Public employment is undergoing some of the sharpest cuts of any sector, and black families are feeling the hit. Public-sector employment is the #1 employer of black men and #2 of black women. As the public job pool shrinks rapidly, it constitutes a major mover of African-American unemployment. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, as I discussed with the NFBPA. Public-private partnerships may expand the constituency for public employment, but in this political atmosphere negotiations are fraught. (I spoke at the convention of black public administrators shortly after the showdown in Wisconsin over public labor.)

Public-sector jobs — military, civil service, public k-12 education, public colleges and universities — were a ladder to the middle class for many black families, including my own. (Grandparents: Post Office and Social Security. Mother and siblings: Post Office, US Army, US Marines, Social Security, Baltimore City (schools and water department), Baltimore County (schools). My generation: almost all private sector, save one.)

Good jobs used to come with a promise of stability, leading to a here-until-retirement mentality. No more, not in the private sector or the public. The drop in African-American employment has helped fuel a drop in African-American support for the President. A recent Washington Post-ABC news poll saw the number drop from 83 percent “strongly favorable” to 58 percent now. The Congressional Black Caucus is running a jobs initiative that has challenged the President on his approach to jobs, specifically not addressing the African-American employment crisis as a discrete thing-in-itself. To do so could be political suicide; but to not name the problem could cause widespread African-American voter attrition, particularly around first time voters and those who voted for the first time in 2008.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently spoke at a Congressional Black Caucus summit on jobs. He’s also written about the global war for what people used to call “good jobs,” a battle with high stakes beyond money. Jobs have become synonymous, for many of us, with identity and personal happiness — not just in the US but across the world. There are few things people fight for as hard as their sense of self.

I hate the term “Post Racial.” It’s weasely. You might as well say that you’re post-reality.

To wit: a new report released today by Congress, revealing that 22% of Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more are African-American. The black population is 11.5 percent of the labor force.

I suspect, given the way unemployment figures are counted, that the figures are actually much starker.

The level of African-American joblessness is a profound opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us to restructure the ways we think about social mobility, business ethics, and the impact of employment on issues from mental health to child-rearing. It’s a profound opportunity for us to look at how the demographic least likely to vote for President Obama share many of the same economic issues as African-Americans. I’m talking about white Southerners in economically challenged states like Mississippi and Alabama. (Those states ranked 50 and 42 in per capita income, and ranked the lowest on the percentage of white voters who chose Obama, 11 and 10 percent respectively.) It’s a profound opportunity for us to challenge categories like “African-American” and “white Southerner,” and figure out how we can develop language about groups and constituencies that is not too broad, but does not ignore reality.

Well, that’s a lot of opportunity. There’s a lot of work to do.

It’s a line from China Mieville’s speculative fiction novel The Scar, but it could easily describe today’s politics.

President Obama has been described as a socialist and tool of banks and big business; a “racist…who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture” and someone who “hasn’t done much for their [i.e., African-Americans'] bottom line” because “so-called black leaders are much more interested in invitations to the White House…than in raising any kind of ruckus that might benefit people in real trouble.

Underlying much of the recent rhetoric is the race issue…yeah, that one, the one the President doesn’t seem to want to talk about. Some of the President’s opponents have not only asserted that he is a “racist,” but even proclaimed, ludicrously but persistently, that he is not an American citizen. (Others have brought guns to Presidential rallies, something worth mentioning only to banish the obvious thought.) In the State of the Union, the President was happy to talk about jobs (23 mentions), the economy (15 mentions), and energy (15 mentions). He did not utter the words “race,” or “racial,” and the only time he mentioned the word “Black” was in the phrase “Black Tuesday,” referring to the stock market crash of 1929.

In the Presidential race of 2008, President Obama did not truly address race head-on until the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy forced his hand… and then he delivered what is widely considered to be a brilliant, landmark speech. There has not been a corresponding moment yet in this Presidency. If there is one, it might (might) come if African-Americans urge the President to be accountable on economic equality. There has been one White House meeting on race, during the white-out of the Washington “snowpocalypse.” The players for the off-the-record event were the President, Ben Jealous of the NAACP, Marc Morial of the National Urban League, and Reverend Al Sharpton of the National Action Network. (Ninety-seven year old Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women couldn’t make it because of the precipitation.)

The three invitees who were able to pass the clotted roads came out of the White House and faced the press (with, between them, one umbrella and one hat for shelter) and delivered soundbites as the snowflakes turned their dark garments pale. The event vibrated with the unspoken. Rev. Sharpton said: “We do not seek any special kind of edict … from the president because he’s African-American. We expect to be included in the process.” Yet among many African-American political junkies, the conversation was: why were these three organizations deemed to be the messengers representing black interests in the economy? Why not invite some black economists, for one? Economist Dr. Julianne Malveaux, the President of Bennett College, has been writing a series of columns deconstructing the truth behind the unemployment numbers. As she writes, having done some data analysis of the Labor Department’s own figures:

Our unemployment rate is not 9.7 percent, as the overall rate is. It is not the 16.7 percent that is officially reported. According to my own calculations, the black unemployment rate is at least 28.7 percent. Would such a rate be acceptable if “all” Americans were experiencing it?

That brings us to the Black President Trap, the one which has been lying, with serrated teeth, under the brush since before the President was elected. On the one hand, if the President is seen as appealing to African-American interests, he risks alienating white (and non-white, non-black) voters. On the other hand, if he fails to deal with the economic realities of African-Americans, he could set the stage for buyer’s remorse that prompts some people to sit out voting in the next Presidential election.

