Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Bob Johnson said Tuesday that the nation would “never tolerate white unemployment at 14 or 15 percent” and yet unemployment for the black community has been double that of white Americans for over 50 years.
“This country would never tolerate white unemployment at 14 and 15 percent. No one would ever stay in office at 14 or 15 percent unemployment in this nation, but we’ve had that double unemployment for over 50 years,” Johnson said while speaking at the National Press Club about the gap between whites and blacks in America.
“The national average is 7.7 percent, and African-American unemployment is 13.8 percent. To be honest, it’s probably greater than that when you count the number of African-Americans who have simply given up on finding employment,” said Johnson, who is also founder and chairman of The RLJ Companies.
In 1972, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 11.2 percent in January of that year and as low as 9.4 percent in December of that same year. It dipped as low as seven percent in April 2000. The unemployment rate for blacks in February 2013 was 13.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Johnson said the challenge was to figure out why the unemployment rate for blacks has been so high, “and if that doesn’t change, somebody’s going to have to pay— 34 million African-Americans are not going to leave this country, millions of African-Americans who don’t have jobs.”
“Somebody’s going to have to pay for them. Somebody’s going to have to take care of them, and if somebody’s going to have to take care of them, that money’s got to come from somebody. And whoever’s paying for it is going to be upset about it, and they’re going to start looking for somebody to blame,” Johnson said.
According to the poll Johnson commissioned, which was conducted by Zogby, 50 percent of African-Americans blame the “failure of the education system for minorities/African-Americans” for high unemployment among blacks, while 48 percent say the “lack of corporate commitment to hiring minorities/African-Americans” is to blame for unemployment in the black community.
Twenty-five percent of respondents blame the lack of government policies for the high rate of black unemployment. Eighteen percent don’t blame anyone or anything, and twelve percent aren’t sure.
“We can’t be competitive if we don’t put all our people on the field to work, and African-Americans can’t be consumers if they don’t have jobs. They can’t buy houses, and the reason the wealth gap is so high, we don’t [have] home ownership. We don’t have savings. We don’t have investments, and part of that is because we don’t have capital,” Johnson said.What if an entity existed that didn't have a lack of corporate commitment to hiring minorities/blacks? In fact, what if one could look at government hiring at the local, state, and federal level, and point out that it operates as a powerful jobs program for otherwise unemployable black people? [Anti-white racism found in Chicago transit hiring: Black population called 'unduly dependent on public sector employment, WND.com, 3-23-13]:
The Chicago Transit Authority, one of the largest employers in Chicago, has a dramatic racial imbalance in its workforce, records show.
Data obtained by WND through a Freedom of Information Act request reveals that whites and Hispanics are vastly underrepresented in the Chicago Transit Authority workforce.
Minorities are 82 percent of the total CTA workforce, with blacks comprising 65 percent. The city of Chicago itself is roughly one-third white, one-third Hispanic and one-third black.
The percentage of blacks in CTA employment is twice their share of the population, and several legal experts are surprised by this disparity, and note that a similar racial imbalance would be cause for alarm if the disparity were weighted toward whites.
The disproportionately high percentage of blacks employed in Chicago by CTA is part of a pattern observed in Washington, D.C., Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta, Ga., among other cities. According to the New York Times, one out of every five black workers has a public sector job.
University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax offered her view to WND:Although blacks would almost certainly be better off if they were more active in the private economy, the fact is that they are unduly dependent on public sector employment. Without government jobs, the turmoil and instability that is already too prevalent in the black community might increase.In the private and public sector, disparities in hiring or pay are often the subject of controversy and lawsuits.
Roger Clegg, president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, told WND that the CTA demographics would be an issue if the races were reversed.
“It is certainly true that, if the shoe were on the other foot, there would be all kinds of accusations being made.”
Clegg says that the disparities raise questions about CTA’s hiring practices.
“I would say that these numbers don’t prove that anything is amiss, but that they do merit further inquiry to ensure that the CTA is recruiting and hiring the best qualified individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin,” he said.
Wax argues that “[t]he whole point of discarding disparate impact liability” which she seeks to abolish, “is that a discrepancy between specific groups’ percentage in the population and their representation in a particular job or job type should not be the basis for litigation.”Yes, Virginia, the government does exist to employ otherwise unemployable black people. It's not just the CTA that is run as a jobs program, with your friendly, neighborhood United States Postal Service (USPS) performing as the ultimate market inefficient employer of otherwise unemployable black people as well.
Let's face it -- the government and barber shops are about the only two sources of steady jobs for black people.
Oh, and Mr. Johnson, black people can be "consumers" if they don't have jobs... that's what the EBT/Food Stamp card is for!! That you can't invest the government issued EBT/Food Stamp in the stock market yet is only a few years away from seeing implementation into the marketplace.
Weaponized Equality, after all, is the theory that the government can break down all barriers of inequality placed in front of black people.
Damn the consequences, right?
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