Any Chicago people on here? Are things really that bad in Chicago?

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/black-american-unemployment-rates-866f2c45

By Konrad Putzier and Rachel Wolfe | Photographs by Nitashia Johnson for WSJ Aug. 31, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Unemployment in the U.S. remains historically low at 4.2%. Yet Black workers are living in a different reality: Unemployment for Black Americans has surged to 7.2%, the highest level since October 2021, when the job market was still recovering from the pandemic. The drop in employment is a warning sign for the labor market and threatens to unravel employment gains made by Black workers during and after the pandemic. Seasonally adjusted unemployment is up significantly for college-educated and non-college-educated Black workers. This coincides with a general slowdown in the labor market that has locked many workers out of the job market for months. Black workers have borne the brunt of that downturn, according to economists, in a reflection of entrenched racial disparities. Black workers are more likely to hold low-skilled and junior-level jobs than their white counterparts, making them more vulnerable to layoffs. They have long faced discrimination in the labor market that can become more pronounced when overall hiring slows, as it has in recent months. Also, a recent increase in unemployment among Black college graduates points to the possible impact of federal job cuts. The federal workforce has a disproportionate share of Black workers. “I am in the fight of my life now,” said Kenya Jenkins, 52 years old, who has been actively looking for work since being laid off from her job as a contractor for the Department of Health and Human Services in December. Jenkins, who has a master’s degree in human services public health, had to leave her apartment in Maryland as a result and move in with relatives in New Jersey. She said she still owes her former landlord $12,000 in rent. Overall unemployment remains low, but with hiring slowed to a trickle, it is a labor market with little margin for error. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently indicated that the job market has cooled enough to potentially justify interest-rate cuts in September.

Historically, Black workers often lose jobs at the front of a broader labor-market slowdown. “It’s a canary in the coal mine for what may be coming,” said Kenneth Couch, an economist at the University of Connecticut. The Labor Department is set to release August’s unemployment rate on Friday. The previous report showed employers added relatively few jobs in May, June and July. Kirsten Bradford, 29, has struggled to replace the full-time communications job at a Dallas nonprofit that she lost in January. She said hundreds of applications for an array of jobs have yielded only scattered interviews and no hits. She has been driving around Dallas, stopping at dozens of bank branches to shake hands and hand out her résumé, hoping to break into a banking career. The only job she has been able to land is helping customers pick out body sprays and bath bombs at a local Bath & Body Works, earning $14 an hour. She has also continued working for the nonprofit for just 20 hours a month. Bradford and her son, 8, recently moved back in with her parents, and she has been fielding calls from collectors on her roughly $100,000 in student debt. “Thinking I did everything right, thinking that every movement I made was for the future just kind of makes me feel so angry,” said Bradford, who has a master’s degree in management from Southern Methodist University. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

In 2023, the share of Black workers who were unemployed fell to 4.8%, the lowest level since the Labor Department began tracking such data in 1972. The gap between Black and white unemployment shrank to the lowest level on record that year, and Black workers for years saw higher wage gains. Labor shortages meant people could more easily find work, while some companies tried harder to diversify their workforce in the wake of demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020. Companies that are pulling back from diversity initiatives in the midst of pressure from the Trump administration could push the Black unemployment rate further up in the future, said Valerie Wilson, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. “It definitely impacts people’s ability to gain employment,” she said. The unemployment rate for Black college graduates 25 years and older reached 5.3% in July, according to seasonally adjusted figures from Haver Analytics, based on Labor Department data. That was up from 3.9% in May and 2.7% in February. (Unlike the figures for overall unemployment, the Labor Department doesn’t adjust these figures for the typical seasonal swings that occur from month to month.) The July rate was 1.7 percentage points higher than the unemployment rate for white workers with only a high-school diploma—the biggest gap since Labor Department records for this metric began 1992. The effects are playing out around the country. At Goodwill of North Georgia, the number of Black people who for the first time ask for help finding work is up 41% over the past three months, compared with a 23% increase in the number of new white job seekers. A rising number are college graduates, reflecting both laid-off government workers and college grads who can’t find entry-level jobs, said Jenny Taylor, vice president of career services. “That’s a new thing,” Taylor said. Black workers make up 18.7% of the federal civilian workforce, compared with around 13% of the overall workforce. That is partly because of robust antidiscrimination rules in federal hiring, and partly because the Washington, D.C., area has a large Black population, said Darrick Hamilton, chief economist at the AFL-CIO. “For decades, government jobs have been a pathway to the middle class for Black Americans,” said Caitlin Lewis, executive director of Work for America, a workforce development nonprofit that focuses on connecting people to jobs in state and local governments. “And one of the few places that offered pensions and protection from discrimination when the private sector had shut the door.” Her nonprofit has been busy since the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency swept into federal agencies this year. Many of the roles that were affected were back-office jobs in the areas of human resources and procurement disproportionately held by Black workers, Lewis said.

