Obama-era Black jobless rate fell
ACA, 2009 stimulus bill raised employment
President Barack Obama did nothing to help the Black community while in office, according to an Oct. 24 Facebook post written by two high-profile supporters of President Donald Trump. The post also alleges that Black unemployment was at an all-time high under Obama.
“Obama is a Liar! He did nothing, and we mean absolutely nothing for the Black community,” sisters Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson wrote. “Not only that but up under him and Jim Crow Joe Biden’s administration, black unemployment was at an all-time high.”
The post was shared more than 9,000 times.
The sisters, who use the moniker “Diamond and Silk” professionally, are “President Trump’s most loyal supporters,” according to their website. Once Democrats, Hardaway and Richardson switched allegiances in 2015 to vote for Trump in the primaries and general election. They are authors, podcast hosts and hosts of “Diamond and Silk Crystal Clear,” on conservative network Newsmax TV.
Hardaway and Richardson did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.
The statement about an “all-time high” unemployment rate for Black people during Obama’s presidency is inaccurate. But Obama administration policies on behalf of the Black community deserve a more nuanced analysis.
Unemployment fell under Obama
In 2009, the U.S. entered an economic recession rivaling the Great Depression of the 1930s, USA TODAY reported. The overall unemployment rate jumped from 5.8% in 2008 to 9.4% in 2009 and reached a record high of 9.6% in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Black unemployment was nearly 5 to 6 percentage points higher, at 14.8% in 2009 and 16% in 2010.
Among the first laws passed under the Obama administration, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, provided for $787 billion in education, health care, infrastructure and renewable energy investments to help spur the economy. The cost of the stimulus was later revised to $831 billion between 2009 and 2019, according to government transparency website GovTrack.
The act also established temporary relief programs for Americans most affected by the recession. It passed in the Senate on Feb. 13, 2009, with no Republican votes, according to the U.S. Senate website.
The Congressional Budget Office credited the ARRA for increasing the number of full-time jobs up to 200,000 in 2014 and the number of people employed that year by 100,000 to 300,000. The act also spurred slow but steady job growth for African Americans.
From 2011 to early 2020, Black unemployment dropped to the lowest rate in recorded history, according to the Wall Street Journal. BLS records support this find; the rate inched downward in 2011 and began a rapid decline in 2012.
In an analysis of Trump’s second State of the Union Address on Feb. 5, 2019, the Associated Press reported that more jobs were generated during Obama’s last two years in office (5.1 million) than during Trump’s first two years (4.9 million).
Other policies aided Black community
African Americans face structural inequalities in access to wealth, health care and encounters with the criminal justice system compared with whites, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. Obama-era policies have disproportionately affected this group.
Matt Dallek, political historian at George Washington University, told USA TODAY that African Americans benefited from the economic recovery of the 2010s as well as the Affordable Care Act of 2009.
“An estimated 20 million people (got) health care and hundreds of thousands – or maybe millions – of people got onto Medicaid through Medicaid expansion,” Dallek said. “Not an insignificant percentage of people helped by those two pieces of legislation were, of course, African Americans,”
Health insurance coverage improved for all racial groups under the ACA, according to a March report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The overall uninsured rate fell from 15.1% to 8.9% from
2009-18, according to an article in the Duke University Journal of Health, Politics and Law, and the rate of non-elderly uninsured African Americans fell from nearly 20% in 2010 to 11.5% in 2018. Expanded insurance coverage is listed as one of the Obama administration’s key accomplishments on behalf of the African American community.
Also listed is an unprecedented high school graduation rate among African Americans. From 2013-14, 72.5% of African American public high school students graduated within four years, according to the Obama administration.
Data from the Education Department support this figure. The four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate for African Americans enrolled in public school was 73% from 2013-14.
Obama added $85 million a year in funding for historically Black colleges and universities to his fiscal 2017 budget, an amount confirmed in an October 2016 Education Department fact sheet. During Obama’s two terms in office, mandatory funding for HBCUs ranged from nearly $80 million to $85 million a year, according to Politico.
Dallek also cited My Brother’s Keeper, the 2014 initiative that sought to narrow opportunity gaps between young men of color and their white counterparts, as a policy benefiting African Americans.
“I think it’s hard to kind of measure its ... sort of tangible success,” Dallek said. “But certainly, it was an effort that enjoys some support within the African American community,” Dallek said.
MBK provided grant-funding opportunities to establish mentorship and other programs focused on early childhood development, improved graduation and college-entry rates and reducing youth violence among young men of color. Obama under the initiative also banned the use of solitary confinement for juvenile prisoners, according to a 2016 progress report.
Obama White House weaker on criminal justice
Despite policies like MBK, criminal justice reform was a weak spot for the Obama administration, according to Dallek.
“I think (Obama) and (Attorney General) Eric Holder ... did a number of regulatory steps rather than legislative that at least attempted to deal with the problem of systemic racism in the criminal justice system,” Dallek said, and added that Holder laid the groundwork for sentencing reforms passed during the Trump administration.
Holder served as Obama’s attorney general from 2009-15. The Sentencing Reform Initiative he launched in 2013 led to a drop in mandatory minimum sentencing for certain drug offenses, according to a Justice Department press release.
Trump’s First Step Act of 2018 expanded on Holder’s initiative. The act allows judges more discretion in sentencing on nonviolent crimes, according to a Feb. 20 fact sheet.
Obama also created the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which urged independent investigations of police killings in the wake of the 2014 shooting deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown by police, according to USA TODAY.
The administration claimed the incarceration rate for African Americans fell each year of Obama’s presidency. This is true, according to the Pew Research Center. The African American incarceration rate began decreasing during Obama’s first term in office. Black inmates accounted for 2,261 per 100,000 Black adults at the end of 2006 compared with 1,501 Black inmates per 100,000 Black adults at the end of 2018.
“The symbols and the rhetoric of the Obama administration also matter,” Dallek said. He referenced Obama’s responses to the 2012 shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin and the shooting of nine Black parishioners by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 as examples. The thenpresident consistently called for tolerance and inclusion in response to the tragedies.
“And so, the very fact of Obama’s presidency was, I think, very important to the African American community,” he said.
Our rating: False
We rate this claim FALSE, based on our research. The African American unemployment rate fell during Obama’s presidency due in part to policies like the Affordable Care Act and the 2009 stimulus bill. A claim that Obama did “nothing for the Black community” is also inaccurate, per a presidential historian.