LOOKING FOR CAUSES: Four decades ago, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to examine racial unrest, blamed the riots in part on a jobless rate for blacks that was twice that of whites. (CARL ALBERT CENTER CONGRESSIONAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA)

However, the national conversation about racial discrimination in the workplace lately has focused on whether remedies for minorities have gone too far. In its most talked-about decision of the year, Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court last month sided with white firefighters who protested that they were victims of bias when the city of New Haven, Conn., invalidated a promotional exam because no African-Americans made the cut. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been criticized for joining a ruling against those white firefighters when the case was before her appeals court.

But civil rights advocates say the racial differences in unemployment that are being magnified by the recession are strong evidence of a continuing need for public policies designed to eradicate bias against minorities.

“It’s really important for policy makers to address these problems for real, rather than using them as a wedge issue or attempting to shove it under the rug with arguments about reverse discrimination,” said Jones. “We’re seeing a lot of that, with the Ricci case, this notion that somehow an attempt to remedy past discrimination and ensure diversity is somehow an assault on white men.”

The right focus, Jones and others say, would be stepped-up enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and the targeting of economic stimulus assistance to create jobs in minority communities that historically have had high rates of joblessness. Leaders of the NAACP called for this sort of action at their 100th anniversary conference this month.

But even as civil rights advocates push in this direction, there are few signs that the message is resonating on Capitol Hill or in the White House. And many people echo the president and say the current economic situation calls for a broader approach rather than targeted assistance to specific communities.

“I think what the NAACP and others forget about and don’t focus on is our macroeconomic policy,” said William M. Rodgers III, a labor economist at Rutgers University who served as chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration. “What is the best kind of macroeconomic policy that’s going to maximize job creation? If we can get ourselves back to where we are creating 200,000 or 300,000 jobs per month, that will make it easier to remedy the long-term problem.”

Disparity’s Dimensions

Although the economic climate exacerbates the pain of unemployment, the racial divide in joblessness has indeed been a long-term issue. The Kerner Commission, tasked by President Lyndon B. Johnson with explaining the causes of urban race riots, reported in 1968 that one big factor was that “unemployment rates for Negroes are still double those for whites in every category, including married men, as they have been throughout the post-war period.” In other words, the gap is about the same today as it was four decades ago.

There are disparities for other racial groups as well. Hispanics, for example, have long had a jobless rate about one-and-a-half times that of whites.

Disparities in Unemployment: Click Here to View Chart

“The country has made progress — certainly I would rather live in 2009 than 1969 — but it’s clearly a persistent problem,” said Algernon Austin, a sociologist who studies race relations at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning Washington research organization.

In an economic slowdown, Austin and other scholars say, the relatively weak position of minorities in the workforce exacerbates their already existing high unemployment rates. Over the past few decades, minorities have made large gains in education, but they still lag behind whites in educational attainment. And while the specifics vary for different racial groups, minorities tend to work in lower-wage, non-supervisory jobs that are most likely to be eliminated when companies try to reduce labor costs.

On top of that, African-Americans in particular are concentrated in areas of the economy that have been particularly affected by the recession, such as manufacturing and government jobs.

“Blacks, once they are employed, are going to be lower-ranked and more recent hires,” Austin said. “Some of it is just that they are younger on average. The median age for black workers is lower than the median age for white workers. When companies shed workers, they tend to shed more from the recent hires. And the unemployment rate for less-educated workers is much higher than for the highly educated. All these factors in a period of recession will push up the black unemployment rate significantly.”

The difference in the jobless rates for blacks and whites has widened measurably since the recession began in December 2007, meaning that even as the jobless rate has risen for all groups, blacks have been hit harder.

In some areas the disparate impact of the recession on blacks and whites has been even more dramatic. The New York City Comptroller’s Office reported this month, for example, that the unemployment rate for black residents in the city rose four times as fast as the jobless rate for whites between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009.

Economists say it isn’t exactly clear why the gap is widening in New York, but they believe part of the explanation is that despite all the publicity surrounding job losses in the heavily white financial industry, the biggest share of payroll cuts has been in industries where African-Americans tend to work.

“Most of the job loss has been in manufacturing and construction, which has employed a lot of blacks,” said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning New York research group.

