Black College Grads Twice as Likely to Be Unemployed as Whites

by Dexter Mullins for Al Jazeera America

At age 33 and boasting an Ivy League graduate degree, Kitama Cahill-Jackson never thought he’d end up a security guard.

But after years of layoffs and coming in second in job interviews, the Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker took the job.

Cahill-Jackson dreamed of a career as a news producer. But now, after years of unsuccessfully searching for journalism jobs, he said he can’t even look at the news.

“When I got to work at 4:30 in the morning, I would listen to NPR. I don’t listen anymore because it makes me sad. That’s the career I didn’t have,” he said.

“I don’t read the paper because it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart that I put on this uniform every day and come in here, and I’m not seen as a professional. I worked so hard academically, and for all of that, to work at a job that only requires a GED.”

Cahill-Jackson is among the more than half of black college graduates who are underemployed, according to a study (PDF) released by the Center for Economic Policy and Research this month.



Recent black college grads ages 22 to 27 have an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, more than double the 5.6 percent unemployed among all college grads in that demographic and almost a threefold increase from the 2007 level of 4.6 percent, before the Great Recession took its toll on the U.S. economy. More than half of black graduates, 55.9 percent, are underemployed.

Even for those who enter the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, areas where grads are the most needed and paid the highest, African-Americans still have a 10 percent unemployment rate and a 32 percent underemployment rate.

The study’s authors blame racism, a faltering economy and an unequal playing field.

“We live in a racist society,” John Schmitt, one of the authors, told Al Jazeera.

“We internalize a lot of views about the way people are that are deeply embedded in a lot of our economic and social policies. It’s extremely complicated, but the first step is that we need to acknowledge that we have a problem.”

While unemployment for blacks has almost always been higher than the national rate, the recession took an especially harsh toll, with an unemployment gap between blacks and the national rate growing from about 4 percentage points to nearly 6 points. And even for those who have jobs, the moribund economy has come with a financial cost.

“The old adage that sometimes nonblack folks are not always as familiar with but all black people are is that you have to work twice as hard to get half as much,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Emory University.

“That’s something all of our parents have always told us, and it has been so fairly consistent.”

Cottom said that it’s widely known that blacks have a higher level of unemployment than the national rate but that this report is different because it dispels the notion that education shortcomings are keeping black Americans from upward mobility.

Continue reading at Al Jazeera America

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