In 2025, nearly 90 percent of White, Hispanic, and Asian American men (25 to 54 years old) were employed, but the rate for Black men in this age group only approached 80 percent. Black men’s employment-to-population ratio, or employment rate, is a low outlier by race. They are disadvantaged in the labor market in comparison with these other groups. This report shows that hard skills and soft skills do not go very far in explaining this disparity. Anti-Black discrimination is the most likely explanation.

Key Findings

• The annual employment rate for prime-age Black men averaged 11.4 percentage points below the rate of prime-age White men from 2000 to 2025.
• Increasing Black male employment would be a positive for Black women, Black children, and for reducing crime in Black communities.
• Although Black men have a higher educational attainment than Hispanic men, they have a much lower employment rate. White men’s educational advantage over Hispanic men is even greater than their advantage over Black men, yet White men have essentially the same employment rate as Hispanic men.
• The lower the hard-skill demands, the greater the Black-White employment-rate gap.
• The Black male employment rate increases with educational attainment, but it is still lower than the White male rate at every level of educational attainment. Thus, while increasing Black men’s educational attainment is likely to have positive employment effects, it will not eliminate the problem.
• Less educated Black men’s low employment rate is not due to a low level of soft skills since their employment rate in soft-skills occupations is equal to or greater than less educated White men’s.
• Less educated White young men are as successful at obtaining construction laborer jobs as they are at freight/warehouse laborer jobs, but less educated Black young men are successful at obtaining freight/warehouse laborer jobs and very unsuccessful at obtaining construction laborer jobs. Hard skills cannot explain this finding.
• Researchers have found that a majority of White adults have anti-Black attitudes.
• Most of the occupational categories with the strongest White employment-rate advantage for less educated young men earn above the overall median wage for these men. The one occupational category with an advantage for less educated Black young men, office support occupations, earns below the median.
• White men have distinct and stronger social networks than Black men, and these networks give them an advantage in finding jobs.
• Policy Recommendations
  • Implement Affirmative Action to Counteract Discrimination Against Black Men
  • Create a National Jobs Program
  • Improve Black Men’s Educational Attainment and Skills

The Large Employment-Rate Gap for Black Men

Analyses of joblessness tend to focus on the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is a very useful measure, but it can significantly underestimate joblessness for disadvantaged populations. The unemployment rate is a percent of the labor force — the people working or actively looking for work who meet the specific criteria of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.¹ Passive job searches or simply a desire to work without an active search is not sufficient for someone to be counted as in the labor force.² For these reasons, the unemployment rate does not count all people who are jobless who may want to work.

Participation in the labor force is responsive to economic conditions. When employment opportunities increase, participation in the labor force also increases. For groups who face persistently poor employment opportunities, then, their labor force participation rate can be persistently depressed, which can lead to an underestimate of their rate of joblessness when using the unemployment rate.

A better measure for examining groups facing persistent disadvantage in the labor market is the employment-to-population ratio, or the employment rate. As William M. Rodgers III and Alice L. Kassens argue, the employment rate is a better metric for studying Black men because it is a better indicator of the employment opportunities or lack of opportunities facing them.³

There is no good reason for the employment rate of similar groups to be very different. Therefore, the large gap in the employment rate of Black men with those of White, Hispanic, and Asian American men is a problem to be explained.

Black Men’s Employment Rate is a Low Outlier

The employment rate for Black men is significantly lower than the rate for White, Hispanic, and Asian American men.⁴ Figure 1 shows that the employment rate for prime-age (25 to 54 years old) Black men ranged from 7.4 percentage points (in 2024) to 15.5 percentage points (in 2011) below the rate for prime-age White men from 2000 to 2025. The average over this period was 11.4 percentage points lower. In 2025, Black men ages 16 to 64 needed 1.3 million more jobs to have the same employment rate as White men.⁵ This Black-male jobs deficit cost Black America roughly $65 billion in lost earnings⁶ and may have increased the number of Black people in poverty by about 230,000.⁷ (The jobs deficit for Black women relative to White women was 500,000 jobs and cost roughly $22 billion in lost earnings.⁸)

Figure 1

As bad as these numbers are, they actually understate the problem: The incarcerated population is not included in the calculations, and the data undercounts disadvantaged Black men. The state and federal incarceration rate for Black men is over five times the rate for White men and over 27 times the rate for Black women.⁹ Nearly 400,000 Black men are in state and federal prisons¹⁰ and over 200,000 are in jail.¹¹ Individuals in prison should be counted as jobless,¹² but they are generally not included in labor force calculations. Nonetheless, many imprisoned Black men have children¹³ and other family members who are burdened by the fact that these men are not able to contribute an income. Their joblessness has an impact on lives even if they are deleted from employment statistics.

