Black American Unemployment Rate Continues Above 9%

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 5, 8:15AM EDT

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While unemployment on a national basis dropped to 5.1% as the economy added 173,000 jobs, among the groups that continue to have a high unemployment rate is black Americans, where the rate has lingered around 9% for many months.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports:

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for whites declined to 4.4 percent in August. The rates for adult men (4.7 percent), adult women (4.7 percent), teenagers (16.9 percent), blacks (9.5 percent), Asians (3.5 percent), and Hispanics (6.6 percent) showed little change in August.

The unemployment rate among black Americans was 9.1% in July, 9.5% in June and 10.2% in May. That keeps it more than twice the rate for white Americans.

There are several theories about why the figure is so high. Among the most common, and most dismissive, is that the trend has persisted for many years. According to the Washington Post:

There was a stubborn bit of data buried in the August jobs report released on Friday: The unemployment rate for blacks (11.4 percent) was more than twice that for whites (5.3 percent). We call this stubborn for one simple reason: In the 42-year period during which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has separated out unemployment data into different races, black unemployment has always been higher than white unemployment.

According to the editors at The Atlantic, another reason:

[W]hen black Americans lose their jobs, they stick to their job search for longer than white Americans, inflating the black unemployment rate relative to white’s.

Another, put forward by editors at Al Jazeera America:

Social scientists, economists and other experts cite a variety of reasons for the high unemployment rate among black males: lack of training, loss of public-sector jobs, high incarceration rates (at least five times that of white men), unequal access to social networks and outright discrimination. When coupled with the fact that the recession hit all men particularly hard (men lost 2.6 jobs to every 1 by a woman, in large part because of a decline in manufacturing and construction), a clearer picture of the tenuous relationship black men have with today’s labor market starts to emerge.

Looking across this set of analyses, one thing stands out. There is no unanimity about causes, which means, incidentally, there is no common path to a solution.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.