The Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson has a really excellent piece on the despair felt by many who are unemployed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — where 1 in 2 black men is out of work. It’s one of the best pieces of daily journalism I’ve read on how federal efforts to stem unemployment impact a specific community and also what the community in question thinks about their government:

In interviews with more than 30 African Americans here, the emotions among the jobless ranged from deflated to defiant, angry to hopeless. Nearly all said their frustrations have not affected their support for Obama. Most blamed Wall Street or the Bush administration for the deteriorating economy, though some said they think Obama should do more to create jobs. A few sided with members of the black caucus who have accused the president and those around him of not being sensitive to the higher unemployment rates among blacks.

All the same, the long-standing problem of joblessness among blacks in Milwaukee — only intensified by this latest recession — holds opportunity and fear for the people here. There is some hope that the federal government will find a way to spur job creation, and there is fear that the rest of the country will recover, leaving chronically jobless communities jobless.

These are key points Thompson’s interview subjects make. For one, I agree that the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, is most responsible for the recession, despite the daily news media tendency to utterly forget a world prior to the Obama presidency. The last point made here is chilling: there will be a national “recovery” and African Americans won’t be part of it. Barabara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammed made this point in a New York Times op-ed this September:

…[B]lacks are the ones who are taking the brunt of the recession, with disproportionately high levels of foreclosures and unemployment. And they weren’t doing so well to begin with. At the start of the recession, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling to a lower economic level, according to a study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University and Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research organization.

In fact, you could say that for African-Americans the recession is over. It occurred from 2000 to 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During those seven years, one-third of black children lived in poverty, and black unemployment — even among college graduates — consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.

That was the black recession. What’s happening now is more like a depression.

Indeed, the unenmployment numbers for black males in Milwaukee are depression-like. Thomspon shows that there are stimulus programs — like green job training to become an arborist — being used in Milwaukee. But the scale of these programs is pathetically inadequete in the face of Milwaukee’s concentrated unemployment.

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