in the civilian labor force. About 140 million of them are employed. About 114 million of those employed are white people. White men who are older than 16 have 61 million of the jobs. So white men have 43% of all jobs, while white men make up about 36% of the U.S. population. White women 16 and older have about 53 million of the jobs (37% — about proportionate). That’s already 114 million of the jobs (81% of all civilian jobs), leaving just 26 million jobs.

So there are about 15 million black people with civilian jobs in the U.S. (out of about 40 million black people in total), leaving 11 million jobs for the Asians and “Hispanics” and the “everyone else” — and the Asians have like 7 million of those.