In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents.
For African Americans, the last 50 years have been marked by extremely high unemployment occasionally interrupted by periods of merely high unemployment.
In fact, income inequality has gotten so extreme here that the US now ranks 93rd in the world in “income equality.” China’s ahead of us. So is India. So is Iran.
Here’s what the Wall Street protesters are so angry about (many more graphs at the link)
In May, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for [six months or more]) increased by 361,000 to 6.2 million; their share of unemployment increased to 45.1 percent.
Bureau of Labor Statistics - Employment situation summary, June 3 2011
Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe that there are no jobs available for them. The number of discouraged workers in the U.S. increased sharply during the current recession, rising to 717,000 in the first quarter of 2009, a 70-percent increase from the first quarter of 2008. Relative to their share of the labor force, young people, blacks, and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics and men were over-represented among discouraged workers.
“Bad jobs” are typically considered those that pay low wages and do not include access to health insurance and pension benefits. As shown here, about 10% of full-time workers are in low-wage jobs, about 30% don’t have health insurance, and about 40% don’t have pensions. The graph also shows that the likelihood of being in a bad job is much worse for part-time workers, for on-call and day laborers, and for those working for temporary help agencies.
Women and men tend to work in very different occupations. And overall “men’s jobs” are better paid than “women’s jobs.”
An African-American child raised in a lower-class family is 37% less likely to become a professional basketball player than is an African-American child raised in a middle- or upper-class family.
Dubrow, J. & Adams, J. (2010). Hoop inequalities: Race, class and family structure background and the odds of playing in the National Basketball Association. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, November 2010.
(Source: web.hbr.org)
American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.
Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino.
On MLK Day, some thoughts on segregated schools, Arne Duncan, and President Obama
And life inside these [Rio de Janeiro] slums is difficult. Complexo do Alemao ranks lower than the African country of Gabon on the United Nations Human Development Index, a world survey of living standards that measures factors like access to education and health care. By comparison, the Development Index scores of upscale Rio neighborhoods like Gavea and Leblon are higher than Norway, the world’s top-ranked country.
South Koreans produced more than four-million tons of food waste last year, about 100,000 tons more than the basic food available to North Koreans.
Although the position of young black men in the city’s labor force was already tenuous before the recession, it was significantly impacted during the recession; this demographic group’s unemployment rate increased by 11 percentage points, reaching nearly 34 percent during the period January 2009 through June 2010—the highest of all demographic groups.
In addition, the employment-population ratio for young black men decreased to 25 percent in 2009–2010, meaning that only one in four young black men had a job in the city during the period January 2009 through June 2010.
On average, black men and women were unemployed for 36 weeks, almost two months longer than the mean duration of unemployment for all New Yorkers.
Black men experienced the largest absolute increase in their unemployment rate during the recession—from 9 percent in 2006 (already high) to 17.9 percent in 2009… which effectively doubled black men’s unemployment in the city.
← Older entries
Page 1 of 3
