In a catastrophe which will have major economic and social ramifications, the black teenage unemployment rate has neared 50 percent according to figures released by the Bureau of Labor.
According to the new figures, contained in a report released last week, 49 percent of all blacks between the ages of 16 and 19 are currently unemployed, which translates to just under one third of a million individuals.
This figure has steadily grown every month since September last year, when the figure was 40.7 percent, the Bureau of Labour said.
This compares with the total black unemployment rate of 16.1 percent, or 2.8 million individuals, which has also grown month by month from 15.3 percent in September 2009.
The usual gaggle of liberals have already manufactured the excuses for these figures, which mostly center on blaming white Americans for being "discriminatory" in their employment and educational practices.
For example, Doug Schoen, political analyst for Fox News and darling of the leftist Huffington Post, scribbled an essay for that website which, when stripped down, blamed whites and called for them to financially subsidize blacks even further.
In an article entitled "An Unspoken National Crisis," Mr. Schoen said the black teenage unemployment rate is "something approaching a national emergency that goes well beyond the current unemployment rate in the recession or the more general economic dislocation that Americans have been facing recently."
"If discouraged workers — that is, those who have given up seeking employment — are also included in this calculation, the number of black teenagers without work rises to 70–80%," Mr. Schoen continued.
He explained further: "The implications of this are ominous. Without any real opportunities to participate in American society, the alternatives are truly calamitous for young people and for society at large."
In other words, the black unemployment rate is setting the stage for social collapse, which is about the only part of Mr. Schoen's analysis which makes sense.
He said that the only way to solve the problem is to throw even more money at it: "We should increase funding for minority-serving institutions and universities so that these teens are exposed to quality education beyond high school, which will offer them more job opportunities and make them more qualified for a diverse range of higher-paying jobs.
"We must develop targeted workforce development programs that place black workers into pipelines that lead to higher-paying industry sectors.
"Further, we should provide blacks with opportunities for entrepreneurship and encourage entrepreneurship in minority areas. Business growth centers should be established in minority areas that offer business training, financial literacy instruction, mentoring, management counseling, financing and contract negotiation. Assistance must also be available in minority areas to facilitate access to funding available from federal government programs and the private sector."
In other words, the liberal solution to the crisis is even more of the affirmative action, anti-white employment policies already being pursued by the government.
Compare this hysterical demand for whites to subsidize blacks even more with the total silence accorded to the Bureau of Labour's "white" teenage unemployment statistics, issued in the same set of figures.
According to the Bureau, "white" teenage unemployment runs at 1.12 million individuals, or 23.4 percent. This has remained relatively stable since the same time last year.
Observers might have thought that a 25 percent unemployment rate amongst "whites" might also have provoked a reaction, somewhere — but it has not.
Once again, the plight of nonwhites is accorded far greater attention than that of whites, a symptom of the endemic anti-white psychosis which prevails throughout liberal society.
* We used the word "white" in inverted commas when referring to the Bureau of Labor's statistics. This is because there is no category on those figures for any racial groups except blacks and "whites," so it seems that, as usual, Hispanics and Middle Easterners have been included in the "white" statistics.
