Despite rising inflation and
legislative drama, some economists are touting the latest jobs
numbers as a cause for celebration. And there is good news in the
recent jobs report. Job growth exceeded expectations, adding nearly
100,000 jobs from last month (bls.gov).
Wages increased. But Black folks didn’t get the same gains
that others did. The unemployment rate is trending down for everyone
but Black folks. So, while the overall unemployment rate dropped
from 4.8 percent to 4.6 percent, the Black unemployment rate remained
at 7.9 percent. The President who "has outback" backed out
of the issue of economic equity.
Am I being unfair? The racial
unemployment gap is as old as our post-enslavement reality. It is,
perhaps, unrealistic to expect President Biden to alter a racist,
predatory capitalistic economic structure that yields unequal results
for Black folks. At the same time, when a “brother” says
he got your back, you want to see results. So far, few results. Is
that why some Black Virginians stayed home instead of participating
in a tight election with significant national consequences?
Just as COVID-19 blew the lid off
our nation's flaws and inequality, so will the aftermath of COVID
continue to highlight our nation's inequality in education, health,
and employment. Black folks are still the last hired, first fired.
Even as some employers say they are desperately seeking workers, they
aren't desperately seeking Black folks. The Black unemployment rate,
as always twice the white rate, is a testament to that.
The Build Back Better legislation
will create some jobs and repair some infrastructure. Still, will
enough of these gains be targeted to those African Americans who have
been historically sidelined and further impacted by the violent
treatment of Black folks in our nation's history? Some unenlightened
white folks are resisting any notion of closing, like the white
farmers who don't even want pennies to be offered to Black farmers
who have lost much of their land because of the racism that permeated
the documented racism of the Department of Agriculture.
The Black folks who worked so hard
to get the vote out aren't seeing the expected return on investment.
All this talk of good news leaves some Black folks feeling "some
kind of way" as if we have been used and discarded. And
President Biden and Vice-President Harris are juggling aggrieved
Black people and entitled white people who ignore history. The
pushback to "critical race theory," which is taught in no
k-12 school, nor any undergraduate college, is a way of saying that
too many white people don't want to deal with our nation's second
original sin (the first is the expropriation of American Indian land,
the second being the brutality of enslavement). Whatever the
Biden-Harris team is juggling, they risk alienating their base if
they don't do more for Black folks.
Where is the good news for Black
folks in these recent economic reports? It's not in the unemployment
rate nor in the wages creeping up for some, not for others. It's not
in the uneven ways that inflation affects us. It's not even in the
Build Back Better infrastructure
legislation,
which may or may not have a positive impact on Black cities and Black
clean water when Republican legislatures will decide who gets what
from BBB. The legislation would be more potent if cities, instead of
states, were prioritized, since we know that the pandemic affected
urban dwellers more than cities.
I was sitting with a young activist,
counseling the patience that many sowed into me decades ago when I
was an angry baby girl activist. I was told then that it was going
to be an evolution, not a revolution. I resisted that advice saying
that things could immediately change if we demanded it. Not. We
can't flip the script right this minute. But we can't give up.
When we hear this economic good
news, we must resist the celebration and remind our allies that as
long as there is a racial economic gap, there should be no economic
celebration. The so-called progressives excited about Biden gains
need to ask themselves why Black folks remain sidelined and why the
racial economic gap is acceptable. And they need to be as vocal
about these gaps as they are about climate change and other vital
issues. Who gets to live economic good news?
Good economic news is only tepid
news for Black folks.
