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This isht is getting way out of hand:

The unemployment situation across America is bad, no doubt. But for African-Americans in some cities, this is not the great recession. It’s the Great Depression. Take Charlotte, N.C., for example. It is a jewel of the “new South.” The largest financial center outside of New York City, it’s the showcase for next year’s Democratic National Convention. It was a land of hope and opportunity for many blacks with a four-year college degree or higher.

According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, in Charlotte, N.C., the unemployment rate for African-Americans is 19.2 percent. If you add in people who have given up looking for jobs, that number exceeds 20 percent, which, according to economists Algernon Austin and William Darity, has effectively mired blacks in a depression. “You’re looking at a community that is economically depressed in my opinion,” Austin said. “And we need action that will address that scale of joblessness.”

There are jobs to be had in Charlotte. But African-Americans are not sharing in the recovery in the way others are. Devah Pager, a sociologist at Princeton University, conducted groundbreaking research in Wisconsin and found that black men were less likely to be called back on a job application than white men with a criminal record.

The statistics went like this:

Job call-backs:

White non-criminal: 34%

White criminal: 17%

Black non-criminal: 14%

Black criminal: 5%

According to Darity, “The differential in unemployment between blacks and non-blacks in the U.S. is perhaps one of the most dramatic indicators of discrimination in this society.” So – what to do about it?

The Congressional Black Caucus has been leaning on President Obama to address the epidemic of black unemployment on his watch. So far, the president has resisted the notion of job programs specifically targeting African-Americans. His position is that a rising tide will lift all boats. But the tide remains out as far as job creation goes.

The recession – or depression — in the black community is rapidly eroding the black middle class. At its convention in Boston this week, the National Urban League released a troubling report on that topic. It found that the recession has virtually wiped out all of the economic gains blacks made in the past 30 years.

And a new report from the Pew Research Center drives home just how bad things are out there.

It found that in 2005, the average net worth for white households was $134, 992. For black households, it was $12,124. (That’s not a typo.)

In 2009, the number dropped to $113,149 for whites and a paltry $5,700 for blacks.

Algernon Austin believes the government hasn’t taken the problem seriously enough. “It’s just one step below the scale of the Great Depression,” he said. “But we haven’t treated it as a crisis of that magnitude.”

$113,149 and $5,700???

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