By Khalil Gibran Muhammad

“Education is the key to success. Knowledge is power.”

Wise words repeated countless times to young people at home and in school every single day. But what should we say to them if one day their hard work meets empty promises, if their dreams are deferred, or their first paycheck of material reward is marked insufficient funds.

What advice should be given now, for example, in this moment of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression? Nearly double the percentage of black people is unemployed today as compared to white job seekers, 16 percent vs. 9 percent, according to the December Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The nearly two-fold employment gap is as troubling and persistent today as it was in the 1930s.

How can yet another generation of ambitious young people—continuing the path of their elders— be encouraged to remain hopeful and optimistic in a time of tremendous economic misery and uncertainty, especially when racial discrimination continues to deny them equal opportunities?

A recent New York Times analysis of current unemployment data shows undeniable evidence that the largest gap between black male jobseekers and white ones is not among underachievers or high school dropouts. The recently widening racial gap is among hardworking, ghetto-defying, college-educated men—the pride and joy of their families and communities. Black men with college degrees have nearly twice the unemployment rate, 8.4 percent vs. 4.4 percent, of their white male counterparts.

First, we must practice what we preach. If knowledge is power, then, parents, mentors, preachers, and teachers must educate young people about the real world. They cannot bury their heads in the sand when the cold hard facts of economic discrimination don’t fit our rhetoric that personal responsibility guarantees the American Dream. Remember, unemployment rates measure people actively looking for work, not those who do not want to work. Contrary to enduring myths, the gap is not simply a measure of black people’s laziness, ignorance, or criminal records. It is not now, nor has it ever been.

Don’t misunderstand me. Individual hard work and perseverance are crucial ingredients to future success. Every young woman and young man, every boy and girl, are most in control of their own work ethic. They make the choice to study hard, to impress their teachers, and to master the skills that will position them to maximize opportunities. Still, in America there is an inconvenient truth: if you happen to be African American or perceived as such, and are likely a first or second generation college graduate, you are still twice as likely to be unemployed as your white counterpart. The situation is nearly as bad for college-educated black women, where the largest racial gap is also among the Talented Female Tenth.

This fact must be acknowledged and taught so as to prepare young people for the challenges ahead, and to minimize disappointment, self-doubt, and injury if they are blindsided by the data. No football coach would put a novice running back on the gridiron—no matter how quick and strong—without teaching him to lower his shoulders, brace for impact, and hold on to the ball.

Who would think that economic discrimination would be increasing among black men and women in an era when so many Americans believe that King’s Dream has been realized with the election of President Barack Obama—and the animation of Disney’s first black princess? Many have suspected that in this historic moment, Affirmative Action’s days might be numbered. They just didn’t know it was already on life support.

There are those critics, black and white, who will argue that the unemployment gap is not racism at all, but a reflection of the lower quality of education obtained by black college graduates and professional degree holders. Yet even when black job applicants are Morehouse men, or Yale grads, or hold MBAs from the University of Chicago, as New York Times reporter Michael Luo observed in his interviews of several men, they are still less likely to be hired. “After all,” he writes, “many had gone to good schools and had accomplished résumés. Some had grown up in well-to-do settings, with parents who had raised them never to doubt how high they could climb.”

Reared to persevere in spite of adversity—“ bloodied, but unbowed”— those interviewed by the Times have not given up on the American Dream. Except, some have taken to whitewashing their resumes, using middle names that are less “ black,” and stripping away all visible signs of blackness by erasing any mention of their memberships in black professional societies, fraternities, and community organizations. Speaking of community organizations and resumes, truth be told, Barack Obama might be the last community organizer to obtain the most prized job in America.

The second lesson we should teach is that history matters. For those coming of age in the post-Civil Rights era, it has not been easy to make sense of the past. To know what is instructive, empowering, or debilitating. All too often these days any look backwards to America’s racist past for clues on how to move forward is dismissed. Race pundits that lean to the Right often warn against what Shelby Steele calls our “enemy memory”: when the painful memory of slavery and Jim Crow’s evils blind us to the enemy within. John McWhorter argues black history too often fuels a “cult of victimology.” And many others, on the Left and Right, simply say black folks are too quick to “play the race card,” where every instance of individual failure is substituted by a fictive Bull Connor or Mark Furman.

But America’ history of economic discrimination is no more or less instructive to fighting contemporary racism as is the Vietnam War to the War in Afghanistan, or the Works Progress Administration to federal stimulus spending today.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the over-achieving, Harvard-educated, pioneering black academic who could not land a job at a white university to save his life, wrote the first major study of racial and economic discrimination in 1899. He said of Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love: “How long can a city say to a part of its citizens, ‘It is useless to work; it is fruitless to deserve well of men; education will gain you nothing but disappointment and humiliation?’ How long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face?”

Far longer, it seems, than Du Bois could have imagined. Labor market discrimination has a long and sordid history in this country with new chapters being written in the 21st century. In 2004 and 2005, two research studies, conducted by Princeton sociologist Devah Pager in Milwaukee and New York, found that white men with a criminal record were more likely to get a job than black men with a squeaky clean past.

White nepotism and black stigma cannot be willed away by sheer optimism or by ignoring the past. They are two sides of the same coin in circulation since before the minting of the Continental Dollar of 1776. When the U.S. economy returns to full employment at 5 percent , if we don’t retire the coin or actively discourage its use, there will likely still be a two-fold, overall black/white unemployment gap.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University and the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.