The following is an excerpt from the Twin Cities Daily Planet by Mary Turck
The Twin Cities metro area has the biggest disparity in black-white unemployment rates of any major metropolitan area in the country. What is going on here?
That's the question addressed by Dr. Algernon Austin, author of the Economic Policy Issues brief that presented the research on national disparities in unemployment by race. He spoke at a "leadership session" organized by the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability at in St. Paul on September 1.
Austin sliced, diced and dissected the numbers from a dozen studies, and came up with three reasons for the disparity. The first reason - plain, old racial discrimination - has a lot to do with the nationwide racial disparity in unemployment. The second two reasons - a high dropout rate and a young labor force - have more to do with why the Twin Cities has a worse record than other cities.
First, racial discrimination in hiring is still a major factor across the country, and in the Twin Cities as well.
Austin cited an African American proverb: "You've got to work twice as hard to get half as far as a Black person in white America." Study after study shows that white job applicants are more likely to be hired than black applicants, even when all qualifications are equal. The most convincing studies - such as a 2001 study in Milwaukee - match pairs of researchers, one white and one black, for similar characteristics and train them to present information in similar ways. When black and white applicants with identical qualifications applied for jobs, the positive employer response- being called in for an interview or offered a job on the spot - was 34 percent for white applicants and 14 percent for black applicants.
Some pairs of applicants were instructed to show criminal records on their applications. For these applicants, 17 percent of white applicants with criminal records received a positive response - higher than the positive response for black applicants with no criminal records.
Austin cited other studies and results in cities across the country - all showing that racial discrimination in hiring persists across the country.
Second, the Twin Cities has a higher high school dropout rate for African Americans and lack of education is a major contributor to unemployment.
The higher dropout rate, however, raises its own question: Why is the dropout rate high for African American youth in the Twin Cities?
While this may be a partial explanation for the difference in unemployment rates, it's only part of the picture.
For example, African Americans with a high school diploma or GED were three times as likely to be unemployed as whites with the same level of education. Even if blacks had the exact same educational profile as whites in Minneapolis, they would still have a much higher unemployment rate.
Not that this is only a Minneapolis, or Minnesota, problem. Austin cited national studies conducted prior to the current recession, which showed that African Americans with some college or an associate degree have unemployment rate similar to those of white high school dropouts.
The relatively young age of the African American labor force in the Twin Cities is also a factor, because younger people have higher unemployment rates.
Younger people have a higher unemployment rate than older workers. A higher percentage of African Americans are younger workers. But that's still only a partial factor. "Even if the black and white populations were identical in high school dropout rates and in their age distribution, there would still be a big difference in unemployment rates," concluded Austin. "People working to improve the employment opportunities for black workers should not underestimate the resistance to hiring."
Two local panels responded to Austin's presentation.
"We have to have race-conscious solutions," said Jermaine Toney, of the Organizing Apprenticeship Project. "We talk about racial disparities, but we nee to talk about race-conscious solutions, so that solutions do not end up reinforcing disparities. ... We have to get racial equity a s a standard of government effectiveness."
Solutions that address the problems of one in five African American males who have criminal records are crucial, said Sarah Walker, of 180 Degrees and the Second Chance Coalition. As a first step, she said, the "ban the box" legislation that says public sector employers cannot ask about criminal records in the first steps of the application process needs to be extended to private employers as well.
State Representative Bobby Joe Champion said that we need to "enforce local laws already on the books - that's part of the solution." Ramsey County Commissioner Toni Carter also called for attention to hiring in the Central Corridor LRT project.
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The right wing educational attack in Arizona expressed in the May 11 passage of HB 2281 banning the teaching of Ethnic Studies in all levels of education, k-12 through Higher Education, and new social standards by the Texas State Board of Education, confronts directly the historic struggles of people of color. These are attacks on our ability to tell our stories, to speak our truths, and to transform the curriculum regarding the history of the United States. These transformations in US education came from hard-fought struggles. From the 1968 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College resulting in the establishment of a Third World College, to the 1969 Morrill Hall Take Over by Black students at Minnesota and the struggles for American Indian and Chicano Studies on that campus, these fields emerged out of struggle.
Indeed, the Third World Strike at San Francisco State College might be called the borning struggle of contemporary Ethnic Studies in the academy. "On strike! Shut it down!" resonated on the campus from November 1968 to March 1969. This five-month strike, according to Helene Whitson, archivist of the San Francisco State College Strike Collection, was "longer than any other academic student strike in American higher education history." http://www.library.sfsu.edu/about/collections/strike/essay.html
It led to the creation of Third World College, which spawned hundreds of other Black, Chicano, Native and Asian Studies programs in the late 1960s.
The current period demands that the struggle continues since present political realities have everything to do with whether African American, Chicano/a, Native American and Asian Studies will survive. Let us not forget either that the buying and selling of Black bodies, African men, women and children, the seizing of Native, Latino/a and Asian lands and labor have been constants in the crafting of the United States as a nation. HB 2281 reconnects to this history of exploitation with its passage by attempting to erase the history of people of color in the US. Not surprisingly, it has emerged during a period of intensified racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant hostilities and practices. While attention has been rightfully focused on the draconian anti-immigration policies in Arizona, this attack on Ethnic Studies is another key feature in our struggle for educational and social justice in the US and globally.
In short, these are chilling times for peoples of color. The Ethnic studies programs, departments, centers in this country cannot / must not rest easily. The Ethnic Studies project has been named in conservative public discourse as the site of political divisiveness. Our status is fragile within the white academy that dominates higher education and K-12 , as institutional decisions too often embrace this logic. While those of us in Ethnic Studies have chastised and railed against conservatives, in fact, we face a neo-liberal reality where liberal and conservative sensibilities merge. The attacks on the conceptual playing fields of Ethnic Studies are matched by the politics of retreat and efforts to dismantle the fields altogether.
The perennial question for Ethnic Studies programs is why are we here? How must we connect to our students and wider constituencies? The Ethnic Studies paradigm is rooted in critique of Eurocentrism. The key actors who founded Ethnic Studies were young men and women of color who refused to accept their educational erasure. The Ethnic Studies task today remains the decolonization of knowledge, educating and creating the institutional basis for sustaining these fields. Most importantly, our task is refusing to be brought into the circle of domination that keeps injustice alive. No doubt, the attack on Ethnic Studies is one expression of an especially difficult set of inequalities in the US: the dismantling of living wages, intensified poverty, the destruction of welfare state supports which reach the poorest women and children in this country, and the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands Black and Brown men and women. This is happening in the context of global economic exploitation. These retreats from social justice are part and parcel of the same logic that led to HB 2281. Our struggle continues. ]]>
In this course Professor Atkins will examine the social and cultural contexts surrounding eras of athletes such as Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods. The impact of these athletes on national and international events will also be examined. The course also explores periods when it was not uncommon for black entertainers and athletes to become involved in politics and community activism.]]>
gap to close it for us."
"It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend." Nikki Giovanni
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The societal challenges that we face as a global society are complex, our understanding of its intricacies has grown and continues to grow considerably. As alumni and friends of African American & African Studies we now know more about the ways that education, politics, economics, and cultural complexities are interrelated and together shape the world in which we live. The health of our society has been and will continue to depend upon our ability to care for past, present and future generations.