Yesterday, I heard from two different community leaders within a matter of hours a statistic that made me cringe. The Twin Cities holds another top title but this time it’s for having the greatest disparity between blacks and whites in terms of unemployment among other large metro areas in the country. What does this mean? African American Twin Citians are three times as likely as White Twin Citians to be unemployed, even when accounting for education levels.
Just released, a report from Economic Policy Institute researcher Algernon Austin, Uneven Pain: Unemployment by Metro Area and Race, examines unemployment by race in the 50 largest metro areas in the United States. The national average unemployment rate in 2009 was 9.3 percent, while in the Twin Cities the black unemployment rate was 20.4 percent. The unemployment rate for whites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metro was 6.6 percent—well below the national average.
This is bad news on top of an already bad situation with so many people out of work here and across the country.
At the same time, it doesn’t come as a surprise to me…rather it’s an affirmation of what we’ve been hearing from communities and in neighborhoods across the metro, and it’s a challenge–a challenge to us as community leaders seeking create a better quality of life for all residents. To meet this challenge, we have to acknowledge these disparities exist and persist. If education is the route to obtaining a job, what does it mean when you can have the same levels of education and yet be three times more likely to be unemployed? It means we need to look deeper into the issues and barriers for job seekers. It means we need to be more intentional and aggressively looking at issues of race in our hiring practices and community responses to unemployment. As employers, it means we need to reflect the community in which we operate and serve.
It also means we need to look deeper at ourselves to create the kind of just and prosperous community we want to live in.
This is indeed troubling…and it speaks to the deeper issues of racial disparity that are still very prevalent and, sadly, not so deep these days. In addition, to the degree that this reflects African-Americans in poverty, I see the Twin Cities’ low-income African-American communities as very geographically insulated more so than in some other metro areas. Our weak transportation system and the geography of employment opportunities make finding and keeping work a bigger challenge if you live in North Minneapolis, Eastside Saint Paul or other lower-income communities of color. So, yes, we have deeper work to do on racism. And, we can do more to focus our job creation efforts closer to our communities of color.