Pete Buttigieg: Hispanic Hater

Our barely-there Secretary of Transportation was complaining that people of color were being denied work in the construction industry:

BUTTIGIEG: “We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color that finally sees the project come to them but everyone in the hardhats on that project looking like, you know, doing — doing the good paying jobs don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood.”

Putting aside the lack of relevance of the experience of “generations past” on the present, it takes but a moment to dig up the demographics of the construction industry from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and but a moment more to screencap their chart (Slide 3):

One presumes that the likelihood of seeing construction workers of color in neighborhoods of color corresponds to the prevalence of workers of color in the construction industry. So the usual whipping boy, Non-Hispanic Whites, doesn’t seem to be grabbing more than their fair share of construction jobs. No, it is Hispanics who have captured a disproportionate fraction of those jobs.

So why pick on Hispanics, Pete?

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