That’s how USA Today’s writer, DeWayne Wickham sees it.
In a piece explaining how then-Senator Barack Obama made a commitment in a July 2007 speech to improve the lives for people in urban America, when the nation’s overall unemployment rate was 4.7% –with whites having a jobless rate of 4.2% and black unemployment standing at 8.1%–Wickham makes the following points:
- In 2011, the black jobless rate is 15.5% nearly double that of white job seekers.
- The Obama administration spent $608 million during the first 17 days of its involvement in Libya’s civil war. Yet, it cannot muster either the money or the will to combat black unemployment.
- Black leaders give Obama a pass on his failure to fight black unemployment vigorously, even as they complain in private. Wickham notes, their reluctance to challenge Obama the way Martin Luther King, Jr. did Lyndon Johnson in 1967 is striking.
- In March, the Obama administration applauded the creation of 216,000 new jobs and a slight dip in the overall unemployment rate, even as black unemployment edged up.
- In December 2009, when the black jobless rate was just 5.5 percentage points higher than the national rate, Obama said he didn’t think special programs were needed to close the gap. Now that it’s nearly 7% points higher, black leaders should demand that Obama focus laser-like on this problem, as he has done on ending the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and in pressing forward with immigration reform.
