Black people's Reliance on Government Jobs Becomes Clearer; So Do the Events of Black Memorial Day

A government dedicated to advancing, and a media dedicated to censoring this concept is doomed

A nation reliant on McDonald’s for contributing nearly 50 percent of the jobs created in one month is doomed. That McDonald’s triumphantly boasts of being 365Black is an apt metaphor for that same country, which has also instituted a 365Black mantra of its own called Black-Run America (BRA).

We’ve talked about what Black Memorial Day 2011 means, and Jim Goad did an excellent job of discussing exactly what the Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) reaction to Matt Drudge’s clustering of Black-centric stories on his site represents at Takimag:

And as far as trying to “inculcate fear and apprehension” goes, these street mobs are doing a bloody good job of it. Even prior to Barack Obama’s election, there was some concern that if he didn’t win, blacks across America would riot. Perched high in their glass cages, the left may be turning a blind eye to this sort of bloody racial street theater—or even winking approvingly at it—because a National Black Flash Mob in 2012 if Obama isn’t reelected might scare the living freaking sweating bleeding shit out of white voters.

These digitally orchestrated and monolithically black mob attacks only seemed to start after Obama was elected. And they seem devoid of any political message beyond brute, ugly, triumphal racial intimidation through group power and group force. America’s black Attorney General refers to other blacks as “my people” and refuses to prosecute slam-dunk cases of voter intimidation when his peeps are the perps. And all these events are passively enabled by a media that largely sticks its own head up its ass and pretends that everything smells peachy. If anyone complains, even while their teeth are being kicked out of their mouth, they’ll get called the worst word in the world.

If you consider Drudge’s site – merely an aggregator of topical news story at that given moment – to represent a universe of evolving news, then May 30, 2011 represents his attempt at giving us a constellation that – like ship captain’s of old – is guiding us to disquieting summer.
 

Chicago is city that is one police shooting of an “urban youth” away from massive chaos. That Black teens are working in groups to attack “people of undisclosed race” is a sign of where we are headed this summer. A gang of Black youth attacked a person in New York City’s Central Park. Both of these events happened last weekend.
 

A near-riot at Bessemer, Alabama’s “Alabama Adventure” park – caused by Black people – is an indicator that the problems that plagued Wave Country in Nashville and Point Mallard Aquatic Park in Decatur (Al.) aren’t isolated incidents to be casually dismissed as examples of “Black youths” being left unsupervised.

White kids are allowed freedom in an unsupervised capacity all the time, but their actions don’t require the shutting down of water and amusement parks which denies paying customers the opportunity to have fun.
 

One comment left at the AL.com story on the “Alabama Adventure” near-riot struck us as funny. A number of people left comments that dared call-out Black people for the truculent behavior displayed at the park, and a DWL commenter wrote:

Wow.
I read some of these comments and have to ask, how's the weather in the 19th century?

What does the assertion by DWLs that criticism of Black people is somehow backward thinking and that its better suited for the 19^th or mid-20^th century mean? Experience is the only light we know to guide ones thinking, and many people are experiencing behavior in 365Black America that is causing them to question everything and slowly inch closer to the ranks of Those Who Can See.
 

But a story from Huffington Post that details the Black middle-classes – an artificial creation of affirmative action policies in Corporate America and Government jobs – reliance on government jobs and how Black people will feel the brunt austerity measures makes perfectly clear that BRA is not an economically viable proposition. It is coming to an end:

Such a sentiment has echoed throughout the nation, as the red ink left in the wake of the Great Recession prompts federal, state and local government agencies to pare down payrolls and eliminate positions that have sustained middle class dreams for decades. Since the beginning of 2008, some 375,000 government jobs have been eliminated, according to the Labor Department.

The cuts fall with marked impact on African Americans such as Mathis. Nearly 21 percent of the nation’s working black adults hold government jobs, as compared to some 17 percent of white workers and 15 percent of Latinos. Public agencies are the single largest employer for black men, and the second most common for black women.
The disproportionate vulnerability of African American employees to the impacts of government budget cuts helps explain why black workers have fared so much worse than other slices of the population since the recession’s end. In May, the unemployment rate among black Americans reached 16.2 percent, up from 15.5 percent a year earlier. By contrast, white unemployment was eight percent, an improvement from the 8.8 percent level of a year earlier.

The loss of government paychecks erodes one of the great equalizing forces at play in the American economy for more than a century. A government job has long offered a pathway for American Americans to sidestep discrimination that has impeded progress in the private sector, where social networks often determine who has a shot at the best jobs, say experts.

The 1987 film Hollywood Shuffle embodies the crucial importance of government work for black families. In one scene, a struggling black actor is reminded by his grandmother that he can always get work at the post office.

"Something similar but maybe less pronounced can be said about a lot of government agencies," said Philip Rubio, a labor historian at the University of North Carolina A&T State University, who took that movie scene as the title for an academic book on the subject, "There’s Always Work at the Post Office."

