On Dec. 4, President Obama hosted a Jobs Summit in
Washington, attended by economists, businessmen, mayors, and labor union
officials. Two days later, in his weekly address, Obama touted the “diminishing
job losses” as evidence of an economy that is headed towards recovery. He went
on to admit that these trends “do not buy groceries” for those who remain
unemployed. For these workers, Obama pledged to “do everything [he] can to
accelerate” job creation, focusing on it “every single day.”
 Jim Crow laws limited any type of meaningful advancement for African Americans Photo: assatashakur.org |
But this one-day conference, with over 100 “experts” raising
their hands to make suggestions from the floor, should not be confused with the
beginning a serious jobs program. The event was more reminiscent of the ineffective conferences organized by ex-President
Herbert Hoover in the first years of the Great Depression.
The White House has made clear over and again that its 2010
economic focus will not be on job creation, but on balancing the budget—in other words, cutting
spending. The Obama White House wants to appear to be focused on jobs, so there
will not be too big of a backlash when they turn towards cutbacks—and we can be
sure that the “Defense” Department will not be on the chopping block.
The recession has exposed the instability of the country’s
so-called “middle class,” whose homes and jobs have been rapidly pulled out
from underneath their feet. But the rapid impoverishment of tens of millions of
workers has by no means affected each sector evenly. For one, the recession has
shone a spotlight on the deep racism built into the U.S. capitalist economy.
The official unemployment rate among African Americans is
15.7 percent, while the national average sits at 10.2 percent. That is only the
beginning of the story. African Americans have significantly higher rates of
long-term unemployment, and with far less family and inherited income, job loss
is more likely to translate to permanent unemployment and poverty.
One in five younger workers, ages 16 to 24, is out of work.
The number is nearly one in three for African American youth—the highest
official rate of unemployment of any group in the country.
What explains these enormous disparities? In some cases,
bigoted employers are directly discriminating against African Americans, who
have historically been the last hired and first fired. But in reality, the
roots go much deeper to the historical development of African Americans as a
separate people within the borders of the United States.
The African American people were forged into a separate
nation by their particular history. The initial basis for the creation of the
Black nation can be traced to the plantation slave system in the antebellum
South, which provided much of the initial material wealth for the U.S. ruling
class.
Even after slavery was overthrown, the vast majority of the
Black population labored in southern agriculture as farmhands, tenants or
sharecroppers. Black workers who received jobs in the South’s urban service
sector or factories labored at very low wages. Jim Crow limited any type of
meaningful advancement, and cut short most attempts to jointly unionize with
white workers. During the Great Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 did
not cover agricultural and domestic laborers, which constituted 90 percent of
Black workers. Absent Social Security benefits, large numbers of Black families
had little or nothing left by the end of life to pass on to the next
generation.
The mechanization of agriculture and the labor demands of
World War II radically changed the state of Black employment. Millions of
African Americans were pushed out of agriculture and into manufacturing.
Black workers maintained a significant share of
industrial jobs throughout the 1950s and 1960s. But housing discrimination,
backed by the government and private real estate developers, kept the Black
population confined to under-funded urban centers (or the still
poverty-stricken Deep South), while tax dollars flowed to white suburbs.
It is thus no surprise that the decades-long process of
deindustrialization has hit Black workers the hardest. The removal of
manufacturing jobs left urban workers to scrap for the remaining public sector
jobs and low-paying service work (such as retail). With the racist police state
focused in these deteriorating communities, permanently unemployed Black
workers were thrust into the prison system. Prisoners, it should be noted, are
not even counted in unemployment rates.
Local governments now are either laying off workers or, at
the very least, imposing hiring freezes. Combined with a decline in retail jobs
and the continued attrition of industrial work, Black unemployment has soared
through the roof.
The Obama administration has been silent on the particular economic
difficulties facing the African American community. Quite clearly, the enduring
problems of national oppression cannot and will not be solved by capitalism.
