President Trump had no issue boasting about Black unemployment rates being the lowest its ever been in history, but Marc Morial challenged the reports.
The president and chief executive officer at the National Urban League, Morial said that recent records do not depict the honest economic situation of the Black community.
“The Black unemployment rate came down from over 16% down to just below 8% under President Obama. It’s now come down about a point under President Trump,” he explained.
“The Black unemployment rate is still twice as high as the white unemployment rate… You can’t look at the unemployment rate and simply say that’s a picture of the economy in Black America,” he challenged on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Friday.
Reports in March showed a 6.9% Black unemployment rate compared to a 3.6% white working rate. The African-American unemployment rate reportedly dropped to 6.8% in December 2017 and Trump claimed it had been the lowest since 1972.
During Friday’s CNBC “Squawk Box” segment, the nation’s first black billionaire Robert Johnson said, “something is going right.”
“When you look at African-American unemployment, … you’ve never had African-American unemployment this low and the spread between African-Americans and whites narrowing,” Johnson relayed.
Morial noted that the Black home-ownership rate is extremely low at 42.1% among whites with 72.7%.
“I’m not displeased that the unemployment rate is down to where it is… But what I’m saying is, it is still twice as high as the white rate,” Morial added. “We can’t look at it in isolation… Let’s look at it in a broader context.”
