Fox News national discovers what I’ve been talking about for a long time. Charlotte is an economic Armageddon for African-Americans, with a black unemployment rate over 20 percent.
As Fox alludes, that makes it ironic that the Democrats want to showcase the city and the state by hosting the Democratic National Convention here:
The unemployment situation across America is bad, no doubt. But for African-Americans in some cities, this is not the great recession. It’s the Great Depression.
Take Charlotte, N.C., for example. It is a jewel of the “new South.” The largest financial center outside of New York City, it’s the showcase for next year’s Democratic National Convention. It was a land of hope and opportunity for many blacks with a four-year college degree or higher.
According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, in Charlotte, N.C., the unemployment rate for African-Americans is 19.2 percent. If you add in people who have given up looking for jobs, that number exceeds 20 percent, which, according to economists Algernon Austin and William Darity, has effectively mired blacks in a depression.
“You’re looking at a community that is economically depressed in my opinion,” Austin said. “And we need action that will address that scale of joblessness.”
Not exactly the ringing endorsement Charlotte was looking to get out of the DNC. But as the convention gets closer, Charlotte will get its wish for more scrutiny.
Journalists nationally may begin to report things we’d never be told locally, like that the number of people employed in Charlotte shrunk by 2,600 between May and June, from 317,118 to 314,485, a devastating loss of jobs that does not bode well for local economic momentum going into the Democrat National Convention and, again, for all that national scrutiny.