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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 Lu, Jon 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.

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.

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.

The logical next step in any tabulation of who has power would be big-city mayors. For example, being mayor of Chicago has long been a byword for possessing clout. (The current mayor of Chicago, by the way, is a black lesbian.)

But at that point, the NYT appears to give up on its initial intention to document the racial imbalance of power on the mean streets and skips mayors altogether. (In case you are wondering, 28 percent of the mayors of the biggest 25 cities are black, compared with 13 percent of the population.)

Besides mayors, some of the other obvious categories that are missing from this list of the powerful include lavish campaign donors like Michael Bloomberg and Sheldon Adelson, billionaires like Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin (but 99 sports-team owners are counted, which overlaps notably with the Forbes 400), nongovernmental organization philanthropists like Bill Gates and George Soros, superlawyers like Alan Dershowitz and David Boies, government officials like Anthony Fauci and Jerome Powell, media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Anderson Cooper, and press barons like Rupert Murdoch and the Widow Jobs.

Still…most of the categories that are tabulated in “Faces of Power” are reasonable and thus useful for analyzing race in America.

Ironically, much of this new report’s evidence for white supremacy comes from highly liberal fields. While the top 25 police chiefs are only 44 percent white, the Times reports that the presidents of the top-rated 25 universities are 96 percent white. And to keep it from being 100 percent, the Times had to declare that MIT president Rafael Reif, who grew up speaking Yiddish at home in South America, is a nonwhite Hispanic Person of Color.

In general, this New York Times listing makes use of an extremely expansive definition of Hispanic. For example, Senator Ted Cruz, due to one quite white parent from Cuba, is listed as nonwhite.

They even count as Hispanics people with no Latin American ancestry, but one parent with roots in Spain or Portugal. For instance, Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore is declared to be Hispanic because his father was of Basque descent.

(About the only person with a hint of Hispanicity among the “Faces of Power” who is deemed to be white is world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, who was adopted as a child by his kindly Cuban-immigrant stepfather. Genetically, Bezos is Danish-American on his father’s side and Cowboy-American on his mother’s side.)

Still, even counting all these vaguely Hispanic individuals as if they were direct descendants of Montezuma, we only get to 7 percent of the powerful being Latino. And only 3 percent are Asian. In contrast, 9 percent of the power people are black.

It’s almost as if for more than a half century, Americans have been going out of their way using affirmative action to advance the careers of even marginally competent blacks.

One reason blacks are well represented among the “Faces of Power” is that 47 percent of the NYT’s 922 are members of the House of Representatives. Since the 1982 Voting Rights Act, House districts have been gerrymandered to increase the chances that blacks and Hispanics are elected. Republicans like this law because it means that a fair number of districts are rigged to be so heavily Democratic that they will elect black Democrats rather than more broadly appealing white Democrats. This means that most other districts must be concocted to slightly lean Republican.

Hence, in January 2019, 54 of the 435 members of the House (12.4 percent) were black. But the 1982 Voting Rights Act tends to put a glass ceiling on black political careers at the House level. Contorting some House districts to be extremely black selects for racial agitators such as Maxine Waters and former Black Panther Bobby Rush, who crushed the young Barack Obama in the 2000 Democratic primary.

But these black House members are not candidates with much of a future appealing to a nonblack majority in statewide races. Thus, there are currently no black governors and only three black senators (counting the half Tamil Brahmin Kamala Harris as black).

Without this affirmative-action system for the House, there would be fewer black
representatives, but likely more black governors and senators.

While The New York Times is quite worked up over White Privilege, which it assumes is proven by white overrepresentation among the powerful, it has never shown any interest in the exactly parallel concept of Jewish Privilege.

And yet Jews are far more overrepresented among the “Faces of Power” than are whites in general (although possibly less so than you might expect). A Twitter user named Philippus Arabus went through the list and identified 120 Jewish individuals compared with the Times’ count of only 85 blacks, 62 Hispanics, and 32 Asians.

Jews, who make up about 2 percent of the population, are 13 percent of the NYT’s rankings. One might think that Jewish pundits who promote the concept of White Privilege by pointing to the greater executive power per capita of whites than blacks should ponder that the exact same logic would suffice to demonstrate the existence of Jewish Privilege.

Jews are most overrepresented among university presidents (56 percent), news editors (40 percent), Hollywood executives (40 percent), Supreme Court justices (33 percent), and sports-team owners (31 percent).

They numbered fewest among police chiefs (none), Joint Chiefs of Staff (none), governors (4 percent), Trump cabinet members (4 percent), members of the House (6 percent), CEOs (8 percent), and senators (9 percent).

No doubt ethnic differences in IQ play some role in these patterns: University presidents are probably the highest-IQ category among the powerful, while police chiefs are probably the lowest-IQ group (the titanically successful William Bratton being the exception that vindicates the pattern that police chiefs aren’t usually brilliant).

I’ve posted here the full table of the “Faces of Power.”

Few things anger Jewish-Americans more than non-Jews tabulating Jewish success. (The Israeli and Jewish-American ethnic press is of course more than welcome to celebrate it.) They call it “Jew-counting.”

Because Jews are vastly higher-achieving, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to want to cover up that fact in an era that assumes that any disproportion must be due to discrimination. Jewish individuals make up only 2 percent of the U.S. population but 13 percent of the NYT’s list of the 922 most powerful people. If those excess 11 percent of Jewish “Faces of Power” resigned their posts in favor of People of Color, the underrepresentation problem of POCs would be largely solved immediately.

Of course, this Swiftian proposal will be greeted with furious point-and-sputter. But to those mad at my publicly pointing out that Jewish individuals are overrepresented by a factor of about 7 among the “Faces of Power,” let me ask you: Are you also mad at the Times publicizing that whites are overrepresented (by a smaller amount)?

If not, why not?