For Obama, touring MLK Street would be “the right thing to do”

Drive through the heart of any African American community and you will find a street, avenue, or boulevard named in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Very often, these thoroughfares were once thriving and vibrant corridors of black culture and commerce. Today, typically, they are filled with shuttered homes and boarded-up businesses. The current national economic crisis has exacerbated the problems on MLK Street, worsening downward economic trends that have been in the making for several decades.

It is no secret that African Americans have been deeply and disproportionately affected by the recession. Seemingly every governmental agency and nonprofit organization tracking the recession – from the US House and Senate Joint Economic Committee to AARP – has documented the devastating effect that the recession has had on African Americans.

African American unemployment, for instance, has more than doubled in recent years, jumping from 9% in February 2007 to 19% in February of this year, far outpacing national averages for the general population. And things are likely to get much worse before they get any better because of the disproportionate concentration of African American workers, especially African American males, in vulnerable industries such as auto manufacturing; persistent barriers to employment, ranging from employer discrimination to limited education; and the surge in mass incarceration.

President Obama, however, has steadfastly refused to address specifically the impact that the recession has had on African Americans, choosing instead to pursue “colorblind” policies that are anything but colorblind.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus money, for instance, have been poured into select job sectors, such as construction, an area in which employers and unions purposefully excluded African Americans (and women) for generations, resulting in an industry that is wholly dominated by white males. Such policies, therefore, directly and disproportionately benefit whites – both white males and families with white male heads of household; these are hardly race neutral policies.

Yet the President says that such policies benefit everyone, including African Americans, and as such, insists that there is no need for recovery policies that target African Americans specifically. This is rising tide economics. Unfortunately, boats can’t rise when they have gaping holes in them, and they certainly can’t rise when they are already underwater.

In recent weeks, the President has made a great show of touring Main Street U.S.A. Just yesterday, he visited the V & M Star Steel factory in Youngstown, Ohio, which is planning a stimulus-supported expansion project that is forecast to create 400 new jobs – in construction. From the factory floor, Obama spoke about the positive impact that his recovery plan has had, stating that, among other things, it was “the right thing to do” to give loans to small businesses and “the right thing to do” to extend unemployment benefits. Obama left Youngstown after the speech.

Ironically, V & M Star isn’t actually located on Main Street. Its address is 2669 Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. Before heading back to Washington, the President should have toured the rest of MLK. In fact, it would have been the right thing to do.