Jobless Black men are also undercounted in official statistics. There is a growing problem of survey nonresponse. In 2021, (Julie) Yixia Cai and Dean Baker reported an overall nonresponse rate of 13 percent in the Current Population Survey and a 30 percent nonresponse rate for young Black men.¹⁴ They found that young Black men who do not respond to government surveys are more likely to be jobless than those who do respond. This pattern distorts statistics derived from these surveys. Cai and Baker found that adjusting the data for the higher rate of joblessness among young Black male nonresponders yields an employment rate that is two percentage points lower for these men.¹⁵ The problem of declining response rates also applies the American Community Survey data used in much of this report.¹⁶

While it is clear that many Black men would be better off if their rate of employment were comparable to the rate of White, Hispanic or Asian American men, these benefits would reach beyond the Black male population. Increasing Black male employment would be a positive for Black women, Black children, and for reducing crime in Black communities. Improving Black America ultimately benefits all people in the United States.

Black Women: A survey commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) shows that the vast majority of Black women express concern about the high rate of joblessness among Black men. Black mothers are worried about the job prospects for their sons. Black women are worried about their husbands and male partners being able to find and keep a job. Black women also believe that increasing the employment of Black men would help Black women and girls.¹⁷

One specific way that increasing the employment rate for Black men would help Black women is by increasing the number of “marriageable” males as argued by William Julius Wilson.¹⁸ Although the Black marriage rate is much lower than the White rate,¹⁹ Black women have the desire to be married at the same rate as White women.²⁰ The worse economic standing of heterosexual Black men greatly lowers the odds that heterosexual Black women will find a spouse.²¹ Increasing the Black male employment rate would likely increase Black women’s marriage rate.

Black children: Poverty can harm children in multiple ways. One important way is in terms of educational attainment and achievement. Researchers have found evidence linking poverty to lower academic achievement and behavioral problems.²² Increasing the employment rate of Black men would reduce poverty in Black families and should contribute to better outcomes for Black children.

The Black crime rate: Street crime is most common in the most marginalized and economically deprived communities. In the United States — these would be poor, majority Black communities.²³ As a result, Black people experience higher than average crime victimization rates.²⁴ Rates of street crime also tend to be highest among young men.²⁵ While there may be complicating factors in the relation of Black men’s joblessness to street crime,²⁶ there are reasons to believe that increasing Black men’s employment rate can help reduce street crime in Black communities. Summer jobs programs for youth have been found to reduce involvement in street crime.²⁷ Patrick Sharkey and his colleagues found that community workforce development nonprofits contributed to a decline in street crime.²⁸ Subsidized employment programs have been shown to be effective at reducing criminal recidivism and involvement with the criminal legal system.²⁹ Research by John Laub and Robert Sampson also suggest that employment is an important factor helping individuals end criminal careers.³⁰ Thus, increasing Black men’s employment will likely make Black communities safer.

Since there are widespread benefits to Black Americans from an increased Black male employment rate, it is important to understand why their employment rate is so low and what policies can increase it.

What Is the Cause of the Low Black Male Employment Rate?

Scholars have argued that lower levels of hard skills and soft skills explain worse labor market outcomes for Black men.³¹ An alternative view is that that anti-Black discrimination plays a major role in the worse labor market outcomes for Black men.³²

The Role of Hard Skills, Part 1: Education and Training

Individuals learn hard skills through formal education, and educational credentials can also signal one’s ability to acquire additional hard skills. Thus, educational attainment is one useful measure of the hard skills of Black men. Using educational attainment, a hard-skills gap does not appear to explain the low employment rate of Black men.

Table 1

Table 1 shows again that Black men’s employment rate is an outlier. Asian American men have the highest employment rate at 88.8 percent, which is 1.6 percentage points higher than the employment rate for White men. The employment rate of Hispanic men is basically the same as for White men, only 0.6 percentage points lower. The Black rate, however, is 9.6 percentage points lower than the White rate.

