Census links race, money

September 27, 2007
By Kristin Collins

Blacks make less money and have higher unemployment rates than any other racial or ethnic group in the state, census figures released Wednesday show.

Median household income for blacks in 2006 was just over $29,000, the data indicate. That's 12 percent less than Hispanics and 40 percent less than white households earned. It's also slightly less than the median income for American Indians.

Unemployment in 2006 climbed to 7.5 percent among African Americans -- nearly twice the state unemployment rate of 4.2 percent. The rate among Hispanics, the state's second largest minority group, was 5 percent, even though fewer than half of Hispanics have a high school diploma.

Some say that the plight of blacks can be blamed on the same forces that have always kept them poorer than whites: a legacy of discrimination that has led to broken families, high rates of imprisonment and lower educational attainment than whites.

"When you look at the number of businesses owned, who runs our major corporations, who makes most of the hiring decisions, it's still vastly white," said Keith Sutton, president of the Triangle Urban League, which advocates for African Americans.

Others, however, say that a new force -- illegal immigration -- is hurting the job prospects of blacks in North Carolina .

The census shows that less than 8 percent of blacks now work in the construction and farming trades, compared with 37 percent of Hispanics.

Dan Coleman, president of the Raleigh-Wake Citizens Organization, a black leadership group, is owner of a construction company. He said construction jobs once provided a middle-class wage to workers across the racial spectrum.

"When I was a kid, blacks did most of the construction work," Coleman said. "And you saw whites from down east and Indians coming in from Lumberton . Now, I don't see any of them doing it."

Instead, he said, crews are almost exclusively Hispanic.

In a 2006 study, UNC Chapel Hill economists found that the influx of uneducated Hispanic workers had depressed wages and displaced some low-skill African American workers.

But John Kasarda, one of the study's authors, said it's not clear how many jobs blacks have lost to immigrants. In interviews, Kasarda said, blacks often say they are unwilling to take the jobs Hispanics do -- at any wage.

Sutton, of the Urban League, agreed that many blacks no longer want to harvest crops or work construction.

Census figures show that, even though Hispanics are working more than blacks, they are still suffering from high rates of poverty. Their higher household incomes may be inflated because a typical Hispanic home, which often includes extended family, may include more workers. More than one-fifth of Hispanic families live in poverty, the same rate as for blacks.