The annual exercise that is the National Urban League’s State of Black America Report is, by far, one of the more essential yearly exercises in policy thought leadership. It’s a needed and can’t-do-without pulse checker that gives us the comprehensive helicopter flyover of the community. While some might question whether it passes the snuff test of a truly balanced, non-partisan document, it remains to be seen if there is a viable contender study in size, scope and undertaking. The League gets many nods of respect for its consistency, managing to push out what has become the authoritative autopsy on African Americans as a collective since 1976. It clearly establishes NUL as the big brother in the room. That’s heading into nearly 40 years of copious documentation pulled into a per annum bible that should sit on every Black bookshelf … if you manage to grab a copy.
Yet, its biggest problem is not so much esoteric hair-splitting over agenda suspicions (many Black conservatives constantly grouse and moan over being left out), but the way in which it is largely ignored or glossed over by mainstream conversation. It may get respectable, somewhat obligatory play through a multitude of Black press channels – which is, of course, what they’re supposed to do or risk the sting of a head slap from a grandparent. But it will barely make the headline of the day or week on the front pages or sites of large go-to international publications. That is, frankly, quite sad and – dare we venture – despicable: it’s nothing more than willful, garish ignorance of what’s happening with 15 percent of the population (because Black folks are woefully undercounted in the Census).
Perhaps if the rest of the world were to pay attention to the SOBA – as it’s been affectionately abbreviated in recent years – there’d be better understanding when tragedies occur. Which is the point of the report: a sort of courtesy aimed to preempt any feelings of betrayal or ambush. An axiomatic ‘We told you so’ as a way to forewarn the rest that something is on the horizon. It’s typically a very serious and sometimes unbearably ominous data dump of grim, but it does its job for those who read it.
Instead, society chooses to plays as dumb as Black America cries foul. When Black men are jailed or unjustly shot, there’s predictable shock and This-Can’t-Happen-In-America disbelief. Newscasts talk of missing Black homeless girls as if it’s in a novel (“How could this happen?“), but no one recognizes that the system has been failing them all along – SOBA could’ve told you about it. All of that could be avoided by simply picking up a copy of the SOBA. A casual skim through it will reveal longstanding issues and grievances that offer more than enough insight into why shit is the way it is.
This year’s report is titled “One Nation Underemployed: Jobs Rebuild America” (and you can read the full copy here). It finally delves deeper into the issue of underemployment rather than the well-branded and more familiar unemployment. It may help us all to arrive at careful, critical distinctions between the two. It comes at a curious time when official Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show a steady drip drop in national jobless figures as if recession is done. But, it’s been long known by those who’ve pushed back at recovery hype that BLS figures only cover the unemployed we know about – or the ones that are still reporting they’re unemployed. And it’s not really taking into account the number of folks who are underemployed, hit hard during the height of recession years and now barely getting by on less than what they were making only several years ago. Underemployment is the more troublesome and holistic portrait of the American job landscape.
Thanks to the SOBA report, as grisly as it sounds, there are now more of us who know the underemployment rate for African American workers is above 20 percent – with fears that it could be a higher given the large numbers of folks who have been out of work for so long, they’re off the grid. But, what we’re seeing in this report is wider acknowledgement that the Black jobless problem is turning into something mercilessly permanent, particularly after a quarter of the Black middle class has vanished since the recession started. These are Depression-era numbers, especially when compared to Latino and White rates that show high joblessness, but less so than Blacks at 18.4 percent and 11.8 percent respectively.
A larger audience wouldn’t know too much about this without the annual SOBA reminding them, nor would we have metrics like the Urban League’s equality index to gauge progress (if any). Right now, the overall index for African Americans is 71.2 percent – which might be an inch better than 2013’s 71.0 percent (barely worth mentioning), but is clownishly low compared to the 100 percent full equality granted to Whites. Interestingly enough, Latinos fare better at 75.8 percent equality. And ongoing challenges of poverty and decline in urban centers give Blacks 55.5 percent economic equality on the index scale (compared to 60.6 percent for Latinos).
It would behoove the rest of the nation to take note: something awfully twisted is happening to 15 percent of its population. Ignoring SOBA’s warnings out of fear we’ll lose sense of the post-racial mythology we’ve designed can create devastating consequences. This is a report as crucial an addition to the national library as a steamy pulp novel is to Oprah’s book club list. It’s best we get to the business of reading it.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for UPTOWN Magazine. He’s also a frequent contributor to The Root and Washington Correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune. Reach him via Twitter @charlesdellison.