Black Men and Employment Woes

An article, Black Men in TN have Hard Time Finding Jobs, in the Tennessean indicates that African American men in the state are facing similar employment challenges as those across the country.

According to the article, "Black men in Tennessee are unemployed at a rate nearly three times higher than the state's overall working population." Several factors account for the discrepancies, such as the relative lack of African Americans attending college in comparison to white Americans, the erosion of manufacturing and other jobs that require only a high school diploma, the presence of racial discrimination, and the complications of black men having criminal records.

So far, the solutions or ideas for solutions involve job programs that target "economically distressed populations," as one of the observers put it. Since it is unlikely that governmental programs would address black men directly, it is possible that some of the policies might address those "distressed populations" or communities with large numbers of black men. Ideally.