The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that the first African American president met with African American leaders to talk about how to address the huge unemployment of the African American population.
Prominent African-American leaders pressed President Barack Obama on Wednesday to pursue an economic agenda that includes targeted help for blacks, whose unemployment rate is much higher than the national average and nearly twice that of whites.
1) Isn't "targeted help" exactly what so many black people have been receiving from the federal government for decades now? At disproportionately high rates African American individuals and families signed onto government assistance programs since they first started mushrooming out of the Washington ground under LBJ. And how much good has it really done them?
2) How ironic is it that on a black president's watch the African American population is langusihing in higher degrees of unemployment than ever? When he said "the road would be long" in his acceptance speech on Election Night, could Barack Obama really have meant that over a year into his presidency that his own ethnic group would be doing worse with no sign of getting better? Wasn't he supposed to bring hope and change for the better to his own ethnic group as well as the country entire?
Of course, someone may object that if African Americans' plight started to actually improve in the United States, while other ethnicities held constant, Obama's policies might still face criticism for being too "targeted." But that would depend on why African Americans did uniquely better. If Obama suddenly decided to step back and let the free marketplace actually be "free at last," and African Americans uniquely seized upon the opportunities afforded to them by the loosening of Washington's command-and-control policies, by working hard and gaining marketable skills, then more power to them. That is how Asian Americans have prospered in this country for decades.
The story continues:
"We worked very hard to share with him ideas around the need for targeted relief - and that means to urban communities, to areas of high unemployment," [National Urban League President Marc] Morial said. He said the next challenge is to "create the political will in the Congress. My argument is that when cities do well, America does well. Cities are the economic engines."
Indeed, the story does not at all discuss the Asian American unemployment rate, which, like with all ethnicities in the United States, is higher now than it's been in a long, long time.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment figures show jobless rates for whites, African Americans, and Asian Americans. But how much are Asian Americans hurting in comparison to blacks and even whites?
In Jan. 2010 the unemployment rate for:
*Whites was 9.6 percent,
*African Americans was 17.3 percent, and
*Asian Americans was 8.4 percent.
Asian Americans must be receiving some serious targeted help from the United States government, right? The National Association for the Advancement of Asian American People (NAAAAP) must really be breathing down Barack Obama's neck. Right? ... No?
At a press conference on Wednesday, the President said:
the best thing that I can do for the African American community or the Latino community or the Asian community, whatever community, is to get the economy as a whole moving.
Somebody should tell him the economy is already moving for the Asian (American) community and has been moving for decades. Why would that be the case? Because they're the ones who aren't going to Barack Obama to get their economy moving. They rely (mostly I mean -- wouldn't want to stereotype anybody) on themselves. They don't play (generally I mean) the victim. They work hard, they educate themselves, they learn marketable skills, they build their incomes over time, and whaddaya know, they get jobs, even the few that are out there. And they prosper.
It ain't rocket science.
(And no, I'm not suggesting that African Americans as a group play the victim or don't work hard or anything like that. To the extent that any of the 17.3 percent of African Americans who are unemployed do not work hard and do play victims, it is only because they have been persuaded to do so by the well-intentioned policies of central planners in Washington D.C. in recent decades -- policies that place African Americans in a state of dependence on government rather than on themselves for goods and services.)
Leave a comment