When whites catch a cold in America, blacks catch pneumonia.
The American economy's been under the weather for the past two to three years. At the same time, black Americans faced record levels of unemployment. So the following should be good news for everyone, right?
The U.S. unemployment rate fell last month to its lowest level in more than two and a half years as employers stepped up hiring in response to the slowly improving economy.
The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent last month from 9 percent in October. The rate hasn't been that low since March 2009, during the depths of the recession.
That's good news, right? Read on.
However, unemployment ticked up amongst African-Americans up from 15.1 to 15.5 percent and black teen joblessness also went up from 37.8 to 39.6, after three straight months of drops.
But it's not all good news for Americans in general:
Still, 13.3 million Americans remain unemployed. And a key reason the unemployment rate fell so much was because roughly 315,000 people had given up looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed.
So the real reason behind the lower unemployment numbers was scores of people giving up any hope of finding any sort of employment, or finding alternative forms of employment that wouldn't necessarily be counted in the stats (i.e. freelancing).
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in black communities remains double of what whites face. When America comes down with pneumonia, black Americans come down with West Nile virus.
I can imagine Newton Leroy Gingrich taking a look at these statistics and coming to the conclusion that this validates blacks as being "lazy" and otherwise unmotivated to do anything that doesn't involve slinging drugs or stealing televisions. You know how Leroy and his people can get.
