After Five Years of Declining Unemployment - the Jobless Rate for Black Americans is Finally in Single Digits - but Race Gaps Persist

Some sad numbers in the jobs report persist.  PB
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From the Wall Street Journal online:

For the first time in nearly seven years, the unemployment rate for African-Americans is in single digits–though it remains more than twice as high as the jobless rate for whites.

• The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for black workers was 9.6% in April...down from 10.1% in March.
• For whites, the unemployment rate was steady in April at 4.7%.
• The Hispanic jobless rate was 6.9%, ticking up from 6.8% in March.
• The Asian unemployment rate was 4.4% last month, up from 3.2% in March.

[From last month:] Race matters in America’s labor market.

The unemployment rate has been dropping steadily since October 2009, but this progress is doing little to close the gap between black, Hispanic and white workers...

Although every group has made progress, nearly five years into the recovery, the gap between black and white workers is barely closing, if at all.

A year ago, the black unemployment rate was 7.4 percentage points higher than for whites.

In [last month's] report, it was 7.5 percentage points higher.

For both black and Hispanic workers, the disparity remains significantly wider than before the recession began in December 2007.

In mid-2006, the gap between Hispanic and white workers had closed almost entirely, with Hispanic employment only half a percentage point above white employment.

Today the gap is 2.3 percentage points.

Many factors could account for the disparity, but one thing that doesn’t explain it is educational attainment.

Blacks and Hispanics with college degrees are more likely to be unemployed than whites with college degrees.
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Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/08/jobless-rate-for-black-americans-finally-dips-into-single-digits/

Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/04/04/five-years-of-declining-unemployment-doing-little-to-close-race-gaps/