According to a recent report released by the Chicago Urban League over nine out of 10 African American male teens living in Chicago are jobless. This shocking number is higher than the already abysmal national average of 83 percent. Only 6 percent of Black teenage men in Chicago living in households earning an annual income of $20,000 were working in 2012.
One cause for this for this crisis is the growing numbers of adult workers, desperate for work, who are taking low-wage, entry level jobs that are traditionally taken by younger workers. But the nearly 100 percent unemployment of Black teen men in Chicago cannot not be fully explained by economic trends and changes in the character of the job market due to the constant battle being fought by big business against the working class. The capitalists of Chicago have ruthlessly waged a racist war against Black youth in the city, dooming an entire generation of young African Americans to the United States’ school-to-prison pipeline.
Instead of fighting a war on poverty or creating jobs, Millionaire Mayor Rahm Emanuel at City Hall and Springfield are waging a calculated and systematic war on working people’s pensions, laying people off, reducing wages, dismantling affordable housing programs, closing public schools, deporting record numbers of immigrants, slashing food aid, raising taxes and fees on workers and the poor, closing badly needed health clinics and waging a war on unions.
It is more than obvious that there is no way to solve the unemployment situation for Black youth in Chicago, or anywhere else, under the present property relations. Capitalism is a system of exploitation that thrives on inequality, unemployment and racism. Only through a valiant struggle against racism and fighting for socialism, a system where a job is a basic right for all workers, can we begin to dismantle the disparity between rich and poor.
