Where do different races in the US tend to work?

Factual Questions
1

Most online profiles of US employment by race simply show employment levels. Whites, the biggest population, have a 53% to 55% employment rate. Afro-Americans, a much smaller workforce, also have a 55% employment rate. Asians, the smallest, have a 60% rate but rates derived from smaller numbers might be more erratic.

You might format answers in the following ways:

  1. Geographical - in the cities (commercial/business districts) or in agriculture areas, or in industrial belts.

  2. By type - Government service/the armed forces, industrial, service, commercial, self-employed

  3. If working in private businesses, by company size - large corporations with > 1,000 workers, or small- to medium business with less than 1,000 or a family-run business.

Here’s something that often catches me: Whenever I see small- to medium business featured in the media, whether on tv (ex: Dirty Jobs) or on the net, it’s mainly all-white workers (discounting family-run businesses, of course.) So where do the other races go?

2

I also thing that we get a distorted view from drama on TV. It has become a cliche to show the senior detective or lawyer etc as an Afro/Caribbean. That is surely not true in the real world.

3

This might help on the geography part.

4

Dunno if you’re looking for outliers or general statistics but Indian-Americans (less than 1% of the population) dominate the (privately held) hospitality industry. We’re also just over 10% of the nation’s physicians, and nearly 15% if you count South Asians generally.

Ethnic minorities (all of them, except possibly Jews) are in all actuality horrifically underrepresented in the bar. You can see the racial breakdown of the population generally here.

5

Oh c’mon, next thing you’ll tell me is there are judges in US courtrooms that aren’t stern middle-aged heavy-set black women with their hair pulled back or 80+ year old withered white men.

6

In some cases it’s pretty obvious. The Kentucky Derby works in Kentucky and the Boston Marathon in Boston. I don’t follow all the races in the U.S., but I do know the Preakness Stakes works in Baltimore and the Iron Man Triathlon is in Hawaii.

7

^
So how do I get to watch the white race, go to a pet store?

8

Census data can answer some of those questions. From the 2012 Statistical Abstract:

Table 616 - Employed Civilians by Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin (Excel format).

It tells us, for example, that the most chosen occupations of Asians are computer engineers, nurses, and cashiers. For Blacks it’s health aides, cashiers, and drivers. For Hispanics it’s janitors, cooks, and housekeepers.

9

And here’s an interactive map by the NY times showing racial distribution by location (down to the city block level where available)

10

Last ones for tonight, if you want to crunch the data yourself:
occupation/industry/income by ZIP Code.

Race by ZIP code

Or Occupation by Race and ZIP, one for each race (note: 8 separate tables, use arrows at top to navigate)

Google Fusion Tables, the Bing or PowerView addons for Excel 2013, Openheatmap.com and other similar services can help you visualize that on a map, but the dataset is so big that it’ll take a while… I started doing it but have to go to sleep now.

ETA: And if you look for results “by class of worker” it’ll tell you whether they’re self-employed, work for the gov, etc.