Brooklyn Hipster Demographics
05/10/2012
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The recent New York article by Benjamin Wallace on the boom in artisanal food products made in Brooklyn, The Twee Party, came with a sidebar of photos of 38 Brooklyn entrepreneurs holding their packaged food goods: Brewers, Bakers, and Beef-Jerky Makers.

As I mentioned before, I can't afford these luxury goods (this scene is made possible by all the money in the world pouring into next-door Manhattan), and I don't have a sophisticated enough palate to care all that much, but I wish these small businesspeople well. Eventually, some of their innovations will filter down to the mass market and help the kind of food I eat continue to get better in quality, as mass market food has gotten better over my entire lifetime. (In a couple of decades, a few of the people who in were on the Brooklyn artisanal food scene in, say, 2007, will be billionaires, and will, no doubt, by greatly resented as sell outs by all the people who were there with them and didn't make it big. But, such is the way of the world.)

By looking at the portraits of the 38 hipster foodies, we can crudely estimate the demographics of the Brooklyn scene. Overall, the borough of Brooklyn is 36% white, 32% black, 10% Asian, and 20% Latin. 

But the artisanal scene is different. I come up with 84% white, 1% black, 11% Asian, and 4% Latino. 

Keep in mind that there's a lot of guessing in this: For example, I'm assuming that the light-skinned lady who looks vaguely mulatto is half-black because her name is Evers, which is one of those names like Washington that seems to be blacker than other WASP names. I'm not counting as black the man named Stout who wears a bandanna, sunglasses, and beard, and could be English or Australian Aborigine for all I can tell. I'm of course counting as Latino the one guy who looks like George Zimmerman, but I may not have fully counted the various white people with potentially Spanish-surnames. 

I suspect these numbers are relevant to thinking objectively about the recent Girls Whiteness Crisis, but what's the fun in thinking objectively?

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