By Lee A. Daniels

In one sense, the federal government’s monthly jobs report for May released earlier this month could be characterized as a matter of less-than-meets-the-eye.

For, although the statistics showed a monthly jobs increase of more than 431,000, roughly all but a tenth of that increase stemmed from the federal government’s own hiring of temporary workers for the census.

In other words, the May hiring statistics for permanent, private-sector job growth was deeply disappointing, ratcheting up fears of a jobless recovery and concern about the overall health of the economy.

But the Bureau of Labor report has also done something more. It has underscored the sharpening of an old, alarming dynamic of American economic life: the disparate burden of unemployment based on the facts of race and color.

Even as the overall economy continues its slow, inch-by-inch climb out of the depths of the Great Recession, the racial differences of who’s bearing the sharpest pain of joblessness are becoming more and more stark.

This isn’t to ignore the pain many whites are suffering. After all, there are a total of 15.3 million Americans out of work. More than 11 million of them are white, compared to nearly 3 million blacks. Nearly half of the unemployed – 6.76 million — have been jobless for more than six months. That’s a record for the category of long-term unemployment, and a development whose consequences will hinder the country’s economy and blight the economic fortunes of millions of Americans for years to come.

But black and Latino Americans are disproportionately bearing the burden of joblessness, with, relatively speaking, more of their working-age members out of work at every demographic level, from high school dropouts to college graduates.

The race-driven burden is immediately apparent once one looks past the overall official unemployment rate. For May that general rate was 9.7 percent. Asian Americans, who have traditionally had the lowest unemployment rate among all groups, were at 7.5 percent, and whites’ unemployment rate was 8.8 percent. However, the rate of Latino Americans was 12.4 percent, and that of African Americans 15.5 percent.

Since the first of the year, the white unemployment rate has fluctuated in a narrow band between 8.7 and 9.0 percent. This is far different from the trajectory of blacks’ rate, which in those months has been: 16.5 percent; 15.8 percent; 16.5 percent; 16.5 percent; and now, 15.5 percent (PDF). Even those shocking figures understate the extent of joblessness among blacks in particular cities, and black males and black teenagers as a group.

In other words, while the white unemployment rate never reached double digits and is now beginning in broad terms to show signs of recovery, black American joblessness remains far above what, in terms of whites’ unemployment, has always been marked as the “unemployment crisis level.” To reconfigure the old metaphor, while white Americans as a group are beginning to recover from their heavy cold, black Americans still have pneumonia.

And given that the sporadic nature of private-sector job creation is almost certain to persist for several more years at least, that means that black unemployment is likely to be stuck above 12 percent for several more years as well. There’s only one way out of that chilling scenario of high mass black unemployment: job-creation programs by local, state and federal governments.

But, in this era of straitened government resources, such initiatives can only come about through concerted political pressure. That’s black Americans’ new, tough political challenge: Forging an extraordinary political mobilization involving themselves and other Americans in order to prevent their current unemployment crisis from becoming a long-term condition.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.