Save Our State  

Go Back   Save Our State > Priority Topics Section > The Economy

The Economy Topics and information relating to the economy affecting SOS associates

WELCOME BACK!.............NEW EFFORTS AHEAD..........CHECK BACK SOON.........UPDATE YOUR EMAIL FOR NEW NOTIFICATIONS.........
Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old 07-28-2011, 03:14 PM
Jeanfromfillmore's Avatar
Jeanfromfillmore Jeanfromfillmore is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 4,287
Default African-American Middle Class Eroding As Unemployment Rate Soars

African-American Middle Class Eroding As Unemployment Rate Soars
The unemployment situation across America is bad, no doubt. But for African-Americans in some cities, this is not the great recession. It’s the Great Depression.
Take Charlotte, N.C., for example. It is a jewel of the “new South.” The largest financial center outside of New York City, it's the showcase for next year’s Democratic National Convention. It was a land of hope and opportunity for many blacks with a four-year college degree or higher.
According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, in Charlotte, N.C., the unemployment rate for African-Americans is 19.2 percent. If you add in people who have given up looking for jobs, that number exceeds 20 percent, which, according to economists Algernon Austin and William Darity, has effectively mired blacks in a depression.
“You’re looking at a community that is economically depressed in my opinion,” Austin said. “And we need action that will address that scale of joblessness.”
Vanessa Parker worked hard to get ahead. She was an administrative assistant at IBM in Charlotte. She went to night school to better herself, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in finance. Parker and her husband saved up enough money to move from a bad neighborhood to a quiet, middle-class street. But instead of moving up in the company, IBM moved out. Now she works at a big-box store for minimum wage.
“It’s very frustrating and it makes you wonder why are you doing it,” she told me. “Because it seems like the more that you try to get ahead, seems like you’re falling back.”
“It takes time to build anything. But it doesn’t take very long to destroy it,” says Patrick Graham of the Urban League of Central Carolina.
His organization runs classes on empowerment, hoping to raise the self-esteem of the unemployed and give them the confidence to take charge of their lives.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he told me. “In a sense that you watch people who are viable who have talent who can’t necessarily find the job opportunity that they need.”
Derrick Foxx is another example of how deeply this recession has affected the black middle class. Foxx was laid off from Phillip Morris Tobacco 2 years ago and hasn’t worked a day since.
Like Vanessa Parker, Foxx was trying to better himself, attaining an MBA. Though he has sent out more than 1,000 resumes, and contacted more than 1,000 companies, he is still unemployed.
“I got out of school and didn’t get the job I was looking for,” he says. “Then I went back, got an MBA degree, you know, and I’m almost like – wow – was this really worth it?"
It’s quite a sign of the times that people are questioning whether their education was worth all the time, effort and expense. Education is supposed to be the gateway to prosperity. But according to economist William Darity from Duke University, education does not provide the same key for African-Americans to open that gate as it does for others.
“It’s really, actually, a tragedy because people have invested a tremendous amount of effort – devoted the motivation and time to acquire degrees,” he said. “But it doesn’t provide them with the same degree of protection that it provides others in this society.”
There are jobs to be had in Charlotte. But African-Americans are not sharing in the recovery in the way others are.
Devah Pager, a sociologist at Princeton University, conducted groundbreaking research in Wisconsin and found that black men were less likely to be called back on a job application than white men with a criminal record. The statistics went like this:
Job call-backs:
White non-criminal: 34%
White criminal: 17%
Black non-criminal: 14%
Black criminal: 5%
According to Darity, “The differential in unemployment between blacks and non-blacks in the U.S. is perhaps one of the most dramatic indicators of discrimination in this society.”
So – what to do about it?
The Congressional Black Caucus has been leaning on President Obama to address the epidemic of black unemployment on his watch. So far, the president has resisted the notion of job programs specifically targeting African-Americans. His position is that a rising tide will lift all boats. But the tide remains out as far as job creation goes.
The Urban League’s Patrick Graham believes small business should be the major driver to employ African-Americans.
“It’s gonna really not just take hard work, but it’s gonna really take some creative thinking in terms of entrepreneurship and other things to really get us out of this,” he said.
The recession – or depression -- in the black community is rapidly eroding the black middle class.
At its convention in Boston this week, the National Urban League released a troubling report on that topic. It found that the recession has virtually wiped out all of the economic gains blacks made in the past 30 years.
And a new report from the Pew Research Center drives home just how bad things are out there.
It found that in 2005, the average net worth for white households was $134, 992. For black households, it was $12,124. (That's not a typo.)

