By Terry Manning
At a time when gaslighting and whataboutism are rampant, there’s one sin of which America is perennially guilty and unable to refute: good old-fashioned racism.
I want you to consider that one aspect of racism in this country is so pervasive, so normal, it is the basis for a common assessment of how the country’s economy is doing. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine.
For those who don’t get the reference, in the old days, coal miners kept canaries in cages. The birds had a heightened sensitivity for the unseen and sometimes odorless, deadly gases that could accumulate. If the workers checked the cage and found a dead bird, that was a sign of trouble.
If the canaries succumbed, the human workers ran the risk of being next.
So why bring that up now? Because I keep seeing, hearing and reading that metaphor being used to talk about the nation’s faltering economy, specifically the job market, under President Trump.
Last week’s job report showed companies across the country are holding off on hiring. Not only were a paltry 22,000 jobs gained in August, revisions to earlier numbers showed there was a net loss of jobs in June.
CNN reported that this marked the end of the second-longest period of employment expansion on record, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It began in December 2020.
This came paired with news from CNN that the Black unemployment rate hit a four-year high of 7.5 percent in August, up from 6 percent in May, 6.8 in June and 7.2 percent in July. This merited coverage because what happens with Black and Hispanic employment is typically a bellwether for what will be coming to the larger workforce.
For now, the overall unemployment rate has not reached the point of raising alarm, but that’s likely to change very soon. What won’t change is the fact that people of color suffer first, and worst, compared to the general public when it comes to this type of thing.
The question is “Why?”
If DEI efforts have disadvantaged white people as much as critics claim, why are Black workers the first to be let go? If your answer is that more Black people are being let go because they had an unfair advantage in the first place, then why is it so hard to understand why diversity, equity and inclusion efforts were conceived of in the first place, to address the longtime advantage white workers enjoyed?
But that’s a whole other column.
Another question is why the job market is taking such a heavy toll on Black women. Axios reports the unemployment rate for Black women was 5.4 percent in January; in August, it had climbed to 7.5 percent, even though the overall jobless rate ticked up only marginally, from 4 to 4.3 percent in the same time frame.
This is just one consequence of the slash-and-burn perpetrated on the federal workforce by Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE in the name of eliminating “waste, abuse and fraud.” As the New York Times reports, “Black women make up 12 percent of the federal workforce, nearly double their share of the labor force overall.”
To add injury to insult, Black women have also been hurt by corporate America’s abandonment of affirmative action policies and elimination of positions guiding efforts to enforce those policies. As the Times reports, many of those positions were filled by Black women.
Hispanic women? They gained jobs since the start of the year. Same for white women. Black women lost more than 319,000, while white men saw a gain of 365,000. Isn’t that a remarkable coincidence?
Black men are experiencing a jobless rate similar to Black women, at 7.1 percent. But going after Black women cuts deeper.
There’s an African proverb, “If you educate a man, you are educating one person, but if you educate a woman, you are educating a nation.” A natural corollary of that notion is that hurting a Black woman is hurting more than just that woman.
Economist Katica Roy wrote for MSNBC that “more than 51 percent of Black households with children are led by breadwinner mothers, many of whom are the sole source of income in their homes.”
Yes, it hurts Black women. Yes, it hurts their children and their families. But the hurt doesn’t stop there.
Roy told the Times, “Black women are the canaries in the coal mine … . If any other cohort thinks it’s not coming for them, they’re wrong.”
What’s more wrong? The idea that any nation would consign a segment of its population to a status where its welfare is only a concern inasmuch as it signals peril to the majority.
Worse still is accepting this as the status quo and actively working to make the lives in that segment even harder.
Terry E. Manning worked for 20 years as a newspaper journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
