DEI Cuts Causing Black Unemployment to Surge

Nobody seems to know how big of a boost blacks got from racial preferences because social scientists were averse to studying the sheer scale of affirmative action preferences over the 56 years.

From the New York Times news section:

Black Unemployment Is Surging Again. This Time Is Different.

Federal layoffs and an end to diversity initiatives have weakened a historically strong labor market for Black workers.

By Lydia DePillis

Oct. 12, 2025

Joblessness for Black workers is rising again, two years after reaching a record low. …

This time, the Trump administration’s assault on diversity programs and cuts to the federal work force could make it even more difficult for Black workers to recover when conditions improve.

The African American unemployment rate has surged over the past four months, from 6 to 7.5 percent, while the rate for white people ticked down slightly to 3.7 percent. On top of a slowing economy, the White House’s actions have disproportionately harmed Black workers, economists said. …

At least since the 1970s, when the federal government started tracking unemployment by race, the rate for Black people has run about twice the rate for white people. Because of inferior educational opportunities, the legacy of mass incarceration and discrimination over generations, Black people confront greater challenges in the job market.

Note that according the NYT news desk, there is utterly no controversy over why this is so, other than that White People Are At Fault. It couldn’t have anything to do with differences in IQ or in rates at which blacks commit crime (as opposed to the rate at which they are, presumably, unjustly incarcerated by Systemic Racism).

A strong economy during President Trump’s first term created more jobs for Black workers, but many of them were lost when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in-person employment particularly hard. Generous public subsidies, though, cushioned the blow, and hiring rebounded quickly.

In 2023, conditions for Black workers looked as healthy as ever. Unemployment reached a low of 4.8 percent. Wages rose at their fastest pace since data collection began in the 1990s, and median Black household wealth reached the highest level on record.

Conditions started to deteriorate in 2024 after pandemic-era subsidies expired. Hiring slowed, and high prices weighed heavily on low-income earners. Black households were the only racial group last year in which median income fell and the poverty rate rose, according to the Census Bureau.

… He said he was particularly disappointed in large businesses that said they would support Black workers in response to protests for racial justice in 2020, only to pull back.

Job losses are concentrated among Black women working in professional services such as human resources, according to Ms. Wilson’s analysis of federal data. A hiring freeze and mass layoffs in the federal work force, which have continued during the government shutdown and now exceed 200,000, have also fallen disproportionately on Black workers. …

The federal backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion practices may be making it more difficult for Black workers to get hired in the private sector, too. Some of the strongest evidence for the efficacy of these practices, such as making sure to interview nonwhite candidates or reaching out to Black and Hispanic students, comes from federal contractors. In one of its first actions, the Trump administration ordered that group not to pursue racial equity anymore.

Uh, I think the “Equity” in DEI means something different from “equality of opportunity” or they wouldn’t have dropped the time-honored word “equality” for the gimmicky “equity.”

But here’s the thing about enforcing the 14th Amendment:

Basically, nobody knows how much impact cutting back on affirmative action will have on blacks. We’ve had racial quotas/”goals” since 1969, but respectable people aren’t supposed to ever think about the sheer magnitude of these thumbs on the scale. There have been very few frank studies of how much blacks benefit from racial preferences in order to protect these programs: “Why are you getting worked up over a tiny benefit for blacks? Are you racist? Are you some kind of racist who think blacks need some kind of big quota to be competitive?”

Ironically, this leads many nice white people to assume that affirmative action must be trivial in scale, and thus that abolishing it in the name of equality under the law would hurt blacks only trivially.

Well, we may find out just how much blacks need affirmative action…