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 problem is not just an issue of not having a job. The loss of jobs in Black communities is exacerbating social disparities that have historically caused a lesser quality of life for African Americans.

For example, the rapid loss of jobs means that greater numbers of African Americans are losing their health care, which will only worsen disparities around health care between Blacks and whites that already exist. In 2007, when Black unemployment was approximately 10 percent, 20 percent of Blacks were without heath insurance. With Black unemployment growing steadily today, the numbers of the Black uninsured are sure to rise, too.

Unemployment also impacts rising levels of poverty in Black communities. A recent report found that 90 percent of Black children are part of families that will use food stamps by the time they are 20 years old. All told, 40 percent of Black children live in poverty, according the government's official statistics. According to the census, a full quarter of African Americans were living in poverty in 2007--two years before the unemployment crisis in Black America.

Rising unemployment is also exacerbating the foreclosure crisis in Black neighborhoods across the country.

While foreclosures are not tracked by race, the number of Black homeowners who face the threat of losing their homes is believed to be twice that of whites. A study conducted by the Woodstock Institute in Chicago found an 18 percent jump in foreclosures across the city in 2008, but most were concentrated in African American neighborhoods like Englewood and West Englewood. In these two neighborhoods alone, there were 725 foreclosures in a nine-month period.

The Woodstock Institute has found that for every one home foreclosure on a given block. the value of the remaining homes decrease by 1 percent. Thus, the heavy concentration of home foreclosures in African American neighborhoods is rapidly destroying the value and worth of the remaining homes in the neighborhood.

According to the Center for Responsible Lending, 53 percent of African Americans who bought homes in 2006 have already lost or will lose their homes to foreclosure in the next few years, compared to 22 percent of white borrowers facing foreclosure.

THERE HAVE been many explanations offered for the job disparities between African Americans and whites during this recession. Some focus on education and training as the main problem with the employability of African Americans. Others point to the jobs that African Americans have been concentrated in, like manufacturing--these are the sectors that have experienced the greatest job losses.

There are certainly elements of both explanations that are true. But the larger issue in the overwhelming way the recession is impacting Black America has to do with racism.

In every head-to-head comparison between Black and white workers--workers without high school diplomas, male workers, female workers or teenage workers--African American workers consistently do worse.

Several studies conducted over the last decade confirm that race remains a factor in whether or not employers hire African American workers.

In a study conducted last year by the Journal of Labor Economics found that Latino, Asian and white managers are more likely to hire white workers than African American workers. The study, which was based on hiring patterns at a national department store chain, found that when Black managers were replaced with a non-Black, the number of new Black hires declined from 21 percent to 17 percent, and the number of white hires increased from 60 to 64 percent. In a typical Southern store, the numbers were even more stark--the removal of Black managers resulted in new Black hires dropping from 29 percent to 21 percent.

These studies suggest that racism, pure and simple, is a major factor in the disproportionate numbers of Black workers being laid off in the U.S. economy. This does not mean that other factors aren't also involved, but neither are those factors separate from the influence of racism either.

IT'S TRUE that the recession is having a devastating impact on all workers--Black, white and Latino. It's also true that while the U.S. government has the resources to create new jobs through work programs and infuse hundreds of billions of dollars into the American economy to lift up all workers, the Obama administration instead chose to give away a trillion dollars to the bankers that crashed the economy in the first place.

The result has been millions of dollars in bonuses for Wall Street bosses and peanuts for the working class, in the form of a few extra dollars here to expand unemployment benefits and a few extra dollars there for more food stamp usage.

Despite this general picture, though, the recession's impact in African American communities is catastrophic and demands special attention--if only because employers left to their own devices will rehire Black workers last, if at all. The only way to ensure that African American workers are employed or receive additional benefits to tide them over while the jobs crisis persists is to create special programs to those ends.

This, historically, has been the basis of affirmative action. When it was first introduced in the mid-1960s as a remedy to centuries-long racism and discrimination, President Lyndon Johnson famously explained:

Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society--to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus, it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

Without recognizing the way in which racism factors into the current crisis, and thus the need for particular programs to create more job opportunities for African Americans, politicians and Black community leaders inevitably put the onus on African American individuals to come up with their own solutions. So while the CBC recognizes that more Blacks are losing their jobs and the devastation this is having in their districts, some of the solutions being pondered by CBC members border on the ridiculous.

THE ECONOMIC gains that African Americans made in the 1990s began to erode in the recession of 2000-2001, resulting in almost 10 percent unemployment in 2006, as the 2000s economic expansion was nearing its height--and the rapid increase in home foreclosures in 2006 and after.

These factors combined with the genuine excitement that arose with the possibility of electing the first African American president in American history resulted in an unprecedented turnout of African American voters in the 2008 election. New studies confirm that it was the Black vote, fueled by a historic turnout from Black women and Black youth, that was decisive in putting Obama over the top in the election.

Despite this historic level of support in the election, Obama continues to treat African Americans as political strangers, if not a political afterthought. Black male unemployment is the highest it has been since the Second World War, Black poverty is on the rise, African Americans are losing their homes at breakneck speed--and meanwhile, the first African American president fiddles while Rome--or in this case, Harlem, Englewood, Lawndale and Detroit, among others--burns.

Obama has already made clear on a whole number of issues--from LGBT equality to abortion rights to immigrant rights and beyond--that he will do absolutely nothing until a grassroots movement makes his silence and inaction impossible.

During the campaign, he promised to do even less for African Americans, fearing to be painted as "the Black president"--the result is that he is now going out of his way to ignore the particular problems in African American communities resulting from the disproportionate impact of the economic crisis.

Independent Black politics is in a devolving crisis, stuck between giving Obama "time" and defending him against the disgusting racist attacks from the right. In the meantime, Black America is being devastated.

Until there are political mobilizations that demand more resources for jobs, housing, schools, welfare and a new social safety net for the working class in general, but specifically for Black workers and Black communities, things are going to get worse before they get better.