By Lee A. Daniels

The debt-ceiling crisis that threatened America’s economic foundation has abated for now.

But the jobs crisis and the foreclosure crisis which continue to threaten the present and future of millions of ordinary Americans have not.

If the resolution, albeit temporary, of the fierce political war waged in Washington these past several months marks “a change in behavior from spend, spend, spend to cut, cut, cut,” as Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, said on the floor of the Senate, in what shape does that leave the nation’s already-frayed social safety net? If this compromise inaugurates “a regime,” as a New York Times article put it, “of steep spending cuts aimed at reducing the deficits – so far, without new revenues sought by the White House,” what does that mean for the millions of Americans sliding with increasing velocity toward the margins of society?

These facts of political and economic life make it especially imperative that black Americans ponder an alarming question: What will the economic catastrophe that is only just beginning to sweep over Black America look like?

Catastrophe is not too strong a description of the prospect a significant proportion of blacks – including many who recently lost their middle-income jobs – may face over the next decade.

Not when, as the overall U.S. poverty rate has risen to an all-time high of more than 14 percent, the proportion of black Americans at or below the poverty line rose a full percent to nearly 26 percent.

Not when the dynamics of the country’s jobless recovery promise no reduction in the official black unemployment rate of more than 16 percent—double that of whites – with rates in some urban areas being significantly higher.

Not when that racial ratio (PDF)– black unemployment being one-third to fully twice that of whites – holds for nearly every population segment of the two groups, including that of college graduates.

Not when public-sector jobs, long a crucial foundation of black upward mobility, are being severely cut back, and the private sector, enabled by technological advancements to reap greater profits with fewer workers, has in mass terms put a “not hiring” sign on its U.S. operations.

Not when African Americans, who are 12 percent of the population, make up just over 19 percent of the nation’s more than 14-million jobless workers and nearly 23 percent of the 6.3-million of them who’ve been out of work for 12 months or more.

Not when the epidemic of home foreclosures among black Americans has not only driven African-American homeownership rates back to 1990s levels and undermined the stability of numerous predominantly black neighborhoods but also robbed Black America as a whole of any chance of accumulating significant wealth for the foreseeable future.

And not when, as a new study by the Pew Research Center has charted, the gap in median wealth between white households, on the one hand, and black and Hispanic households, on the other, is at record dimensions. All three groups lost a portion of their net worth as the Great Recession ran its course.

But the erosion suffered by the latter two has put them as paltry levels (PDF). Whites, who had a median net worth of $134,992 in 2005, are now at $$113,149. But over the same period, Hispanic net worth fell from $18,359 to $6,325; and black median net worth declined from $12,124 to $5,677.

These are just a few of the distressing signs indicating that, for all the valuable, necessary and well-publicized achievements of the still-relatively small black strata of upper-class blacks, many middle-class blacks are desperately trying to hold onto the gains which transformed their status and the shape of the black class structure over the last forty years: From one in which fully two-thirds of black households earned no better than a lower-middle-class income to one in which, before 2007, half of employed blacks had solidly middle-class or blue-collar incomes.

Unfortunately, as political scientist Michael C. Dawson recently wrote, the Great Recession and jobless recovery are “eroding the traditional foundation for the black middle class while appearing to all but block roads for less affluent blacks to move into the middle class.” Poor and many middle class blacks, he predicts, are entering a period of “severe economic hardship and dashed hopes.”

This is not to ignore the broader crisis, which has left millions of once gainfully-employed white workers bereft and pushed to the margins of the society they, too, once invigorated with their on-the-job productivity. In fact, the only hope of solving the black jobs crisis lies in crafting a comprehensive effort that will rescue most of the jobless.

That task would be difficult enough by itself because of the dynamics of the globalized economy and the painfully slow recovery many economists project for the U.S. economy.

But it is further complicated by the extraordinary polarization that the debt crisis revealed exists among the national political elite; and, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the increasing movement of white voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

The implications of that shift for the 2012 presidential campaign is underscored by the continuing numerous examples of right-wing political figures on the right, both officeholders or party operatives criticizing President Obama in overtly-racist terms not seen at the level of respectable political discourse since the early 1960s.

That means that, in order for black Americans to have a chance to defeat the economic crisis they are facing, they will have to win the political battle immediately ahead of them.

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