Report shows African Americans suffer higher than average unemployment

Looking at the want ads in the Sunday paper is a lot tougher on the nation’s African-American community, according to the latest Bureau of Labor statistics figures which confirm higher than average unemployment for President Obama’s most loyal voting base.

The unemployment rate for black Americans remains just more than 16 percent; while their white counterparts hover around the 8 percent mark. The numbers don’t get any easier for African Americans when they compare to Latinos whose unemployment rate is 11.8 percent or Asians who enjoy the lowest joblessness of 6.4 percent.

The stubborn recession has left many job seekers crushed while searching for a good, fulltime job and as long as the nation’s joblessness holds firm, the president will have a tough time campaigning for his reelection.

Another problem job seekers face is under-employment.

A new Gallup year-long survey chart showed how unemployment and underemployment have remained within a narrow band. Unemployment, according to Gallup, has remained about 10 percent and underemployment persists near 20 percent.

Making matters worse is a recent story in The New York Times, “Only One in Four Young Black Men in New York City Have a Job.”

“The new report was prepared by the Community Service Society of New York, has other unhappy news about this group — that the unemployment rate for African-American men in New York, age 16 to 24, was 33.5 percent from January 2009 through June 2010,” the article read.

“The recession has created a landscape of the unemployed and underemployed with particular catastrophic consequences for young African-American men,” said David R. Jones, president of the, an advocacy group for New York’s low-income residents.

The new numbers have been a telling trend for African Americans in recent years that have seen lack of employment slowly creep into the double-digits.

“There is no question that black America is worse off than it has been in at least the last 30 years,” said Glen Ford, an executive editor for the Black Agenda Report.

Ted Hayes, a black activist and ardent critic of the Obama Administration, talks a lot about the black guilt this country continues to feel. “We have been bamboozled by the Democratic leaders like President Obama, Charlie Rangel, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who continue to give us more Jim Crow politics,” he said.
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Hayes, who also has his own radio program and website said, “blacks need to stop following the welfare agenda of the African American community leaders.”

The job idleness rate for blacks remains constant and some experts point to the decline in the housing market as a large factor in unemployment for blacks. In the past, construction jobs have been a mainstay for many young African-Americans.

Civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson said blacks are “number one in high unemployment, number one in home foreclosures and number one in populating the prisons of our country.”

However, some experts contend that the large illegal alien population in America accounts for the loss of jobs for blacks. They argue the fact that the illegals, who are primarily Hispanic, will work for less money and have virtually taken over the construction workplace.

Despite this trend, the New York Civil Liberties Union joined immigrants’ and civil rights supporters in the city to protest Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s position on the New York’s Secure Communities, a federal program that runs fingerprints of those arrested against the federal immigration data base, if a match is obtained those illegal immigrants are subject to deportation.

“Governor Cuomo should demonstrate his commitment to New York’s immigrant families and withdraw the state from this destructive program,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “Secure Communities contradicts our state’s proud tradition of embracing immigrants and it ignores immigrants’ immeasurable contributions to New York’s economy, culture and heritage.”

There has been an effort in many liberal cities to fight the federal law banning sanctuary cities, some like San Francisco law enforcement have gone on the record saying they will not obey the law and will not release fingerprint information, even if the illegal aliens are wanted for a variety of crimes.

In the meantime, it looks like black American’s are left holding the highest unemployment prize.

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© Copyright 2011 Kimberly Dvorak All Rights Reserved.

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