Unemployment falls...but not for blacks

For the country as a whole, the unemployment rate fell in 2011. That's good news, right?

As the economy slowly improved last year, the unemployment rate fell for both whites and Latinos.

Not so much for African Americans.

But at the end of the year the black unemployment rate was 15.8%, exactly where it started out 2011, according to the government's December jobs report released Friday. That's a sharp contrast to the white unemployment rate, which fell to 7.5% last month.

The broad trend is unfortunately nothing new, said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. The black unemployment rate has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/06/news/economy/black_unemployment_rate/index.htm?iid=GM