Let’s go back to the 2008 election and look at the numbers. The popular vote does not determine the Presidency, but it gives us one good metric of voting patterns. So, in 2008, then-Senator Obama got 69.5 million votes; Senator McCain 59.9 million votes. The electoral vote tally was 365 to 173.

What’s interesting is who voted in 2008 versus 2004. As the report by Project Vote put it:

Americans of color in 2008 increased by 21 percent from 2004, based on a review of exit polling and preliminary administrative data. Votes cast by Americans ages 18-29 increased by 9 percent. Votes cast by whites in 2008 declined slightly compared to 2004.

Far more African-Americans voted in this election (16.4 million) than the overall margin of victory (9.6 million)… closer than not to a two-to-one ratio. An estimated ninety-six percent of those black voters voted for Obama. A dispirited African-American electorate could seriously mess a black President’s re-election bid up.

When former Vice President Dick Cheney chortles that “President Obama is going to be a one-term President,” the first scenario that comes to my mind that could achieve that is an absence of black voters at the polls in 2012. Given the lack of credibility of the modern Republican Party in addressing African-American interests or speaking, tonally, to African-American sensibilities (and I think here of the delegates at the 1996 RNC booing General Colin Powell when he dared bring up affirmative action), I cannot envision widespread voting against President Obama if, as anticipated, he runs for re-election. I say “I cannot envision” because things regularly happen in politics that I cannot envision.

What I can envision is an America where, after years of persistent unemployment and a degradation of the quality of life in African-American communities, a lot of potential black voters in 2012 just stay home. Black voters staying home plus an uptick in non-black Americans voting Republican could produce a one-term presidency.

So, what to do? Well, the only defense against an impossible barrage of attacks from different vectors is to attack from different vectors. But the Obama administration has been caught in triage mode, trying to stanch the bleeding from wars and the economy and proposing but not yet executing new initiatives like healthcare. The administration needs to simultaneously act broadly, yet with a clarity of ethics and purpose.

Well, as my one of my friends likes to remind me, blogs are not books. So my next piece will tackle how to spring the “Black President Trap” without getting caught in it…

He is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.

What are we to make of that?

Well, the Associated Press did a smart piece (featuring one of my Twitter friends, @profblmkelley) on whether black folks want to give up blackness. (Short answer: no.)

That’s one way of deconstructing Matthews’ statements. What it called up for me was the fundamental question of payback. Andrew Hacker, the author of books including 1992′s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, wrote about race and voters in the New York Review of Books shortly before the 2008 election:

Resentment of perceived black privilege is also involved, as we have seen with respect to affirmative action, and even fear of some kind of racial payback. Over half of a largely white sample told a Rasmussen poll that they feel Obama continues to share at least some of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s positions on America.

The fear of black payback goes back as far as fear of slave rebellions. In modern politics, it means that some voters fear that black politicians will favor black interests, just as white politicians have often favored white interests. In fact, if you look at the history of American government, there has been a far greater transfer of black wealth to white Americans and skewing of public funds towards non-blacks than the reverse.

Instead of a payback mentality, the Obama Administration seems to deliberately be hands-off on dealing with problems facing black America. Last month, there was a spat between the Congressional Black Caucus and the Administration over whether the administration was doing enough for African-Americans. (According to economist Dr. Julianne Malveaux, the real non-employment rate among African-Americans may be 27%.) This is a struggle to keep an eye on, because it begs the question: is the only way to be a post-racial President to ignore the specific structural inequities of race, and if so, at what cost to the nation?

From the SmileyBooks press release

“I’m writing this book as Robert, not R. Kelly,” the singer says. “I’m tired of being misunderstood. I will show you the tears, fears, and sweat. I will open my heart and reveal the good in my life as well as all the drama. I want to tell it like it is.”

There is no direct mention of the sexual assault allegations that resulted in an acquittal.

From Gina MacCauley’s What About Our Daughters:

I had hoped this was a hoax, but apparently Tavis Smiley, who is accused of gathering large numbers of Black folks together so that they could get pitched predatory Wells Fargo loans (disproportionately affecting Black women) is joining forces with another accused predator, R. Kelly. Its amazing that the primary unifying force in the Black community is EXPLOITATION of women and girls. If you go to TavisTalks.com you will see front and center and item announcing that R. Kelly has joined Smiley Books. When is that State of the Black Union and how do we get a permit to protest it? I’m serious.

The comments are no less critical.

And from Danielle Belton’s The Black Snob:

And this book will be just another in a long line of signifiers to perverts that you can do pretty much anything to a woman, girl, child, whatever, and someone will love your trifling ass anyway because it’s our fault for having vaginas. But for Tavis, and others who claim to be holding the entire race to a higher standard, this is further proof that you never meant to hold anything to any standards ever. That “cash rules everything around you, dollah, dollah bill, ya’ll” and you could seriously give two craps about the implication of being the speakerbox to a known predator. After all, freedom of speech, ya’ll! And SOMEONE was going to publish his book so why not Mr. Accountability? Pardon me while I go regurgitate something.

(Belton’s blog also has a link to a guest post about Smiley and Wells Fargo.)

It provoked a conversation on Twitter where several of us talked about who gets the mic when it comes to representing blackness in media. The short answer, in my mind, is that the people who are the best at getting the mic are people who help build the platform: people like Tavis who are business-builders as well as media-makers. So all critiques have to be funneled through the lens of economics: if you don’t like what one mediamaker does, do you have an alternative brand or model?

What do you think?