If deficient hard skills are the cause of this disparity, one would expect Black men to have the lowest educational attainment. This is not the case. A quarter of Hispanic men do not have a high school diploma or equivalent. For Black men, it is only 9.1 percent. Black men have slightly higher rates of bachelor’s and advanced degrees than Hispanic men. Although Black men have a higher educational attainment than Hispanic men, they have a much lower employment rate.

White men’s educational advantage over Hispanic men is even greater than their advantage over Black men, yet White men have essentially the same employment rate as Hispanic men. Asian American men are even more educationally advantaged. Asian American men have advanced degrees at more than twice the rate of White men and approaching six times the rate of Hispanic men, but the White and Hispanic employment rates are only a little below the Asian American rate.

These data suggest that hard skills do very little to explain employment rates. They may be very useful in explaining wages, but they don’t help explain why the Black employment rate is a low outlier.

Another example of a challenge to the hard-skills argument is a study based on an experimental research design evaluating a training program in computer repair.³³ Three-quarters of the study participants were male. Fifty-three percent of the Black participants in the treatment group who received the training received an A+ certification. For the Latino participants, 54 percent did. In other words, the computer repair skills of the Black and Latino treatment groups were essentially the same. In spite of this fact, the Latinos in the treatment group were able to increase their employment rate relative to the Latino control group, but the Black participants in the treatment group did not have an increase in employment relative to the Black control group. Improving hard skills did not have a positive employment effect for the Black participants. There are reasons to be skeptical of the idea that hard skills are a key explanation to Black men’s low employment rate.

The Role of Hard Skills, Part 2: The Effect of Lowering Hard-Skills Demands

Another way to explore the issue of the role of hard skills would be to examine employment rates for jobs that have no hard-skills demands. If there are no hard-skills demands, then groups with weak hard skills and groups with strong hard skills would be viewed the same by employers because hard skills are irrelevant. Both groups would be equally likely to be employed in these jobs.

However, if most or all of the group with strong hard skills are employed in jobs with high hard-skills demands, then the group with weak hard skills would dominate jobs with no hard-skills requirements. This means that if lower hard skills of Black people are driving the Black-White employment disparity, in jobs with no hard-skills requirements, the disparity should be greatly reduced or even possibly reversed.

There are no jobs with zero hard-skills needs, but there are jobs that require less time to train for or more easily obtained credentials. Employers who hire young high school dropouts are likely to have relatively low hard-skill demands. People without a high school diploma generally have weaker education-related hard skills than individuals with higher levels of educational attainment. Young workers have less work experience than older workers and therefore generally have acquired less in terms of skills from working. Employers of young high school dropouts are comfortable with workers with relatively low levels of hard skills.

It is also useful to examine young men without a high school diploma because this is the population most at risk for becoming involved in street crime. Finding ways to increase this population’s employment rate could reduce street crime and its many social and economic costs.

Figure 2

Figure 2 compares the Black-White employment-rate gap for young men (18 to 24 years old) who have less than a high school diploma with the gap for prime-age men of all educational attainment levels. The prime-age gap is large. The prime-age Black employment rate is 9.6 percentage points below the employment rate for prime-age White men. The gap for young high school dropouts, however, is even larger — 16.6 percentage points. Focusing on jobs with a low level of hard-skill demands does not improve the relative employment outcomes for Black men, it makes them worse. This finding also suggests that something other than hard skills is the driving factor behind the low Black male employment rate.

The Role of Hard Skills, Part 3: The Benefit of Increasing Black Hard Skills

Black men’s educational attainment does not provide an explanation for Black men’s low employment rate, since Hispanic men have a lower educational-attainment distribution but a much higher employment rate. Also, it appears that the lower the hard-skill demands, the greater the Black-White employment-rate gap.

Figure 3

To complicate the story, there is an employment-rate benefit to increasing the educational attainment of Black men. Figure 3 shows that prime-age Black men who do not have a high school diploma have an employment rate of 51.2 percent, but prime-age Black men with advanced degrees have an employment rate of 91.6 percent — 40.3 (due to rounding) percentage points higher! As educational attainment increases, so does the Black male employment rate. Thus, there is an employment-rate benefit to increasing Black men’s educational attainment and probably Black men’s hard skills more generally.