African Americans first gained employment in the postal service in the 1860s, in the wake of the Civil War. Two decades later, the post office began hiring through the civil service exam, creating equal access to jobs and equal pay regardless of race or gender. And civil service protections allowed postal workers to get involved in controversial issues such as the earliest stages of the Civil Rights Movement without risking their jobs.

By 1940, 14 percent of the black middle class worked for the postal service, according to Rubio. In the decades since, other government departments, from housing to public works to sanitation, became major employers.

But now, with the broader economy stuck in a deep rut and working opportunities chronically lean, those government jobs are diminishing, too.

"Many of the black people you don’t hear about on the news, the black people who own homes, who can afford to send their children to college and have modest savings, many of them worked for some branch of government before the recession began," said Steven Pitts, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. "There is good reason to be very concerned about what will happen when this work disappears."

Houston does not, at first glance, seem like the sort of place where workers would be suffering. A sprawling metropolis defined by big oil, big malls and big freeways, the Texas city seemed impervious to the forces of decline that have beset so much of the country in recent years.

"To explain that I just need one word: oil," said Mike Valant, survey chairman with the Houston branch of the Institute for Supply Chain Management, who issues a monthly report on Houston’s economy monitored closely by the Federal Reserve. "Oil hasn’t taken much of a hit. Also the health care industry just kept growing."
The Houston area’s roughly two million residents –- about 23 percent of them black –- work largely in three industries: oil, health care and government.

But like every major American metropolitan area, Houston suffered the end of the speculative frenzy in real estate. By the end of 2010, some 12 percent of the city’s housing sat vacant, according to Census data. With so many houses empty and real estate transactions stagnant, the city saw its revenues decline as development fees fell off, along with sales and property taxes.

By March it became clear. The city faced a budget shortfall of $130 million, and given that Houston is legally required to balance its budget, cuts became virtually unavoidable. The majority of Houston’s government workers are black, so those cuts would almost certainly fall heavily on the African American community.

Mathis was among 60 city government workers who lost their jobs in the course of department consolidations during 2010. A similar fate now confronts 750 additional municipal employees who will be laid off on July 1.

Most major American cities have been eliminating government jobs. Local governments have shed 446,000 employees since employment in the sector hit its peak in September 2008. They plan to cut nearly 500,000 more over the next two years, according to a national survey of governments.

The impact of those cuts seems certain to fall disproportionately on African Americans, exacerbating already extreme rates of joblessness. It's no coincidence, some black union activists say. Many think the preponderance of African Americans in the government workforce makes them a useful target for some politicians –- particularly Republicans, cognizant that the black vote trends overwhelmingly Democratic.

"In some states I think it’s a power play, pure and simple," said Lee Saunders, secretary treasurer of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, a public sector union, and the son of a union bus driver. "In some sort of sick way, some of these ultra conservatives think that if you hurt African Americans and they are laid off and can't find work that there may be negative implications for the 2012 presidential election. If you have a lot of people who are frustrated, maybe it is going to be very hard to get your base out to vote."

If you read SBPDL, you already know the government hires Black people at disproportionate rates. Though Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are costing the country billions of dollars each fiscal quarter, phasing out these insolvent institutions can’t transpire because more than 50 percent of their combined workforce are non-white.
 

It’s not that the private sector is racist, as every company bends over backwards to accelerate its diversity with initiatives for increasing Black employee percentages that are just as fervent and overzealous as what once allowed this country to put a man on the moon.
 

It’s that qualified Black people can’t be found to do the jobs. That’s it. Newsone.com compiled a list of jobs that lack significant Black participation and the only barrier to entry that keeps Black people from pursing these jobs is a degree proving they have sufficient education for handling the rigors of the position.

Of course, that’s an educational hurdle that no amount of money can ever get to go way (that pesky racial gap in achievement just won’t close!).
 

Black unemployment numbers are bleak. So is the daunting task of finding cash to pay for future unfunded mandates.
 

Normal, hard-working, God-fearing (family men with obligations) white males are being forgotten as those DWLs in control of BRA scramble to keep afloat a rudderless ship that is sailing inexorably toward one eventuality. Matt Drudge, on May 30, 2011, showed what constellation guides us now.
 

Consider this piece to be the last discussion on BRA’s demise and Black-gang attacks for awhile. The government can no longer find enough tax-revenue nor print enough dollars to hold afloat BRA, and it’s coming down no matter what. We’re going back to humor (after we publish our second and third response to Steve Sailer’s college football piece).
 

Those of us who have views set in the “19^th century” only do so because experience has made us that much wiser. Wishful thinking on the part of good intentioned DWLs has led us to this interesting juncture in history, and we hope that if you, Mr. DWL, when confronted by a gang of Black people in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Baltimore or some hipster-area, that you tell (plead with them) those who attack you that, “But wait, my thinking is in line with 2011!”
 

Just remember, courtesy of Black people in Akron, Ohio in 2009, “This is a Black World.”