The White House signing ceremony came barely three hours after the House approved the $34 billion measure on a vote of 272 to 152. The Senate passed the bill on Wednesday, July 21, for the unemployed whose checks have been cut off since the program expired in early June.
What is the diagnosis and prognosis for unemployed African Americans? Still abysmal on both accounts, even though many will at least receive a temporary financial reprieve with the passage of this bill.
Here’s why: as the grip of the recession eases around the throat of Americans, U.S. unemployment has leveled off at 9.7 percent for the past three months. But the Washington Post reported that the chokehold is still suffocating black workers, particularly men: black male unemployment hit a record 19 percent in March. And in Michigan, the epicenter of the American auto industry, the 2009 jobless rate for the black male population was 26 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers are even more astounding in Detroit, which reports the worst unemployment and high school graduation rates of any city in the nation, a fact that will have dire consequences into the future.
In its latest “Work in the Black Community” report, the U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education found that black and Hispanic unemployment actually rose as the rest of the nation declined. It is far worse than for whites, who saw a decline in joblessness from 8.8 percent in May to 8.6 percent last month.
Some economic and marketplace pundits suggest that Obama take specific measures to help blacks and minorities who are impacted far beyond their population percentage in America.
“It’s like triage in an emergency room — you take care of people who need the most help first and you help the others later,” Kai Filion, research analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, told the Washington Post. He said that the economic losses could result in a 50 percent poverty rate for black children, up from 34 percent in 2008. –terry shropshire
