How Big is Affirmative Action Anyway?
More Debunking of Angry White Math

america 1998 - population approximately 260 million

black population approximately 32 million.

question: what is the effect of affirmative action on 'white' employment?

given: 1/2 of the population is the workforce

therefore the black workforce is 16 million

the non-black workforce is 114 million.

given: black unemployment is 50%, non-black unemployment is 0%

goal: using a zero-sum hardball forced affirmative action program to create 0% black unemployment.

find: what is the net effect on the non-black workforce?

so we have to find 8 million jobs, that would leave the non-black workforce with 98 million jobs.

therefore the net non-black unemployment rate would go from 50% down to 0%

the non-black unemployment rate would go from 0% to 7.017%

this is an absolutely rediculous worse-case scenario. but several things become immediately clear which debunk a lot of angry white math against affirmative action.

1. under the worst of all circumstances, affirmative action could only affect about 1 out of every 14 non-black jobs.

2. black unemployment is nowhere near 50%, it's not even at 25%, it's closer to half that. so that makes the maximum reasonable number of zero-sum replacement jobs 2 million.

3. it is not a fair assumption that affirmative action is applied everywhere - at least 50% of all american employment comes from firms which are too small to be bound to affirmative action rules. that drops the maximum to 1 million.

4. those one million jobs against a black unemployment rate of 12.5% would cut black unemployment in half to 6.25%

so let's do another re-assessment.

given: non-black unemployment is 6.25% it would take something less than 1 million zero-sum jobs to give racial parity in employment. so far, affirmative action hasn't come close. so it stands to reason that white displacement is a myth, and that affirmative action has yet to cost non-black america one million jobs. out of a total workforce of 130 million, that is 7/10's of a percent of all american jobs.

but let's double it, just to be on the safe side. affirmative action covers less than 1.5% of all the jobs in america. which don't all belong to whites, but to asians and latinos as well. furthermore, everybody should know that the largest class of affirmative action beneficiaries are white women.

so i think i have pretty much destroyed the economic case for angry white math, proving once and for all that the primary obstacle to affirmative action is RESENTMENT, not ECONOMICS.

I welcome challenges to my syllogism.