Michigan has the highest rate of unemployment among black Americans in the country. Nearly 1 in 5 blacks there — 18.7 percent — is out of work.

That’s about more than twice the rate for whites in the state, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

This year, Washington’s political class hasn’t merely given up on trying to fix U.S. unemployment; it’s given up on even discussing the subject. This is shameful, and not simply because the jobless rate is still two or so percentage points higher nationwide than it should be, or because the long-term unemployed have been left out to dry. No, it’s shameful because many communities across the country are still simply being ravaged by the lack of work.

Particularly the black community. Even in good times, the unemployment rate tends to be roughly twice as high for blacks as whites, if not worse. Nationwide, black workers today are facing 13.2 percent joblessness. In some large states, the rate is far worse, as shown in the graph below, which was recently posted by the Economic Policy Institute. In Michigan, it was 18.7 percent by the end of 2012. In New Jersey, Illinois, North Carolina, California, and Ohio, the rate was above 15 percent.

Asian-Americans have the highest income and education levels of any racial group in the country. So it might be surprising that they have a higher poverty rate than non-Hispanic whites. Michel Martin discusses the issue with Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute and Rosalind Chou, co-author of The Myth of the Model Minority.

This hits home in Minneapolis, where black unemployment was estimated at 27 percent in 2011 by the Economic Policy Institute. Also, home prices in three of the city’s poorest sections — Camden, Near North, and Phillips — remain more than 60 percent below their pre-recession highs, according to the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors. Homes in north Minneapolis routinely are worth a third or a fourth of what people paid for them in 2005.

Algernon Austin, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, said that taken together, the difference between unemployment rates between different racial groups and their median incomes was just as big a contributing factor to the wealth gap as housing. The black unemployment rate has stayed north of 13 percent since the recession began, and many researchers say the number might be much higher.