By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media

The bad news is that the more than one out of three young blacks out of
work matches the figure for joblessness at the peak of the 1930s Great
Depression. The worse news is that the jobless figure for young blacks,
especially young black males, is not much different from what it was
even before the economic meltdown. During the Clinton era economic
boom, the unemployment rate for young black males was double -- and in
some parts of the country -- triple that of white males.

Two years ago, when the job crisis among young blacks was marginally
less severe than the present, a stunned Congressional Black Caucus and
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reflexively blamed President George
Bush. They claimed that his fiscal and economic policies have resulted
in the loss of millions of jobs during his years in office. They
demanded that he radically increase funding for job training programs
and provide more tax incentives for the working poor. Bush did none of
these things. Neither did Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus.
They did not vigorously push for a crisis job training and creation
program for young black males. The crisis continued to mount. Bush is
not in office. Pelosi and the Democrats have a tight lock on Congress,
and Obama is in the White House.

The bitter new reality is that the job crisis is not Bush's crisis.
It's Obama's. This requires a candid look at why so many young blacks
are unemployed and why they have stayed unemployed so long even when
times were relatively good. State and federal cutbacks in job training
and skills programs, the brutal competition for low- and semi-skilled
service and retail jobs from immigrants, and the refusal of many
employers to hire those with criminal records have been prime culprits
in driving the numbers higher and higher. The high number of
miserably failing inner-city public schools also fuels the unemployment
crisis. They have turned thousands of blacks into educational cripples.
These students are desperately unequipped to handle the rapidly
evolving and demanding technical and professional skills in the public
sector and the business world of the 21st Century.

There's an even bigger reason for the stubbornly high numbers that defy
reason in the good times, a reason that conservatives routinely deride,
and liberals downplay out of political fear. That's the persistent and
deep racial discrimination in the workplace. The mountain of federal
and state anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action programs and
successful employment discrimination lawsuits give the public the
impression that job discrimination is a relic of a shameful, racist
past.

Yet recent studies have found that black men without a criminal record
are less likely to find a job than white men with criminal records.
This is despite the volumes of state and federal laws that ban racial
discrimination. The Urban League's annual State of Black America
reports, a 2005 Human Rights Watch report and the numerous
discrimination complaints reviewed by the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission over the past decade reveal that employers have devised
endless dodges to evade anti-discrimination laws. That includes
rejecting applicants based on their names or areas of the city they
live in. Black applicants may be incorrectly told that jobs advertised
were filled already. One study even documented that employers name-code
blacks to exclude them from hiring. Those with Islamic or Afrocentric
sounding names are red penciled from their interview list.

A decade ago, in a seven-month comprehensive university study of the
hiring practices of hundreds of Chicago area employers, many top
company officials when interviewed said they would not hire blacks.
When asked to assess the work ethic of white, black and Latino
employees by race, nearly 40 percent of the employers ranked blacks
dead last.

The employers routinely described blacks as being "unskilled,"
"uneducated," "illiterate," "dishonest," "lacking initiative,"
"involved with gangs and drugs" or "unstable," of having "no family
values" and being "poor role models." The consensus among these
employers was that blacks brought their alleged pathologies to the work
place, and were to be avoided at all costs. Researchers found that
black business owners shared many of the same negative attitudes. The
Chicago study has been replicated in New York, Los Angeles, and
Philadelphia and other major cities with a large number of unemployed
work eligible black males and surveys of professional groups.

Other surveys have found that a substantial number of non-white
business owners also refuse to hire blacks. Their bias effectively
closed out another area of employment to thousands of blacks, based on
their color.

The government took bold and aggressive steps to bring down the number
of unemployed during the Great Depression. Obama and the Democrats
should take the same bold and aggressive steps to bring down the Great
Depression joblessness among young blacks.