Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Even before the nation-wide demonstrations that have racked the nation and led to arrests in 17 cities, over the wrongful death at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman of George Floyd, the situation of African-Americans in this country was cratering because of the pandemic and its associated economic Depression.
Some of the anger we see in US cities is a revolution of rising expectations. African-Americans were just beginning to experience some wage growth in recent years. That has just been wiped out.
1. Black unemployment has risen to over 16 percent.
The Guardian reported that
“40% of households earning less than $40,000 have experienced job losses, according to the Federal Reserve.”
The Guardian continues
“Only 20% of black workers reported being eligible to work from home, compared with about 30% of their white counterparts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”
2. The Black middle class is being hollowed out, with hundreds of thousands of businesses going under:
The novel coronavirus and the shutdown have devastated the small new Black middle class. The number of working black business owners has fallen 41 percent since February. That is, nearly half of Black businesses are mothballed, and some of them will never come back.
The country has lost 450,000 Black businesses. They were disproportionately in sectors of the economy worst-hit by closures– hair and nail salons, taxis, restaurants, daycare centers. Moreover, WaPo’s Hannah Knowles writes, they don’t have deep pockets and were likely just scraping by to begin with. They also have more difficulty accessing government aid (much of which was scooped up by white chains). They are often too tiny, or don’t have employees, and so don’t meet the criteria set by Congress.