A new jobs report, released at the beginning of July, soothed some worries about the state of the economy: unemployment continues to fall. For Black Americans, however, hardest hit by the economic fallout of COVID-19, the news wasn’t as good.
Black unemployment, which rose last month even while the rest of the country’s rates fell, has now begun to fall - slowly. The white unemployment rate is falling twice as fast.
As a result, some analysts were confused when a recent AEI poll showed Black Americans are wary of reopening the economy, which many see as necessary to reduce unemployment. Black Americans have the most to gain from reopening - right? So why don’t they want to?
“The AEI poll found that 82 percent of black Americans said it’s better for the government to take all necessary steps to ensure the public is safe,” reports FiveThirtyEight, “even if it means keeping businesses closed for longer and hurting the economy.”
More than half of white Americans want to quickly reopen the economy, regardless of whether it’s unsafe.
“I know a lot of people who have lost their jobs,” said Dominique Anderson, a Black man living in Texas, quoted by FiveThirtyEight. “But I fear that reopening so quickly is going to cost more people their lives.” He’s not alone.
Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at more than three times the rate of whites, and tend to live in areas harder hit. That means Black Americans are more likely to know someone personally who has gotten sick or died from COVID-19.
Because the impact of COVID-19 has been harder on Black communities, it also makes sense to fear that the danger of reopening would hit Black communities harder as well.
But there’s another factor beyond proximity to the pandemic: Black Americans seem to care more about others than white Americans do.
Education studies have shown that Black American students excel in school when they are allowed to learn collaboratively, while white students worked best when focused on an individual reward. An orientation toward communalism and interdependence has also been observed in Black adults.
That means that in a global crisis like the current one, Black Americans are in general more concerned about the health and survival of the collective, rather than the economic success of the individual.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in March argued that it was worth sacrificing the lives of our elders in order to help the economy, and President Trump has consistently argued that the economy is more important than the deaths attributed to COVID-19.
He recently celebrated the June jobs report and claimed the U.S. has done an “incredible job” at containing the virus, despite infections hitting record highs across the country and more than 130,000 deaths.
Some Black analysts believe that leaning into communalism, and rejecting the individualism of the modern capitalist economy, is the only way Black Americans will survive the crisis and, potentially, avoid these kinds of disproportionate impacts in the future.