The Foreclosure Triggered Recession has Hit the Afro-Americans Worst

The recession, triggered by the foreclosure crisis has hit the Afro-Americans worst. Unprecedented unemployment has totally erased the wealth of an entire generation of the Black middle-class.

The vigorous job market during the 90’s had made life somewhat easy for thousands and thousands of Afro-Americans who had moved up to join the ranks of the middle class.

Barbara Mitchell was one of these. She got employed in a customer related job with a telecommunications firms. For a good number of years she prospered on a comfortable salary that peaked to $51,000. But when her firm was shut down she had to take up another lower paying job in Wisconsin. Ultimately she could not fit into the changed circumstances and opted for retirement apprehending job termination.

Mitchell was under the impression that she had the requisites to obtain another similar customer related position but at the age of 57 and after a year of floundering about she found herself without any job, any medical insurance and practically no retirement funds for her twilight years. All that she could do is to pray for a part time job but she has realized that the recession would never take her back to the position she held only few years ago.

The harsh reality is that the recession is hitting the Afro-Americans more than others. The unemployment figures of this section of the population speak for themselves. The total unemployment is poised to touch 10%. Amongst the Afro-Americans it is 15.5%. In Illinois it is 18.6% during the third quarter according to Economic Policy Institute. For the teenagers among the Blacks the rate was 40.8% during September.

Employment rate among the minorities have always been high but the recession has increased this gap because of unemployment primarily in the manufacturing and auto group. This unemployment has joined up with predatory lending that was most prominent in black dominated localities. This lead to staggering increases in foreclosures that sent the real estate market reeling downwards. It can be read as a silent depression for the Afro-Americans.
Jean Pogge of ShoreBank that caters to the minority groups in many cities said, “The untold story is that between unemployment, a significant drop in property values, the wave of foreclosures and a lack of credit, there is a whole generation of African-American wealth that is disappearing. The traditional way Americans have acquired wealth and gotten into the middle class is through buying a home and building equity in that home. And a lot of that has been wiped out by the recession.”