While the Black male employment rate increases with educational attainment, it is still lower than the White male rate at every level of educational attainment. Also, the data shows that the employment-rate gap tends to become smaller as educational attainment increases. Prime-age Black men without a high school diploma have an employment rate 14.3 percentage points below their White peers. For Black men with advanced degrees, the employment-rate gap is only 3.1 percentage points. Again, it appears that Black men have relatively more difficulty obtaining employment in occupations with lower hard-skills demands.

Since the Black male employment rate is lower than the White rate at every educational level, increasing Black men’s educational attainment is not a realistic strategy to eliminate the Black-White employment-rate disparity. For example, if prime-age Black men’s educational-attainment distribution were increased so that it is identical to prime-age White men, but Black men had the same employment rates by educational level, the prime-age employment-rate gap would only be reduced by about a third. Most of the gap would remain.

Increasing Black men’s educational attainment and other hard skills are likely to be helpful, but they will not solve the problem, since the cause of the low employment rate is not due to a lack of hard skills.

The Role of Soft Skills

Some scholars argue that a lack of soft skills has caused Black men’s employment outcomes to worsen. For example, William Julius Wilson argued, “In the past, men simply had to demonstrate a strong back and muscles to be hired for physical labor in a factory, at a construction site, or on an assembly line; they interacted with peers and foremen, not with consumers.”³⁴ But with the rise of the service sector and the decline of manufacturing, Wilson believed that employers were less likely to hire Black men. He found that employers reported “that black males lack the soft skills that their jobs require: the tendency to maintain eye contact, the ability to carry on polite and friendly conversations with consumers, the inclination to smile and be responsive to consumer requests no matter how demanding or unreasonable they may seem.”³⁵ These developments, in Wilson’s view, lead to lower employment rates for Black men.

This argument can be examined by exploring the occupational distribution of Black men. The analysis will focus specifically on young White and Black men who have never completed high school — the population with minimal hard skills. Therefore, differences in hard skills should play little role in explaining any differences.

Figure 4

Figure 4 shows employment rates by occupational category for White and Black young men without a high school diploma. Note that the 40.6 percent of these White men and the 57.2 percent of these Black men who are jobless are not shown in the figure, but they are included in the population count for calculating the employment rates by occupational category. The figure is sorted so that the occupational categories where White young men have the largest employment advantage are on top, and the occupational categories where Black young men have the advantage are on the bottom. On the top, one sees that 10.6 percent of the White young men work in construction occupations but only 2.5 percent of the Black young men do. White young men are 8.1 percentage points higher than the Black young men. On the bottom, one sees that 4.6 percent of the White young men are employed in office support occupations, but 6.2 percent of the Black young men are, giving the Black young men an advantage of 1.6 percentage points.

The occupational categories where White young men have an advantage of greater than one percentage point tend to be blue-collar occupations: construction, installation and maintenance, production/manufacturing, building cleaning, and farming. The exception to the blue-collar White advantage is the management occupations. Black young men only have an advantage greater than one percentage point in office support occupations.

There are likely some errors in the coding of occupations or educational attainment in the dataset. Small portions of these young men without a high school diploma are classified as having occupations that typically require bachelor’s or advanced degrees. They are classified as being in engineering, health care, science, and legal occupations, for example. These surprising occupational classifications generally have less than one percent of respondents by race, but it does suggest that there may be classification errors in the unsurprising occupational categories also.

As one would expect, occupations that tend to require higher educational credentials show higher rates among individuals with higher educational attainment. For example, among individuals with advanced degrees, 5.4 percent of prime-age men are in legal occupations. For all the other educational attainment levels, the rates range from 0.04 (for less than high school) to 0.5 (for bachelor’s degree) percent.³⁶

Figure 5 shows the White-Black gap in employment rates by occupational category organized by the average interactional-soft-skills score for the occupational category. The interactional-soft-skills score is a measure of “the need to have positive interactions with customers, coworkers, and supervisors” in an occupation.³⁷ The occupational categories are ordered from top to bottom from those with the lowest average soft-skills needs (the extraction or mining occupations) to the category with the highest (the health care support occupations).  

