Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Emmanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) has vowed to fight for a jobs bill given the high unemployment rate among African Americans.
Cleaver lays at least part of the blame for slow job growth for African Americans on Republican Party insistence on cutting programs that help inner city and minority communities.
“After four months of controlling the House, the Republican Leadership has not considered or introduced one, single jobs bill,” Cleaver said in a statement. “Instead they continue to cut funding to critical programs that directly and negatively impact our country’s most vulnerable communities, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
The unemployment rate for blacks increased for the third consecutive month and is currently 16.2 percent eight percentage points higher than the rate for Whites.
Backing up Cleaver’s claim that lower-class communities are the most vulnerable, are numbers released earlier this year that shows Washington, D.C.’s Ward 8, which houses most of the city’s impoverished residents, has the highest unemployment rate of any district of similar size in the country at 25.2 percent.
It is those numbers that keeps Cleaver vigilant about investing in jobs.
“The CBC remains committed to responsibly reducing the deficit, while safeguarding the progress that we have made in the job market by investing in our future,” Cleaver went on to say. “Investing in our communities goes hand in hand with full economic recovery. No investment, no recovery.”