The August jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed more great news for all Americans. And particularly for black Americans.
The nation’s unemployment rate of 3.7% puts it near the lowest ever in the last half-century.
Black unemployment is at an all-time low at 5.5%.
Also at an all-time low is the gap between black and white unemployment. With white unemployment at 3.4%, the gap is 2.1 percentage points. Put in other terms, black unemployment stood 62% higher than white unemployment.
A few years ago, the Pew Research Center looked at BLS unemployment data back to 1954, the first year the data was broken down by race. From 1954 to 2013, white unemployment averaged 5%, and black unemployment averaged 9.9%.
So going back as far as we have data, the black-white unemployment gap averaged a difference of 4.9 percentage points, compared with 2.1 points now. The black rate averaged 100% higher than the white rate compared with 62% now.
This is good news for everyone except those who are more unhappy that Donald Trump is president than they are happy that blacks are working.
CNN’s Don Lemon told blacks that their vote should be influenced more by what is, according to him, Trump’s “racist behavior” than by the strong economy.
According to the BLS report, there were 349,000 more blacks employed in August 2019 compared with August 2018.
So these 349,000 black Americans now working, who weren’t working a year ago, should be thinking when they go to the voting booth that Don Lemon, whose net worth, according to various online sources, is somewhere between...
