Blacks in the Great Recession

From The Defenders Online:

In the midst of this crisis, President Obama has tried to help those left behind by the conservative drift of the last three decades by stimulating the economy, extending health care coverage, reforming our immigration policies, and enabling workers to freely form unions. And just as Dr. King spoke of “twin-headed creatures”, the opponents of Obama’s initiatives rail against efforts to use government’s powers to aid the less fortunate and simultaneously, use very thinly-veiled racial codes to whip up opposition. (And often, codes are not used at all.)

…What lesson can we draw from this on Labor Day? The key to revitalizing the black community lies in improving the economic fortunes of its workers. One the one hand, this means getting the Black unemployed into good paying jobs—we cannot be satisfied by accepting any job as being good enough—and improving the quality of jobs held by black workers—many blacks are holding low-paying jobs, and these jobs must pay decent wages.

But more fundamentally, this means that, just as the black community had to rely on self-help and political action to defeat legal segregation, the black community cannot focus solely on community uplift to improve the conditions of black workers; we must also engage in political action to raise the living standards of black workers.

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