“In the 1960s, there were a number of occupations that blacks just couldn’t get — you were categorically blocked,” said Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “Now you can see blacks in almost every occupation — including in the White House.”
But fighting discrimination is like trying to inoculate against a mutating disease: The socially and legally sanctioned discrimination of the 1960s gave way to stealthier-but-still-dangerous forms of bias.
“It’s still the case that while there’s little categorical exclusion, we still see evidence that employers prefer white workers,” Austin said. He pointed to much-cited research that found that people with “black-sounding” names were less likely to be hired for jobs than people without them, even when their qualifications were about the same, and that a white man with a criminal record applying for a job was more likely to receive a response from an employer than a black man without one.
The march’s organizers also hoped to put a dent in the double-digit unemployment rate among blacks (10 percent). That figure hasn’t improved in the 50 years since, according to the Economic Policy Institute; indeed, the black unemployment rate over the last half-century — 11.6 percent — suggests that black America is operating in a permanent economic recession. And since 1963, the average rate of black unemployment has hovered at more than twice the unemployment for whites.
(During the recent recession, black unemployment crept up to nearly 15 percent.)
Those dismal numbers might still understate just how bad the employment situation is. “To be counted as unemployed, you have to be actively looking for work,” Austin said. ” In communities where it’s very difficult for people to find work, people drop out of the labor work because their chances are so small.” In other words, there are untold numbers of unemployed black folks we’ve just ceased to count.