Business
Black Economic gains reversed in Great Recession
BALTIMORE (AP) – For the black community, where unemployment continues to rise, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty…
Some see a bitter irony in soaring black unemployment and the decline of the black middle class on the watch of the first black president.
“I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone,” Princeton professor Cornel West told truthdig.com recently.
He said Obama had sold out the poor and become “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats … I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama.”
Yet many jobless blacks do not blame their plight on the president.
“I have no problem with Obama when I look at what the alternatives are,” Wilder says. Goldring doesn’t think Obama is doing a bad job either. “The unemployment situation is not the best, but I don’t think it has a lot to do with him,” she says. “Fixing this economy, it’s going to take time.
Wiley, the Center for Social Inclusion director, says Obama should be applauded for several initiatives that have helped the black middle class, such as programs to modify certain mortgages and prevent foreclosure due to job loss.
She would have liked Obama to aggressively counter the suggestion that first black president would be showing favoritism if he specifically helped black people.
“It’s the right thing to do for the nation,” she says. “Black people are a huge segment of the population, they’re especially hard-hit, and the country cannot recover if the black community — as well as the white community and others — does not recover.
