Professional economists will not pause for an instant at those figures. It is a truism that the black unemployment rate generally runs double the white one, and yet when did that become acceptable? How can there be so little discussion about a full-blown epidemic of joblessness in the African-American community, as if the commonplace incidence of despair -- and, more recently, reversed progress -- somehow amounts to old news?
'Can you imagine any other group at that level of unemployment and the media dismissing it as not important?' the Rev. Jesse Jackson asked during an interview this week.
