A senior loan analyst on furlough from the U.S. Department of Education, protests the government shutdown outside the Centres for Disease Control.
In July, the unemployment rate among Black Americans hit 7.2%, the highest level since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in October 2021.
The rate is markedly higher than the national average of 4.2%, as provided by a new data from the U.S Department of Labour released August 1.
Women have been hit hardest, with more than 300,000 Black women losing their jobs in the first half of the year.
Experts point to three key factors that have contributed to the troubling job losses:
Rising Black unemployment rates have previously been a precursor to a slowing economy overall. More Black Americans are in temporary and low-paying jobs compared to their white counterparts, which means that they are laid off first when the economy begins to weaken.
Said Jessica Fulton, a senior fellow at the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies: “Black workers, and particularly Black women, show up as a canary in the coal mine, giving a picture of what may happen to everyone else later”.
President Donald Trump’s tariff regime has increased costs for businesses, which has made some companies put hiring plans on hold, as revealed by recent surveys by the U.S Federal Reserve. The rising unemployment among Black Americans could be a sign of an incoming recession, experts warn.
Since his first day in office, Trump has worked tirelessly to purge the Federal Government of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes. The President’s anti-DEI agenda has trickled down to the private sector as well, with some of the U.S.´s biggest employers, Meta, Walmart and McDonald’s axing efforts to promote racial diversity in their workforce.
DEI rollbacks could play a role in the recent unemployment figures by creating an “antagonistic posture against the Black workforce”, Andre Perry, a senior Fellow and Director of the Centre for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution, told Bloomberg.
Trump has been adamant about shrinking the government workforce, which has disproportionally impacted Black workers, who are over-represented among federal employees relative to their share of the overall workforce.
Among the efforts, Trump shut down the Department of Education with large repercussions for the country’s educators, 30% of whom are Black.
Said Perry: ”The lay-offs at the federal level where Black people are more represented, the impacts of the tariffs, particularly on small businesses that hire Black women, and the overall use of DEI as a slur, which may be contributing to a lack of hiring of Black women, all of these factors are probably at play”.
