We don’t like whiners, do we?  And with good reason.  The belief that the cards are intentionally stacked against you can be a one-way ticket to professional disaster . . . even if it’s true.  The Washington Post recently looked at unemployment statistics and, if you’re young, black and male, it ain’t a pretty picture.  The unemployment rate for this group is currently worse than it was for American workers at the heart of the Great Depression. 

Consider this excerpt:

“Increased involvement in the underground economy, criminal activity, increased poverty, homelessness and teen pregnancy are the things I worry about if we continue to see more years of high unemployment,” said Algernon Austin, a sociologist and director of the race, ethnicity and economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, which studies issues involving low- and middle-income wage earners.

Earlier this month, District officials said they will use $3.9 million in federal stimulus funds to provide 19 weeks of on-the-job training to 500 18-to-24-year-olds. But even those who receive training often don’t get jobs.

The problem, I contend, is that the US economy, by design, has little to offer the 20% of the population at the bottom of the economic and educational ladder.  In the late 1970s, the captains of interest, with ungrudging approval from the political establishment (Democrat and Republican) intentionally created a surplus population as a way of placing downward pressure on wages.  Globalization is best understood as part of this process.  Between 1930 and 1980 wages for the folks at the bottom rose faster than any other income group; since 1980 the rich have been getting richer and . . .

This being the case, the employment prospects of high school dropouts is bound to be tough at the best of times.  In the midst of a brutal recession you get 30% unemployment. 

But there is more to it than an economy with few jobs for the unskilled.  “Some studies examining how employers review black and white job applicants,” the Post article points out, “suggest that discrimination may be at play.”

“Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men,” said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. “Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison.”

Delonta Spriggs, a 24 year-old reformed drug dealer looking for legitimate employment enrolled in a jobs training program but it wasn’t enough:

“I thought after I finished the [training] program, I’d be working. I only had three jobs with the union and only one of them was longer than a week,” Spriggs, a tall slender man wearing a black Nationals cap, said one afternoon while sitting at the table in the living room/dining room in his mother’s apartment. “It has you wanting to go out and find other ways to make money. . . . [Lack of jobs is why] people go out hustling and doing what they can to get by.”

Does that sound like whining?  It’s certainly a message Middle America doesn’t want to hear.  We like to believe that anyone who wants a decent job can get one if they try hard enough.  For most job hunters this is true (although in the present economy it can take half or year or longer to snag a job).  But for young uneducated black males living in bad neighborhoods, work is desperately hard to find.  After a year-or-so of fruitless job hunting, the lure of the streets takes over.  America has a place for young men in this predicament . . . it’s called prison.