In 2009, the number dropped to $113,149 for whites and a paltry $5,700 for blacks.
Algernon Austin believes the government hasn’t taken the problem seriously enough. “It’s just one step below the scale of the Great Depression,” he said. “But we haven’t treated it as a crisis of that magnitude.”
Despite their plight, both Vanessa Parker and Derrick Foxx have remained remarkably upbeat. Foxx finds purpose in coaching girls’ basketball, and helping disadvantaged youth. “My biggest thing is -- if I’m helping others, you know, it takes the pain off of me,” he says. “Because I see someone else who’s doing worse than I’m doing."
Vanessa Parker is struggling to hang on to what she has built. She doesn’t want to go back to the gunshots and – as she says – the “boom, boom, boom” music of her old neighborhood.
And she truly believes better times are ahead.
“On many days I went to bed crying because I feel that I can’t get the job that I deserve. But then when I think about it, that a better day is coming -- that keeps me going. It keeps me going to that $7.25 job. You know, because something is better than nothing,” she said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/07/28...#ixzz1TRG3LZvP
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old 07-31-2011, 06:29 AM
ilbegone's Avatar
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 2,068
Default

Quote:
“The differential in unemployment between blacks and non-blacks in the U.S. is perhaps one of the most dramatic indicators of discrimination in this society.”
I don't know. Does it have to do with an expectation of some sort?

I recently worked with a black man who went right to work without having to be prodded, and was a lot of fun to be around as well. I would hire him in a minute if I had a company.

However, we became overmanned, and he was let go in favor of another black man who is rather lazy and somewhat obstructs the wheels of progress presumably because the lazy guy was there first - first hired, last fired. Is this a form of discrimination? What if it were I, a white guy, who was either first hired or last hired, would that be some form of discrimination as well if I were two checked instead of the lazy guy or the other way around?

The man who was let go told me a story about one of his sons, that he had tried to get his son into the entry level occupation of our trade. The son's response was "I'm not digging holes for the white man". The fact that his father makes relatively good money and rarely would be digging holes was evidently not a factor in the young man's decision. However, the son is now serving a life sentence in prison rather than making good money digging holes or anything else.

Some years ago, I worked for a black man who owns his company. The man treated me good, and there was no fault between us when I left his employment. I saw him again last year, and worked out of the same place as his crews did as he was a sub contractor to my employer. Everyone on his crews were black, far more so than when I worked for him. Being the good man he is, does that mean he is discriminatory in that he didn't have "diversity" on his crews, or was it because whites and browns chose not to work for the man? Or did the chips just fall that way?

As for the allegation of discrimination which implies racism, I will discuss that far more seriously when the rhetoric goes beyond "institutionalized racism" and the leading cause of death among young black males is no longer that of being murdered by another young black male.
__________________
Freibier gab's gestern

Hay burros en el maiz

RAP IS TO MUSIC WHAT ETCH-A-SKETCH IS TO ART

Don't drink and post.

"A nickel will get you on the subway, but garlic will get you a seat." - Old New York Yiddish Saying

"You can observe a lot just by watching." Yogi Berra

Old journeyman commenting on young apprentices - "Think about it, these are their old days"

SOMETIMES IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Never, ever, wear a bright colored shirt to a stand up comedy show.

Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 03:37 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright SaveOurState ©2009 - 2016 All Rights Reserved