Figure 5

In Figure 5, one sees that there is very little difference in the employment rates between White and Black young men in occupational categories from the middle to the high end of the soft-skills range. In fact, in health care support and personal care, two of the occupational categories with very high average soft-skills demands, young Black men have a slight advantage in finding employment. In the middle of the soft-skills distribution, young Black men have similar employment rates with White young men. The exceptions are for office support occupations where young Black men have an advantage and management and food preparation occupations where White men have an advantage. Where White men have the strong advantage is in the occupations with the least soft-skills needs, the traditional blue-collar occupations: construction, installation and maintenance, and production/manufacturing. These findings directly contradict the assertion that Black men’s low employment rate is due to a low level of soft skills.

The Role of Hard Skills, Part 4: White Men Are Employed as Laborers at a Higher Rate

The question of whether hard skills play an important role in employment-rate disparities can be examined further by looking at the employment rates in laborer positions. Wilson suggested that it would be relatively easy for Black men to obtain manual-laborer type positions.³⁸ “Laborer” positions today likely require using more computer technology and machines than in the past, but these jobs still probably require shorter periods of training than many other jobs. The analysis is again restricted to young men who are 18 to 24 years old, who have less than a high school diploma or equivalent, and who are not enrolled in school. Employers who hire these young men generally are not looking for individuals with much work experience or a great deal of hard skills. Again, if hard skills are kept to a minimum as they are in laborer jobs, then the employment rates of White and Black young men should be very similar.

These are also not jobs with a lot of soft-skills demands. Construction laborers have an interactional-soft-skill score of 0.06, and freight/warehouse laborers have a soft-skill score of 0.05.³⁹ Nursing aides, who have a high level of soft-skill demands, have a soft-skill score of 0.85.⁴⁰ Since both of these laborer occupations do not require much in terms of hard skills or soft skills, there should be little difference in the occupational-employment rates for Black and White young men.

Figure 6

Figure 6, which shows the employment rate for White and Black young men in construction laborer and freight/warehouse laborer occupations, does not fit this expectation. White young men have a strong advantage in obtaining construction laborer positions. Their employment rate as construction laborers is 3.1 percentage points higher than the rate for Black young men. In freight/warehouse laborer positions, young Black men have a slight advantage. They are employed at a rate of 1 percentage point higher than young White men.

Another way of looking at these numbers is to note that White young men are employed as construction laborers and freight/warehouse laborers at basically the same rate, but Black young men are successful at obtaining freight/warehouse laborer jobs and very unsuccessful at obtaining construction laborer jobs. It does not seem likely that differences in skills could explain these outcomes. It is much more likely that there is something specific to the recruitment and hiring process for construction occupations that leads to Black young men being underrepresented.

The Role of Anti-Black Discrimination, Part 1: Data on Anti-Black Attitudes

Anti-Black bias is at least partially responsible for the low employment rate of Black men. But many economists have ignored or downplayed the many forms of evidence of anti-Black bias in society.⁴¹

Some scholars studying Black labor market outcomes have assumed that anti-Black attitudes ceased to be common or significant by the 1970s.⁴² It is correct that by the 1970s expressing overt anti-Black attitudes was not considered to be socially acceptable. But because people did not make anti-Black statements openly in public that did not necessarily mean that they did not still have anti-Black beliefs and feelings. 

Careful analysis of racial attitude survey data continues to reveal significant anti-Black bias in American society. For example, in data from 2020, the political scientists Kyle Peyton and Gregory A. Huber found that 59 percent of White adults had anti-Black prejudice.⁴³ Other political scientists have had similar findings.⁴⁴ These measures of prejudice have been found to be correlated with support for segregationist policies and hatred of President Barack Obama.⁴⁵ Corroborating this research, the data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that there are millions of Google searches of “nigger,” “nigger jokes,” “stupid niggers,” and “I hate niggers” mainly coming from states across the eastern half of the United States.⁴⁶ Raj Chetty and his colleagues find that more anti-Black bias in a community is associated with worse economic outcomes for Black men.⁴⁷ Hate crime and hate group data also suggest that Black people are the most common target for hatred.⁴⁸

While the public opinion and other data indicate that anti-Black prejudice did not end in the 1970s, these data have not seriously informed much of the scholarship on Black people and the labor market. Labor market scholars, however, have paid attention to audit studies which compare the employment outcomes of applicants of different races. Researchers consistently find that individuals who are Black or resumes with stereotypically “Black” names are more likely to be rejected than equivalent White or “White-named” applicants.⁴⁹ Audit studies have methodological strengths, but their weakness is that they do not clearly convey the breadth and intensity of anti-Blackness that the public opinion and hate crime data do.

