Employment among African Americans
Employment among African Americans has been significantly shaped by historical and systemic factors that have led to enduring disparities in hiring and career advancement opportunities. From the first arrival of African Americans as indentured servants in 1619, the trajectory of their employment has been marked by discrimination, inadequate opportunities, and economic inequality. Despite some progress post-World War II, which saw a rise in skilled and professional jobs, African Americans still face higher unemployment rates compared to their White counterparts, with gaps persisting in both income and job security.
Education plays a crucial role in this dynamic, as disparities in educational attainment affect African Americans' ability to compete for higher-paying jobs. Although recent decades have seen improvements in educational completion rates for African Americans, they still lag behind Whites in advanced degrees, limiting access to certain professional fields. Furthermore, even in corporate environments, African Americans encounter significant barriers to advancement, often finding themselves underrepresented in senior management roles.
While recent employment trends indicate some positive changes for Black workers, including wage increases and shifts into higher-paying industries, the need for systemic reform remains critical to address the historical inequities and to create a more level playing field in employment opportunities.
Employment among African Americans
SIGNIFICANCE: African Americans have historically been discriminated against in both hiring and promotion in the workplace.
African Americans continue to be confronted with the historical factors that produce racial discrimination in employment. Three salient factors contributing to racial discrimination in employment are trends in historical antecedents, educational level attainment, and employment and unemployment rates. Much excellent scholarly research provides data on these factors. In James Blackwell’s The Black Community: Diversity and Unity (1975) and Talmadge Anderson’s Introduction to African American Studies (1994), the authors provide historical and empirical data that explain these areas.
Historical Antecedents
The first African American laborers were indentured servants who were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. From the beginning, African Americans were not afforded equal opportunities in employment. The seminal work by John Blassingame, The Slave Community (1972), offers an excellent account of this period. Because the contemporary notion of rates of employment and unemployment is not relevant for labor involving enslaved people, it is not possible to compare the work of African Americans to that of White individuals during the period of institutional slavery in America, which lasted more than two centuries from the mid-seventeenth century through 1865.
After slavery was abolished, most African Americans were involved in farm labor at very low wages. The majority lived in the South and often worked as sharecroppers or day laborers. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, in an effort to escape the rigid de jure (legal) segregation that restricted their opportunities for employment in the South, African Americans began moving to the North in search of better jobs in record numbers. Finding themselves in the midst of the rapidly growing Industrial Revolution, African Americans began to acquire jobs that paid wages that far exceeded those they could receive as farmhands in the South.
After World War II, more African Americans acquired skilled and professional jobs. Although, in the 1990s, the wages earned by African Americans remained below those of White workers, they slowly increased relative to White individuals. According to the US census, the median family income of African Americans was 72 percent of that of White individuals in 1969. By 1993, that percentage had increased only to 81 percent. This trend continued in the twenty-first century, with an 11 percent average unemployment rate from 2000 to 2015 for Black individuals and an 8 percent average from 2016 to 2020. In the 2021 census, White households held ten times more wealth, on average, than Black households. Additionally, families with a Black householder were more likely to have unsecured debt, student loan debt, and medical debt. This trend best reflects a critical relationship between races in employment.
Educational Attainment Levels
The most pervasive trend in African American and White employment is that the former has always lagged behind the latter. In both percentages of employed and earnings, African Americans compare poorly with White individuals. Analysis of employment data from the 1960s into the 1990s shows that African American unemployment rates were double those of White individuals. As reported by Claudette E. Bennett in The Black Population in the United States (1996), the unemployment rate for African American men in 1994 was 14 percent; the rate for White men was 6.7 percent. In that same year, African American women were unemployed at 12.1 percent, while White women had an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent. Consistently through the following decades, the unemployment rate of Black individuals remained double that of White individuals. Though unemployment rates in the early and mid-2020s reached historic lows, this was consistent with the labor market, and the inequality between races persisted. Two factors substantially contribute to this disparity: educational differences and discrimination in hiring and promotions.
