Lowest Ever Black Jobless Rate Is Still Twice That of Whites<br />“You had a white-owned company with white leadership saying to people we are doing the right thing,” said Mr. King, the Summit Academy leader.<br />“I was working twice as hard as the next guy by me, and thinking five times faster than him just to stay afloat,” Mr. Parrish said.<br />“If we can’t even answer the ‘why,’ we can’t hope to design policy solutions to close those gaps,” Mr. Kashkari said.<br />Even at the low of 6.8 percent recorded in December — it climbed back to 7.7 percent in January<br />— the unemployment level for black Americans would qualify as a near crisis for whites.<br />The black unemployment rate there went from 23.5 percent in 2011 to 7.5 percent last month but remained at more than twice the rate for whites.<br />“It’s not microwaveable,” said Louis King, who runs a training program in Minnesota<br />that aims to put minority workers into construction and health care careers.<br />The company pushed trade unions to diversify their ranks<br />and told its subcontractors “they weren’t going to get our business if they didn’t pull their weight,” Mr. Mortenson said.
