While the rest of us are weathering through the Great Recession, Fox News reported on national television last week, African-Americans in Charlotte are living through the equivalent of the Great Depression, with a mind-boggling 20-percent unemployment rate.
Wow. That's a huge story. Wonder why it hasn't been covered in Charlotte?
Fox News reporters parachuted in and found black leaders not only willing to talk poignantly about the soul-crushing economic struggles of their community here in Charlotte, but eager. That's probably because no one around here has really bothered to ask.
As best as I can tell, that 20-percent statistic has never been published in this media market. The only African-American unemployment statistic I could find was published back in January, in a single line in The Charlotte Observer that mentioned that the black unemployment rate in November was 16 percent.
Are you freaking kidding me? That means that the African-American unemployment rate in Charlotte has now skyrocketed to 19.2 percent (it is more than 20 percent when those who have given up looking for jobs are counted) and no one in the media here has done a five-part series on it?
Well, why not?
Fox used the unemployment data to question the DNC's decision to showcase Charlotte by holding the convention here. The network questioned whether highlighting a city with 20 percent black unemployment after four years of Democratic policies is necessarily a good idea.
The implications of that kind of national spotlight for Charlotte are huge. Our employment problems, which are worse than the national average, will be splashed across the national news for all to see. So will our economic problems.
And the situation could be getting worse. Charlotte lost a staggering 2,600 jobs in June, when the total number of number of people employed in Charlotte shrunk from 317,118 to 314,485 in a single month, according to state employment security commission data.
That's an odd and shocking economic development, given that the city had been gradually adding jobs each month since January of this year. But in June, in a single month, the city lost nearly every job it had added so far this year, and the unemployment rate jumped from 10.4 in May to 11.2 in June.
That keeps us at an unemployment rate that is stubbornly above the rest of the country. The devastating loss of jobs does not bode well for local economic momentum going into the Democratic National Convention and, again, for all that national scrutiny.
What the city and county's leadership is doing obviously isn't working. The only significant economic action the city's elites have taken since this recession started was to raise taxes and make plans to take on more debt for more projects — in a county that has more than doubled its debt in the last decade. That makes it that much harder for the city to compete for the businesses/jobs we desperately need. Aside from assisting with business recruitment, the mayor hasn't taken a single significant action to boost the local economy. Ditto for the city's other leaders and the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. They simply have no plan. They aren't even discussing the need to have a plan.
We used to convene panels of all the right people to come up with ideas to get through this stuff. Now there is silence.
The most telling part of Fox's story is that it wasn't just about already impoverished people getting poorer due to the recession, as often happens. It was about how the vibrant, educated African-American middle class, once thriving here, is now eroding.
"It's heartbreaking," Patrick Graham of the Urban League of Central Carolina told Fox. " You watch people who are viable who have talent who can't necessarily find the job opportunity that they need."
This despair was, I believe, one of the reasons behind the Memorial Day melee in Uptown that left one person dead and required special police tactical units to disperse as thousands of people stormed the streets. If the economic situation here continues to deteriorate, that will happen again.
One thing is certain. Whatever happens next economically in Charlotte will unfold on a national stage and be remembered for a long, long time.
unemployment
race
job loss