Black Unemployment 94% Higher Than White

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 7:54PM EST · Published Aug 4, 8:45AM EDT

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Black Unemployment 94% Higher Than White — © Thinkstock

Almost all the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics July Employment Situation was good. The economy added 157,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.9%. Not all groups did equally well. The unemployment rate for whites was 3.4%. For blacks, it was 6.6%, or 94% higher.

The unemployment rate among blacks has not wavered much since earlier in the year. The number was 6.9% in March.

The BLS stats for July:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 157,000 in July, and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services, in manufacturing, and in health care and social assistance.

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Household Survey Data

In July, the unemployment rate edged down by 0.1 percentage point to 3.9 percent, following an
increase in June. The number of unemployed persons declined by 284,000 to 6.3 million in July.
Both measures were down over the year, by 0.4 percentage point and 676,000, respectively.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.4 percent) and Whites
(3.4 percent) declined in July. The jobless rates for adult women (3.7 percent), teenagers
(13.1 percent), Blacks (6.6 percent), Asians (3.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.5 percent) showed
little or no change over the month.

Among the unemployed, the number of reentrants to the labor force decreased by 287,000 in July
to 1.8 million, following an increase in June. (Reentrants are persons who previously worked
but were not in the labor force prior to beginning their job search.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was essentially
unchanged at 1.4 million in July and accounted for 22.7 percent of the unemployed.

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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.