Being a Black man is certainly its own scrappy badge of honor. But, according to data, it’s forcing quite a few brothers out of a job.
The latest white paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research goes so far as to crush any convention wisdom of Black progress since the Civil Rights Movement. “Between 1970 and 2010, employment rates fell more than twice as much for black men as for white men; in 2010, more than a third of black men ages 25 to 49 were either unemployed or not in the labor force,” note NBER researchers Derek Neal and Armin Rick.
This graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics – courtesy of the Center for Economic and Policy Research – pretty much confirms this:
Basically, overall employment was better back in the day than it is now – for an abundant number of reasons we can get into later. But, strikingly enough, you can extrapolate that as a Black male between the ages of 20-24 in the volatile, just-freshly-desegregated late 1960s you’d actually have near an equal chance (a 77.3% employment rate) at securing a gig as a White guy (a 78.7% employment rate).
Today, that’s clearly not the case: the employment rate for White men (while much lower than it was in 1969) is still over 18 percentage points higher than Black men – barely enjoying an employment rate over 50 percent.
Department of Labor special data show similar trends, especially when comparing Black adult male joblessness against Black youth and adult female joblessness:
Keep in mind some data do not include rates of underemployment among Black males or the number of individuals giving up and dropping out of the work force entirely. Economist John Williams calls it the “Shadow Unemployment” rate (that no one wants to talk about), illustrating that while the official unemployment rate has fallen to 6%, that’s not having an impact on an alternate rate of 23% which combines unemployment, underemployment and discouraged workers:
You can only imagine how this is hitting African American males. Against that backdrop is the decreasing number of Americans who identify as middle class, dropping from 53% in 2008 (just before recession hit) to 40% in 2014 (as we’re recovering). Noticeably, the number identifying as “lower class” is rising, according to Pew:
National policy prescriptions find few pathways to implementation since any mainstream discussion addressing the issue is usually drowned out by resentful and baseless characterizations of racial favoritism: when President Obama launched a relatively tepid My Brother’s Keeper White House initiative, reviews were notably mixed from Blacks and Whites alike. Many African Americans either felt it didn’t go far enough and others felt it needed to include the sisters, too. Latinos, which the effort did include almost obligatorily, seemed mum on the issue. And, reflexively, White conservatives treated it like the plague with responses ranging from it being too Black to the ornery FOX cable host Bill O’Reilly using it as a soapbox in his offensively perennial campaign against “gangsta rappers” (folks still use that term?) and bad family planning.
We hear it in our living rooms and we see it pass us by either quietly or noisily in our neighborhoods or where we congregate. But, the issue of Black male unemployment a crisis of epidemic proportions that continues drawing very little play as the crisis it is. It reads strong, headlining copy that elicits the type of urgency advocates hope for. But, that hasn’t translated into a meaningful political or policy response nor has it changed the numbers in any meaningful way.
Democrats, realizing this, are struggling to keep Black voters in the fold and mobilized for an ominous Congressional midterm climate if they decide to stay home. Republicans, in the meantime, are more than happy to keep Black voters home, quick to tease President Obama with the numbers above in an abstract below-the-belt effort to whittle away at Black confidence in their Black president. Ultimately, the issue is not something candidates from either party will dare run on as a major platform, despite the danger of future social unrest, public health and public safety consequences if it persists.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran political strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for UPTOWN Magazine. He is also host of #Uptownhall and Washington Correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune. He can be reached via Twitter @charlesdellison.