White Men Get Short End of Stick—in NYT Chart, if Not in Reality

Jim Naureckas

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.