As the nascent economic recovery picks up steam, minorities are still struggling to make gains, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. The report, “The State of Communities of Color in the U.S. Economy,” documents that minorities continue to lag behind Whites in homeownership and economic security while reporting higher rates of unemployment and foreclosures. Representatives from several top advocacy groups held a conference call with reporters this past Friday to discuss the report, and they urged policymakers to take more aggressive measures to aid the most economically depressed communities.
Christian Weller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-author of the report, said that while the recession affected a broad swath of Americans, it disproportionately affected communities of color.
“The recession came after [minorities] had already experienced a weakening during the last business cycle from 2001 to 2007,” he said. “The recession made a bad situation a lot worse.”
The unemployment rate for African-Americans at the beginning of the recession, in December of 2007, was 8.7 percent. Black unemployment rate is now near 16 percent, according to the report.
Particularly troubling: Nearly 40 percent of young Blacks are unemployed. Asian-American undergraduates are more likely to be unemployed after graduation than their peers. Also worrisome; young people who are unable to enter the labor force fail to develop skills that would enable them to obtain jobs in the future.
Asian-American poverty and employment levels tend to be similar to Whites, giving a misleading impression of economic parity, said Lisa Hasegawa, executive director of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development.
“Asian sub-populations have vastly different statistics with regard to poverty in the general Asian-American population,” she said.
