Part 4: Pregnancies, jobs and lifestyles
Detroit, Michigan, a city where I worked for 15 years, presents a mirror of Black communities around America. African-Americans in 1990 made up 67 percent of the total population. In the past 15 years, 300,000 Muslim immigrants moved into the Detroit area with tens of thousands being illegal. In the process, they pushed African-Americans out of their communities.
At the same time, immigrants took jobs from American Blacks at alarming rates of speed. Immigrants undercut Blacks in auto work, janitorial, fast food, construction, taxi cab service, grounds keeping and just about every job in Detroit formerly worked by American Blacks.
Last year, NBC anchor Brian Williams reported a 76 percent dropout rate for Detroit high schools. At first, that number seems impossible, but educational disintegration began with adding a dozen languages to Detroit's classrooms, i.e., Arabic, Spanish, and many more dialects alien to America. With the linguistic chaos came ethnic tension. Without a single language and small classroom size, American Blacks in Detroit and across the nation suffered increasing academic failure.
Listen to my friend TerryAnderson on Sundays at www.theterryandersonshow.com. He chronicles the events as they happen to Black Americans in LA. He roars, "If you ain't mad, you ain't payin' attention."
What happens when kids do not receive an education at the most basic high school level? How do they function at a functionally illiterate level?
Black women have the highest teen pregnancy rate (134 per 1,000 women aged 15-19) in America. (Source: www.cis.org) I think latest statistics show unwed Black mothers outnumber married Black mothers.
They immediately become welfare queens with 1,2,3,4, 5 and more babies. In Detroit, I watched them step through the Kroger doors with five kids lined up hand in hand with one on the way. After I had worked a 14 hour day, they used my money via food stamps to feed their broods. Didn't make me happy!
As for Black Americans:
Dwight Kirk of Coalition of Black Trade Unionists said, "The black unemployment rate jumped or leaped or bounced -- whatever verb fits -- from 10.8 percent in May to 11.8 percent in June -- more than 3 times the increase in the national rate. Bottom line: as the jobless crisis has gotten worse for all workers, the heaviest toll has been on black workers, millions who are becoming nomads in a globalized job market. The June unemployment report contained even more eye-opening "news":
- Nearly half of the 360,000 people who lost their jobs in June were African Americans, even though black workers are only 11 percent of the civilian workforce.
- Black workers suffered the highest job loss (172,000) of all races or ethnic groups in June.
- While white unemployment inched up from 5.4 percent in May to 5.5 percent in June, black unemployment, already in double digits, soared from 10.8 percent to 11.8 percent in the same month (i.e., 10 times the increase in the white unemployment rate).
- Meanwhile, 40 percent of black teenagers were unemployed in June, nearly 2 times the rate for white teens.
The long-term trends are even more daunting. In the year since June 2002:
- The
number of unemployed black workers has increased by nearly a quarter of a
million (214,000).
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