Not Working for Everyone
Markets for White and Black Labor
Today is Juneteenth in the United States, a new federal holiday marking the abolition of slavery.
Racial hierarchies affect many facets of American society, politics, and economics. As a scholar of international relations and foreign policy, one of the tendencies I fight is the idea that there are some spheres that are immune to these dynamics. Forthcoming work suggests that Black and non-Black Americans view U.S. foreign policy systematically differently, for instance, and racial identity shapes how Americans view trade. Yet there are some areas of U.S. life where I think that the evidence of direct, material importance of racial divisions are even easier to see yet somehow underappreciated, like racial differences in labor markets.
If you remember the 2008 recession—an epochal moment in U.S. and global political economy—you will remember that unemployment jumped from about 4.9-5.1 percent in early 2008 to nearly 10 percent by the fall of 2009. (I was in Ph.D. school at the time, so the direct effect of the recession felt muted, but even in academia the signs were noticeable—many job openings were canceled and in a lot of ways the political science academic job market has never recovered.)
I mention this to point out that a 10 percent unemployment rate is huge—not Great Depression, of course, but notable. It’s the sort of thing that we develop generational and cultural memories about. The recession of the early 1980s hit even higher peaks and similarly loom large, for example.
Here’s the thing. The average unemployment rate (seasonally adjusted) for Black Americans from 1972 until 2023 has been 11.6 percent. The peak unemployment rate for Black America during that period was 21.2 percent, comparable to the overall unemployment rate at the height (or depth) of the Great Depression. (As my macro professor muttered back before 9/11, when we have an unemployment rate of 20 percent for Whites, we call it the Great Depression—when we have an unemployment rate of 20 percent for Black Americans, we call it Tuesday.)
Looking at unemployment statistics disaggregated by race is like being introduced to a parallel economic history of the United States. Variations in unemployment are magnified. Levels of unemployment that would presage revolutionary levels of unrest are, if not frequent, not exactly unheard of. Levels of unemployment that cause political earthquakes for the main USA (Carter, Clinton, and Obama, for instance) are structural conditions. And this is the unemployment rate, not a measure of labor force attachment, so this is counting people who are looking for work.
Policymakers, it’s fair to say, have tolerated this situation. The Black unemployment rate is not a commonly cited target for improvement. Conservatives tend to assume this is the natural order of things; electorally-minded liberals tend to talk vaguely about “lifting all boats”. Quite a lot of White folks assume that this reflects something innate or cultural, rather than paying attention to the mounds of evidence showing that prejudice (e.g., against “Black” names) or other factors explain rather more of this variation than such explanations would suggest.
There is, to be blunt, an official acceptance of a “natural” rate of Black unemployment far higher than the system would ever tolerate for any other group. Not only does the system produce unequal outcomes, it tolerates inequalities on this simple measure of economic success for some groups that it would never do for others.
Happily, right now (literally), we are experiencing the lowest recorded Black unemployment rates in history—4.7 percent, or what in the broader economy would count as a healthy economy (even if it also seems that policymakers have tolerated far too high unemployment since roughly the Carter era). Yet there’s still a lot of room for intervention and ambition. The Black unemployment rate is 50 percent higher than the White unemployment rate, for example, even though that’s an improvement on the historic level of having Black unemployment be 2.13 times higher than White levels of joblessness.
Employment matters for many reasons. Skilling happens on the job, for one, and having a job is a source of dignity, satisfaction, and, well, money. Getting folks into jobs should be a priority. We can demand better.