The loss of relatively well-paying jobs in industries such as manufacturing may also account for why, nationally, African-Americans were the only racial group effectively to see no increase in their paychecks this decade. Median weekly earnings for blacks are essentially unchanged over the past nine years, when adjusted for inflation. Whites, Hispanics and Asians have all benefited from real median wage gains since the beginning of 2000.

Austin, who conducted an analysis of Labor Department statistics for EPI, says the biggest problem is for African-American men. “Manufacturers are reducing hours, and as black males move out of these sectors, they’re getting lower-wage jobs,” he said.

Identifying Discrimination

In all areas of the country, the barriers to employment are particularly high for younger and male African-Americans. And it’s not simply that black men and youth are more likely to lose their jobs; they also find it much more difficult to get hired in the first place.

Some scholars point to the relatively high incarceration rates for black men as one barrier to employment when they are released. But it isn’t just that employers refuse to hire men who have been in prison. One 2005 study in New York City sent teams of black, Hispanic and white men in their early 20s to apply for the same positions. White applicants who said they had felony criminal convictions were just as likely or even more likely to be offered jobs than were black applicants who said they did not have any criminal record. Hispanic testers who said they had no record were just about as likely to get a job offer as white testers who said they had committed felonies.

HEAD TO HEAD: Students at a City University of New York job fair fill out applications. Even blacks with a college degree are more likely to be jobless than whites. (GETTY IMAGES / SPENCER PLATT)

“That illustrates the type of bias that exists against blacks, particularly against young black men, in the labor market,” Austin said.

Indeed, a large body of similar studies shows that blacks and other minorities are less likely to receive job offers than whites. One, conducted in Boston and Chicago and released in 2003, found that resumes for people with names popular among African-Americans, such as “Lakisha” or “Jamal,” were less likely to get a positive response than those with traditionally white-sounding names such as “Emily” or “Greg.” Another, conducted in New York City a couple of years ago, found that minorities of all backgrounds were much less likely to be interviewed and hired than whites at fine dining restaurants, and that minority applicants were often “channeled” into lower-paying positions.

“Racial discrimination is very alive and well,” said Philip Moss, a University of Massachusetts economist who performed some of the studies that seek to measure bias. “Those economic factors might be important, but there continues to be either outright racial discrimination or more-subtle forms of stereotyping and statistical judgments.”

Moss and his research partners found that African-Americans, in particular, are subject to bias even when compared with Hispanics. This was especially true in service industries where employers are more reliant on “soft skills,” such as the ability to interact with customers or co-workers.

In the 1990s, Moss concluded that when screening, hiring and promoting workers, employers were very subjective in their judgments in ways that didn’t favor blacks. Among those employers Moss interviewed, blacks were considered “very far down the queue for desirability for jobs that required customer service or telephone skills or required a team player or those sorts of things,” he said. “In fact, recent immigrants like Latinos ranked higher in employers’ perceptions in terms of work ethic and motivation without any clear evidence on which those stereotypes were based.”

The problem is compounded, Moss said, because “this all adds to the education disadvantage, the experiential disadvantage, and the code of language and dress, as well as more behavioral things that make people frightened of young black males.”

Colorblind Approach

Notwithstanding the view in some circles that minority communities need targeted employment aid and that vestiges of overt racial discrimination remain, so far neither the White House nor Congress is taking on that challenge.

Obama gave a nod to the steeper unemployment rates that African-Americans face when he addressed the NAACP convention in New York two weeks ago. And yet, even as he called for an end to discrimination, he made it clear that he takes a colorblind approach to the economy. “My administration is working so hard not only to create and save jobs in the short term, not only to extend unemployment insurance and help for people who have lost their health care in this crisis, not just to stem the immediate economic wreckage, but to lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity that will put opportunity within the reach of not just African-Americans, but all Americans,” the president said.

Signs of Bias: Click Here to View Chart

Afterward, NAACP leaders refrained from reiterating their call for specific economic aid for the minority community, choosing instead to praise the president’s overall tone.

“I think this speech assured all people of color, all people who suffer discrimination, including the gay community, that he cares about rights, that he cares about discrimination, that he’s going to do something,” the president of the association, Benjamin Jealous, told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose.

Even some experts who conclude that employment inequities are evident say now might not be the right time politically for racially focused economic policies. “With these race-neutral kinds of remedies, there’s a political reason why you do it,” said Rodgers of Rutgers. “And for President Obama, I think he has even more pressure to promote a race-neutral approach, because if he does try to be too specific in his policies, he’ll get accused of playing the race card.”