Educational attainment is perhaps the highest social goal among Americans. It is generally believed that success in life, especially employment, is directly correlated to a person's education level. Since 1940, the disparity between African Americans and White individuals in educational attainment for grades K-12 has narrowed greatly. By 1990, the median years of education among the two groups was about equal. Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of American adults who had completed high school increased for all racial and ethnic groups—for non-Hispanic White Americans, 92.4 percent to 95.1 percent, and for Black Americans, 84.5 percent to 90.3 percent. A similar increase was observed for individuals who earned at least a bachelor’s degree, with the non-Hispanic White population increasing from 34 percent to 41.9 percent, and for the Black population, from 19.9 percent to 28.1 percent.
Despite this increase, the percentage of White individuals with advanced degrees remained higher than that of African Americans. The educational inequality at the post-high-school level places African Americans at a disadvantage in qualifying for professional jobs. Some of the needed improvements in the educational system that could better prepare African Americans were offered by Charles V. Willie and Inabeth Miller in Social Goals and Educational Reform (1988). Additional proposals were made in the book edited by Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (1989). Some proposed remedies included improving physical facilities in urban and rural schools, providing equivalent educational resources for all students, improving teacher quality and teacher training, enhancing school-community relations, and hiring and promoting substantially more African American faculty and administrators. Though some of these efforts were implemented, inequality remained prevalent in education.
Unemployment Rates
Two factors stand out in any description of the African American experience in hiring and promotion in the United States. The unusually high rates of unemployment (official and hidden) and a modest presence in senior management positions point to major disparities between Black and White Americans. Hidden unemployment refers to those persons discouraged from seeking employment and those who are involuntary part-time workers. Black men have generally experienced the lowest employment rates of any race or gender. Independent of gender, the unemployment rate for African Americans has continued to be more than double that of White individuals. This reality has held despite affirmative action, set-asides, and minority hiring policy programs. Similarly, the median per capita income for African American households and families has remained greatly below that of White individuals.
Even within the corporate structure, African Americans have faired poorly. The federal Glass Ceiling Commission reported in 1995 that African Americans experienced disproportionately high resistance to advancement to high-level decision-making positions when compared with White individuals with similar education and training. Many of the experiences faced by African Americans in the corporate business environment are presented by George Davis and Glegg Watson in Black Life in Corporate America: Swimming in the Mainstream (1985). In a capitalist system in which employment and maximum fulfillment of human potential are vital to the accumulation of wealth, unfair employment practices have denied African Americans the full opportunity to develop and maintain favorable conditions of wealth when compared with White individuals. With increasing national public policy that severely dampens affirmative efforts to level the playing field in hiring and promotion, the need for better education and employment seems less likely to be met.
Though there is a continuing need for systemic change to close the unemployment race gap, the White House Council of Economic Advisers cited several cautiously optimistic employment trends for Black workers in mid-2024. From 2019 to 2023, the real average wage for Black employees increased by 9.5 percent compared to 6.7 percent for White employees. The council reported a shift in the proportion of Black employees in several industries—Black employment in information, financial activities, and professional and business services increased, while leisure, hospitality, and wholesale Black employment decreased—as the cause of this average wage increase.
Bibliography
Blackwell, James Edward. The Black Community: Diversity and Unity. 3rd ed., HarperCollins, 1991.
"Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data." US Census Bureau, 24 Feb. 2022, www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.
"Recent Labor Market Conditions for Black Workers." White House, 16 May 2024, www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/05/16/recent-labor-market-conditions-for-black-workers. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.
Sudarkasa, Niara, et al. Exploring the African-American Experience. 2nd ed., Lincoln UP, 1996.
Sullivan, Briana, et al. "Households with a White, Non-Hispanic Householder Were Ten Times Wealthier Than Those with a Black Householder in 2021." US Census Bureau, 23 Apr. 2024, www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/04/wealth-by-race.html. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.