It’s supremely unhelpful of the New York Times (Upshot, 10/26/24) to compare income of white men without college degrees to white, Black, Latine and Asian-American women with college degrees:
The Times provided no similar graphic making the more natural comparison between white men without college degrees and Black, Latine or Asian-American men without college degrees. Why not?
Someone who did make that comparison is University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who has a blog called Family Inequality (10/27/24). Maybe you won’t be surprised to find that not only are white men without college degrees not uniquely disadvantaged, they’re actually better paid than any other demographic without a college degree. White men with college degrees, meanwhile, are at the top of the income scale, along with Asian-American men with college degrees.
As Cohen writes, the way the New York Times presented the data “is basically the story of rising returns to education, turned into a story of race/gender grievance.” That fits in with the Times‘ long history (e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/16, 3/30/18 , 11/1/19, 11/7/19) of trying to explain to liberals why they should learn to love white resentment.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org, and has edited FAIR's print publication Extra! since 1990. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader. He was an investigative reporter for In These Times and managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere. Born in Libertyville, Illinois, he has a poli sci degree from Stanford. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR’s program director