The Role of Anti-Black Discrimination, Part 2: Racial Labor Queues

Stanley Lieberson and others have argued that racial discrimination in the labor market creates labor queues where White job applicants are metaphorically at the front of the line and Black applicants are at the back.⁵⁰ According to the queuing idea, within a given skill level, White applicants will be more likely to be employed, and also more likely to be employed in the more desirable jobs. Black applicants will have better representation in the less desirable jobs and also suffer from higher rates of joblessness if there aren’t enough jobs for all.

The data on White and Black young male high school dropouts provides some support for Lieberson’s ideas if one equates a higher wage with a more desirable job. Four of the six occupational categories (management, installation, manufacturing, and construction) where White young men had significant employment advantages have a median annual full-time wage that is above the overall median wage for employed young male high school dropouts (Table 2). Only building cleaning and farming occupations are below the median.

Table 2

The one occupational category where young Black men had a significant advantage, office support, is below the median wage. Young Black men’s employment rate in personal care and health care support occupations approached, but did not reach, a half a percentage point advantage over young White men. These two occupational categories have median wages that are not only below the overall median wage, they are below the wage for farming occupations, the lowest earning of the six occupational categories with a significant White advantage.

Perhaps the best example is the comparison between construction laborers and freight/warehouse laborers. White young men are employed as construction laborers at a rate of 3.1 percentage points more than their Black peers. Black young men are employed as freight/warehouse laborers at a rate of 1 percentage point more than their White peers. So this Black advantage is less than the White advantage with construction laborers, who earn above the median; meanwhile, freight/warehouse laborers earn below the median.  

The Role of Anti-Black Discrimination, Part 3: Social Network Discrimination

Racial discrimination can be conscious to the individual doing the harm, but it can also occur without a conscious attempt or desire to discriminate. When employers rely on their social networks to find employees, they discriminate against individuals not in their networks often without that being a primary or even a conscious motivation. Because of the degree of social segregation by race in the United States, network-driven hiring disadvantages Black job candidates.

Nancy DiTomaso explains the dynamic:

Because we still live largely segregated lives, such networking fosters categorical inequality: whites help other whites, especially when unemployment is high. Although people from every background may try to help their own, whites are more likely to hold the sorts of jobs that are protected from market competition, that pay a living wage and that have the potential to teach skills and allow for job training and advancement. So, just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed.⁵¹

White individuals who may not be motivated by a desire to lower Black employment opportunities may do so nonetheless.

Deirdre Royster conducted a study directly relevant to understanding possible factors behind the low employment rate for young Black men. She studied White and Black graduates from the same vocational high school. She writes,

Both black and white students had attended the same school, performed at comparable levels, and demonstrated similar strengths and weaknesses of character. Nonetheless, even in this carefully matched sample, race continued to be a powerful predictor of wages and employment.⁵²

She found that the Black graduates faced both overt and social network discrimination. Although the Black young men were similar to the White young men in both hard and soft skills, the Black young men were much less likely to obtain blue-collar jobs. They found themselves pushed toward the service sector to find work. The White young men were able to benefit from their White social network of friends and family members in blue-collar occupations to help them obtain blue-collar jobs.

Another qualitative study of social networks in three cities found that “white men tend to have the most racially homogenous networks, [and] Black men have the least robust networks.”⁵³ The authors added that “[s]ince people of color are underrepresented in executive positions and leadership roles, this may limit the ability of people of color with racially homogenous job networks to access individuals in professional leadership roles.”⁵⁴ In other words, Black men are less likely to have access to individuals who could influence employment decisions.

Nationally representative quantitative studies have supported the qualitative findings. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that, in searching for work, unemployed Black men use friends and family less and public employment agencies more than White men.⁵⁵ A different nationally representative study concluded that “black job seekers are less likely than white job seekers to (1) know someone at the companies to which they are submitting applications, and (2) have their network mobilize key resources on their behalf, specifically contact an employer on their behalf.”⁵⁶ As a result, the benefits of social networks for obtaining employment “are significantly smaller for black than for white job seekers.”⁵⁷ White men have distinct and stronger social networks than Black men, and these networks give them an advantage in finding jobs.

