Gabe contributes to CityLab analysis on creative economy’s racial divide
Todd Gabe, an economics professor at the University of Maine, was mentioned in the CityLab article, “The racial divide in the creative economy,” by Richard Florida, co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The Atlantic. Not only does the creative class skew white, but there are few U.S. cities where the black creative class appears to be doing as well as their white counterparts, according to the article. Across America, Florida found almost three-quarters, or 73.8 percent, of all creative class jobs are held by white workers, compared to 8.5 percent by African-Americans. While 36 percent of all workers nationally are part of the creative class, 41 percent of white workers hold creative class jobs, while 28 percent of black workers do, the article states. Florida worked with Gabe to identify the racial breakdown of the creative class across the U.S. and its roughly 380 metro areas. They looked at the shares of black and white workers ages 16 and older in creative class occupations for the year 2013 using data from the U.S. Census categories for management, business, science and arts occupations, according to the article.