Black Workers Are the Canaries in the Coal Mine During Trump 2.0 |
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Nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump infamously asked Black voters in his pitch to garner their support: “What do you have to lose?”
The Federal Reserve answered Trump’s question in its recent Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households report for 2025: Black Americans lost more financially than every other racial group. According to the report, 60 percent of Black Americans expressed that their financial well-being declined, down 5 percent from 2024. In contrast, 79 percent of white Americans said they were “doing okay” last year.
Black job losses in 2025 underscore the Fed’s reporting. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Valerie Wilson, the Black unemployment rate rose 1.2 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same time last year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also recently reported that the Black unemployment rate, which is typically higher than the national average, rose to 7.3 percent, making the rate as high as it was the pandemic in 2021. As I’ve previously noted, Black women endured sudden and staggering job loss as more than 300,000 were let go in the first few months of 2025.
Black American workers have experienced job losses across labor sectors during the first year of the new Trump administration. Its targeting of federal workers using the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) as an economic battering ram disproportionately hit Black Americans hard. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more Black Americans came to view the federal government as a reliable employer that ensured some degree of economic mobility for a racial group increasingly marginalized by the growing “post-industrial” private sector economy. At the end of 2024, Black Americans comprised nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce. Now, with DOGE cuts and this administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion plans and affirmative action programs for contractors, the prospects of Black employment in the federal government appear bleak as ever.
Weaknesses in manufacturing during Trump’s second term hurt Black laborers, who comprise nearly........