Efforts to help particular minority groups are more likely to be politically successful in times when the economy is good, Rodgers said, because there’s less risk of backlash from people in the majority culture who are also suffering and feel they’re being left out. Employment gains for minorities were most striking during the 1990s, he pointed out, when everyone was doing well.

“To me, Job 1 is getting ourselves back on a firm footing in terms of job creation, and then, from there, you can have the conversations about longstanding racial and gender inequality,” Rodgers said.

At the same time, thinkers such as John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative-leaning organization that promotes individual responsibility, say Obama is taking the right approach by emphasizing self-reliance and education. “People have to relate to the president, whatever color he is,” McWhorter said. “I think there’s a certain set who think it’s still 1969 because life isn’t perfect. They think that as long as you can find any evidence of racism or discrimination in society that nothing changes. But a lot has changed.”

The government should stay out of the role of directly providing jobs, McWhorter said, and he praised Obama’s recent proposal that the federal government pump more money into community colleges.

“Instead of the vague notion that the president is supposed to create jobs that last, which never happens, we need to look at how underserved people get and keep jobs,” he said. “The movement in the black community needs to be toward developing a new muscle, which is getting community college degrees in order to get good jobs.”

Minority Focus

Despite the administration’s race-neutral stance, and the support for that in some quarters, advocates for government action insist that minorities need more help right now. And those voices are likely to become louder if the economy and the jobless rate worsen.

“Obama has been consistent in not taking a position in favor of particular problems for black Americans, but that’s a position that runs into trouble if there are problems that are unique to the circumstances that confront black Americans,” said Darity, the Duke professor.

LIFTING ALL BOATS: Obama outlined a racially neutral approach to employment concerns to his audience at the NAACP’s 100th anniversary convention this month. (GETTY IMAGES/AFP / SAUL LOEB)

Austin of EPI makes a point that at the start of the recession a year and a half ago the unemployment rate for black men was about the same level as the overall national jobless rate is now. “President Obama was correct,” Austin said. “We do need to get the whole economy working. But if a 10 percent unemployment rate for black men is what we have in the good times, that’s not good enough. The only way we’re going to get this number to approach or equal the 4 percent for white men is by crafting policies that are explicitly aimed at getting that number down to 4 percent.”

Among the proposals favored by advocates of targeted assistance is the creation of federal jobs programs, similar to those that existed in the 1970s, in neighborhoods with a concentration of unemployed minority youth.

In addition, they say, money from the economic stimulus law enacted in February should be directed to job training and placement programs in inner-city neighborhoods where unemployment is highest.

Arnwine, of the Lawyers Committee, says the White House should convene an interagency task force to look at how stimulus money might be quickly spent to help minority communities.

“What’s the obligation to reach out, to retrain, to employ, to make sure that jobs aren’t just once again going to somebody’s best friend and somebody they know in the neighborhood?” she asked. “We need to really look at whether we’re training the populations that are suffering the most and address that in a very targeted way.”

Frozen Wages: Click Here to View Chart

Such steps, these advocates believe, should go hand in hand with stepped-up enforcement of laws that bar discrimination. They point to the George W. Bush administration, during which the staff for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was cut by 25 percent, and complain that efforts to combat racial and ethnic bias in the workplace are still needed.

“It’s very important that we fully enforce our anti-discrimination laws and that we stop pretending that the problems that still exist are isolated incidents,” said Jones of the National Urban League.

Last week, EPI President Lawrence Mishel noted the likelihood that unemployment will continue to rise in the coming months, even if the economy turns around. He called for an increase in government employment aid for particularly distressed communities and additional federal fiscal relief for states and for jobless workers.

At stake, these advocates say, are the fragile gains in employment and wealth that minorities have made in recent decades.

“The increases in poverty are going to last for several years, and then the children growing up in poverty are going to have negative outcomes,” Austin said. “This is a serious crisis. Right now, it’s easiest to see the short term, but I think we really need to start thinking about what we’re going to do in the long term to address the problems that will follow this.”

FOR FURTHER READING: Sotomayor and Ricci case, CQ Weekly, pp. 1712, 1620; economic stimulus and job creation, p. 1359; redefining poverty, p. 664; rewriting the social contract, p. 118; race and the GOP, 2005 CQ Weekly, p. 2486.