The Mysterious Fall and Rise of the Black Unemployment Rate
After a roller-coaster move this spring, it’s now essentially back to where it was in February. How much is statistical noise?
The unemployment gap between Black and White Americans is quite narrow by historical standards.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
In March, the unemployment rate for Black Americans fell to 5% from 5.7% the month before. This was the lowest Black unemployment rate ever recorded in the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly data, which goes back to 1972. It wasn’t really an all-time low — a 1953 BLS study estimated that the Black unemployment rate had been 4.6% the previous year, and even lower during World War II — but the 1.8 percentage-point gap in March between the Black unemployment rate and the White rate of 3.2% may have been (it was 2.2 percentage points in 1952).
These milestones understandably received a lot of attention. When the Black unemployment rate fell to 4.7% in April, and the Black-White gap contracted to just 1.6 points, that received attention, too.1Then the Black unemployment rate jumped to 5.6% in May and 6% in June, generating headlines of a less-positive sort, while the White rate barely budged. In July, it fell back to 5.8%, pretty much where it was in February.