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The Black Depression Continues Despite Recent Job Growth

By Alexis Stodghill on Jan 7th 2011 3:10PM
Filed under: News, The Economy

Comments (13)

The Black Depression
From The Huffington Post:

The latest snapshot of the American job market, released by the Labor Department on Friday, confirms what most ordinary people already knew without need of a government report: Little is improving quickly or broadly enough to dislodge the anxiety that has taken up long-term residence in many communities.

The unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent in December, from 9.8 percent the month prior. But that had little to do with people actually finding work, and much to do with the jobless simply giving up and halting their searches, dropping out of the statistical pool known as the labor force.

A deeper dive past the headline numbers reveals a reality that ought to trigger national alarm but hasn't for the simple reason that it is already embedded in the country we have unfortunately become: the Divided States of America.

Among white people, the unemployment rate dropped in December to 8.5 percent -- hardly acceptable, but manageable were the government spending more to expand a fraying social safety net and generate jobs. For black Americans, the unemployment rate was 15.8 percent.


Professional economists will not pause for an instant at those figures. It is a truism that the black unemployment rate generally runs double the white one, and yet when did that become acceptable? How can there be so little discussion about a full-blown epidemic of joblessness in the African-American community, as if the commonplace incidence of despair -- and, more recently, reversed progress -- somehow amounts to old news?

"Can you imagine any other group at that level of unemployment and the media dismissing it as not important?" the Rev. Jesse Jackson asked during an interview this week.

He described deteriorating inner-city, predominantly-black communities in Chicago and Detroit. In New York, a recent study found that more than one-third of African-American men aged 16 to 24 were unemployed between early 2009 and the middle of last year.

"These are the same areas that were targeted for foreclosure by the banks, through reverse redlining," Jackson said, referring to the way subprime lending operations preyed with particular dispatch on minority communities. "These are the same areas that have less access to transportation, which makes it nearly impossible to get to where the jobs are. You are structurally locked out of economic participation and growth."

The picture becomes more vivid still using a broader Labor Department measure known as underemployment, which counts jobless people along with those who are working part-time for lack of full-time work, or who have given up looking for work but are eager for jobs. Among African-Americans, the underemployment rate was running just under 25 percent late last year, according to an analysis of government data by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. That compared to a rate of about 15 percent for white Americans.

Nearly 15 years have passed since the publication of "When Work Disappears," a masterful book by sociologist William Julius Wilson describing in compelling detail the impact on working class African-American neighborhoods suffering large job losses: in a word, disintegration. Little has changed since then except for an acceleration of the slide.

Read the rest on The Huffington Post.

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