Black America's economic freefall

[IndianaGreen]

Black America's economic freefall

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes the depths of the crisis wracking Black communities--and the failure of political leaders, including Barack Obama, to respond.

January 8, 2010

THE AMERICAN economy has gone through what has been called the Great Recession. But the crisis in Black communities across the U.S. constitutes an outright depression--spurring desperate conditions that have gone largely unreported because of the racist indifference of the government and mass media.

Unemployment has reached catastrophic levels in Black communities. The numbers are staggering. Official African American unemployment was 15.6 percent in November 2009, compared to an overall national rate 10 percent--and those statistics leave out workers who have been forced into part-time jobs because they couldn't find full-time work, or who have been pushed out of the workforce altogether.

For young African Americans, male and female, aged 16 to 29, joblessness is as high as 30 percent, according to the Washington Post. According to one report, between 2006 and 2009, more than 6 percent of Black men have lost their jobs--in real numbers, that adds up to the disappearance of more than 489,000 jobs.

Unemployment among Black women 20 and older has risen by more than 4 percentage points since the beginning of the recession, bringing their total unemployment rate up to more than 11 percent--which 75 percent higher than for white women in the same age range.

The overview of unemployment doesn't begin to convey the extent of the jobs crisis in Black America. Officially, the nation's highest unemployment rate is in Detroit, which is 83 percent Black--joblessness is a staggering 28 percent. Unemployment on the mostly Black South and West Sides of Chicago comes in second at 22 percent. The top 10 areas in the country where unemployment is concentrated include Black neighborhoods in Toledo, Ohio; Atlanta; and St. Louis.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/01/08/freefall-in-black-america

[CrawlingChaos]

1. Nearly shut out of Stimulus help too

92% of distressed small business Stimulus loans went to whites, and 1.5% went to Blacks.

[Vidar]

2. K&R.