By The Editors

Has America forgotten there’s a Great recession going on? That more than 14 million workers who recently had jobs now don’t? And that more than 44 percent of them have been out of work for six months or longer – a circumstance which has laid the foundation for a permanent jobless class numbering in the millions?

It’s a fair question to ask, given how quickly consideration of the federal government’s monthly jobs report for July released last Friday seems to have disappeared as a topic of interest in most of the mainstream media and blogosphere.

Perhaps it’s because the Great Recession has gone on for so long – more than thirty months now – the terrible toll it has taken has lost its grip on our imagination, and lost its power to spur us to find solutions (PDF).

Perhaps it’s the tedium of the overall unemployment rate now seemingly stuck in the mid-9-percent range. Or the hearing one more time that the economy has lost more than eight million jobs since December 2007; that there’s only one job available for every five jobless workers; and that one of every six American workers is either unemployed or working in a part-time job because they can’t find a full-time one.

Every month these and myriad other numbers which outline America’s unemployment crisis don’t improve underscores that its effects will last long after the overall unemployment rate finally begins to substantially decline.

One reason why lies in the widening gap in economic well-being among white, black and Latino Americans. The stark situation such numbers reveal is telegraphed by the contrast between the unemployment rate for whites of 8.6 percent, on the one hand, and that of Latinos (12.1 percent) and blacks (15.6 percent) (PDF), on the other.

Multiple news stories during this potent economic crisis have shown the stress on individuals and families an unemployment rate above 9 percent can produce. Now, as the unemployment rate of whites has fallen below that level, we need portraits of the hardship 12- and 15-percent unemployment rates are producing among Latino and black Americans. Plumbing that racial divide is especially needed because, as the nation’s once-substantial safety net becomes more and more porous, blacks’ and Latinos’ stunning absence of net wealth means that most lack even the barest cushion to survive a serious economic event – such as being out of work.

Their predicament – and the larger society’s – is plain to see in a recent report by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development (PDF), an Oakland, California-based think tank. It found that, whether married or single, whites have far greater wealth than Latinos or blacks. For examples, white couples, married and unmarried, have a media net worth of $167,500, compared to $31,500 for blacks, and $18,000 for Latinos. The comparative gaps in net worth are even greater for single individuals, and greatest of all for single mothers: white single mothers have a paltry net worth of roughly $8,000; but black and Latino single mothers have zero net worth.

These and other data outlining the widening racial divide just beneath the surface of the Great Recession are alarm bells. They warn that merely concentrating on pushing down the white unemployment rate is not going to solve America’s economic crisis. Is anyone listening?