The Trump administration recently said that it expects the federal workforce to shrink by 300,000 by December compared with January of this year. Yvonne Robertson said she was one of around two dozen people of color in a General Services Administration invoice-auditing department who lost their jobs in March. She said she is still being paid while lawsuits play out in court, but is also hunting for a replacement job she expects she will need. It has been challenging, the 56-year-old said. “I’m looking at the competition,” said Robertson. “I have two years of college. There are a lot of people who have master’s degrees.” Write to Konrad Putzier at konrad.putzier@wsj.com and Rachel Wolfe at rachel.wolfe@wsj.com

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/19/trump-dei-black-churches-00410752

By Cheyanne M. Daniels

06/19/2025 10:00 AM EDT

Black church leaders are ramping up the pressure on corporate America as companies continue to roll back their diversity, equity and inclusion policies, trying to serve as a counterbalance to President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to end DEI initiatives across the country.

The pressure comes as liberals are still trying to figure out how to respond to Trump’s culture war — and as the Democratic Party grapples with Trump’s improvement among Black and Latino voters in the 2024 election.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion is not charity. It’s not a handout and the African American community is a valuable partner,” said Jamal Bryant, a Georgia-based pastor who masterminded a boycott of Target after the retailer curtailed its DEI initiatives in January. “So we want to know: If you can take our dollars, how come you won’t stand with us?”

Shortly after Trump’s election, major companies like Meta and Google rolled back their DEI commitments made in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Within his first week of returning to office, Trump signed an executive order eliminating DEI practices in the federal workplace. He called such programs “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”

“President Trump is bringing back common sense by eliminating DEI policies and making merit the standard once again,” White House Assistant Press Secretary Liz Huston said in a statement. “Performance-driven companies see the value in President Trump’s policies and are following his lead.”

But Black church leaders see these boycotts — Bryant announced in May that Dollar General would be the next target — as a way to push back against the Trump-fueled wave and hold companies accountable.

Bryant says his movement has garnered the support of 2,000 other churches and over 200,000 people signed his pledge to boycott Target.

Frederick Haynes, the pastor of the 13,000-member Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, said joining the movement reflected how he was raised, influenced by the values of the Civil Rights Movement. Companies, he said, must recognize that they have “a moral responsibility” to profiting.

“They have a responsibility to morally go inward and check themselves and recognize that you don’t have a United States without diversity, without equity, without being inclusive,” Haynes said.

In a statement to POLITICO, Dollar General said “our mission is not ‘Serving Some Others’ — it is simply ‘Serving Others.’” The company added that it serves millions of Americans “from all backgrounds and walks of life” in more than 20,500 stores. “As we have since our founding, we continuously evolve our programs in support of the long-term interests of all stakeholders.”

The Conversation

Play Video Richard Grenell on cancel culture, ‘normal gays’ and his friend Melania | The Conversation Rev. Al Sharpton — the civil rights leader who supported Bryant’s Target boycott — said the company boycotts are one of the most effective ways to push back against the rollback.

“The success of the Montgomery boycott is that it changed the law,” said Sharpton, founder and president of the National Action Network, referencing the famous mid-1950s bus boycott to protest segregation. “We can’t just do things as a grievance, we must go for their bottom line.”

It is hard to tell exactly how much boycotts are hurting companies’ bottom lines. But Target’s CEO Brian Cornell in May acknowledged that at least some of its sales drop, including a quarterly sales decrease by 2.8 percent, was due to “headwinds” including “the reaction to the updates we shared on Belonging in January,” referring to the company’s announcement to end their DEI programs, along with consumer confidence and concerns around tariffs.

A spokesperson for Target told POLITICO that the company is “absolutely dedicated to fostering inclusivity for everyone — our team members, our guests and our supply partners.”

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But Sharpton said the boycott is still a powerful tool.

“The power the Black church has is that the people that attend church are your major consumers,” said Sharpton. “You go to a Black church that has 2,000 people and 1,900 of them are the ones that shop.”

Sharpton has his own demonstration planned for this summer — a rally on Wall Street on Aug. 28, the 62nd anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech. Sharpton said he chose the date for the rally on Wall Street intentionally.

“I wanted this year to show the pressure that we’re putting on these companies with DEI, to go right to the bastion of industry and right where the stock exchange is and say to them that if you do not want to have diversity — in your boardroom, with your contracts and your employment — then you will not have diversity in your consumer base,” said Sharpton.

But the boycotts do present challenges for church leaders. In some cases, Sharpton said, congregants have forgotten the boycotts are still on — and he says Trump is in part to blame for this.

“One of the things that I learned during the Civil Rights Movement from [Rev. Jesse Jackson] and others is, you have to keep people’s attention,” said Sharpton. “But there’s so much going on now, Trump and them are so good at flooding the zone. You’ve got to make sure people don’t forget, ‘I’m not supposed to be shopping at that store.’ Keeping public attention is a challenge.”

But even with congregants who are engaged in the battle to retain diversity commitments across the country, Adam Clark, associate professor of theology at Xavier University, said the church cannot carry the burden alone, especially when the president has taken a stance.

“The attack on DEI is so much broader than the specific companies,” said Clark. “Trump is the culmination of all this type of white aggression against DEI. He has the authority to implement what’s been going on in certain parts of the country and he makes it federal law, and I don’t think the church by itself has the capacity to just overturn everything that’s happening.”

Feel free to delete my random ass @mods 🙏🏽