Color Line

Remember back in November 2008 when many declared that racism finally was coming to an end? The linchpin for this dubious claim was the election of America's first black President. With the inauguration of one Barack Obama, many believed we had entered a new epoch in which individuals would no longer be judged by the level of pigmentation of their skin.

Investigative reporter Andy Kroll has highlighted that the best one can say about such predictions is that they are wishful thinking!

Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.2% is almost double the 9.1% rate for the rest of the population. And it's twice the 8% white jobless rate.

The size of those numbers can, in part, be chalked up to the current jobs crisis in which black workers are being decimated. According to Duke University public policy expert William Darity, that means blacks are "the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there's a downturn, they're the first to be released."

That may account for the soaring numbers of unemployed African Americans, but not the yawning chasm between the black and white employment rates, which is no artifact of the present moment. It's a problem that spans generations, goes remarkably unnoticed, and condemns millions of black Americans to a life of scraping by. That unerring, unchanging gap between white and black employment figures goes back at least 60 years. It should be a scandal, but whether on Capitol Hill or in the media it gets remarkably little attention. Ever.

While there is no question that we have made modest gains since those heady days of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Right Movement, we have a long, long way to go. The poverty and incarceration rates of blacks are far higher than those of whites. Recent studies have shown that financial lenders tend to offer better financial terms to whites than blacks. In area after area, blacks, on average, fair much worse than their white counterparts.

While the State of Washington has a significant black population, most African Americans live in the Puget Sound region or Spokane. Here, in the north end of Pacific County, I can count the number of blacks who live in South Bend or Raymond on one hand. I can also tell you from conversations with the locals that these black folk are watched more closely -- though, maybe, not as much as our sizable Latino population -- than whites.

The color line that supposedly was set to disappear hasn't gone much of anywhere. It continues to stain the legacy of this nation.