Skills, Racial Discrimination and the Low Black Male Employment Rate

The evidence points to racial discrimination as playing a substantial role in the lower employment rate for Black men. It is clear that anti-Black attitudes exist in society. This anti-Blackness leads to discrimination against Black men in employment.

The hard-skills argument for Black men’s low employment rate fails to explain why employers are apparently more inclined to hire minimally skilled young White high school dropouts over minimally skilled young Black high school dropouts. Given that both groups have little work experience and generally little in terms of hard skills, hard skills is not likely to be an explanation.

The soft-skills argument for Black men’s lower employment rate also fails. Less educated young Black men have better odds of being employed in occupations with significant soft-skill demands than in traditional blue-collar occupations.

None of these points should be taken to mean that there is no benefit to improving the skills of Black men. Black male employment rates are likely to be higher when they have more and better skills. As the educational attainment of Black men increases, so does their employment rate. Increasing Black men’s educational attainment and skills, however, is not likely to eliminate the employment-rate disparity.

Policy Recommendations

Implement Affirmative Action to Counteract Discrimination Against Black Men

Anti-Black racial discrimination continues to exist. A recent survey of Republicans under 50 years old found that nearly a third of them were willing to openly say that they have racist views.⁵⁸ It would be an error to assume that these are the only individuals with racist views. They are just the most unabashed about having them. As discussed above, recent research finds that a majority of White people reveal anti-Black prejudice.

Even employers who are not anti-Black may rely on predominantly White social networks to find employees. Using this process disadvantages Black applicants.

Affirmative action that requires the recruitment and serious consideration of qualified Black applicants is necessary to counteract these existing practices that provide a racial preference to White individuals.

Create a National Jobs Program

Addressing the extremely low employment rate of Black men is easier when there are many jobs available. It is easiest if there is a national jobs guarantee.

The problem of joblessness is acute for Black men nationally, but it is also a challenge for Black women and men and women of other races in specific counties, cities, and neighborhoods. Even during a strong economy nationally, there are still millions of people in need of jobs. For example,

In 2023, the United States had a second year of the lowest annual unemployment rate since the 1960s. The national unemployment rate averaged 3.6 percent, tying the rate for 2022. But while the national average showed record low unemployment, many communities in every state continued to suffer from high unemployment. For example, the unemployment rate averaged 8.1 percent in Magoffin County, Kentucky; 8.6 percent in Coachella, California; 10.7 percent in Flint, Michigan; and 14.7 percent in Kusilvak, Alaska. Access to jobs is not spread evenly across the country.⁵⁹

Magoffin County is overwhelmingly White.⁶⁰ Coachella is overwhelmingly Latino,⁶¹ and Kusilvak is overwhelmingly Alaska Native.⁶² Flint is about 60 percent Black and about 30 percent White.⁶³ There should be a national jobs program to help these and other communities with high rates of joblessness move toward full employment.

During the Great Depression, the federal government stepped in and created millions of jobs. While the country as a whole is not experiencing a depression, there are specific counties, cities, and neighborhoods that can be considered to be economically depressed or close to it.

The public supports a federal job guarantee.⁶⁴ There would likely also be support for a national jobs program that is more targeted to communities with low employment rates.

Improve Black Men’s Educational Attainment and Skills

There are several programs and policies that have been shown to improve Black children’s educational attainment and achievement. The educational think tank and advocacy organization, EdTrust presents a summary of 11 on its website.⁶⁵

Perhaps the one with the biggest return on the investment is high-quality early childhood education, which has numerous positive long-term outcomes. Black children have little access to these types of programs. Changing this situation would improve Black educational outcomes.

Apprenticeships provide an opportunity for individuals to receive job training while earning an income. Individuals who complete apprenticeship programs typically experience a large growth in their income.⁶⁶ Simultaneous with efforts to increase Black men’s attainment of college degrees,⁶⁷ efforts should be made to increase the enrollment in apprenticeship programs of Black men who are not pursuing college.  

Both President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump have called for an increase in the number of apprenticeships. Unfortunately, analysts argue that there haven’t been enough funds invested to reach Trump’s target of 1 million apprenticeships.⁶⁸

This research was supported by the American Institute for Boys and Men. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of AIBM.