"It's disheartening," said Booker, whose mother and father were also longtime employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District. "I feel like I did everything the right way. I went back to school. I kept improving my credentials."
The crumbling economy can be even crueler for black workers with less education, skills or job experience than Booker or Brayton.
Eight months ago, Aaron Collins lost his job at a Nebraska homeless center and was forced to move back to Los Angeles to live with his grandmother. But the part-time electrical engineering student couldn't find work, even as a janitor or dishwasher. The 31-year-old is now looking to enlist in the Army despite anxieties about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.
"I'm hoping it will set me up for a better career," he said.
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, in January projected that black joblessness could hit a peak of 18.2% nationally by mid-2010, and head even higher for black males and teens, who are plagued by a lack of education, little job training and high incarceration rates.
African American community leaders and academics are hoping that President Obama -- the ultimate glass-ceiling smasher -- and his $787-billion economic stimulus program will keep the institute's grim estimate at bay by giving blacks more career options than joining the military.
That can be a tall order in tough times, says Lola Smallwood Cuevas, project director for the African American Union Leadership School at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
A long-term fix needs to focus on "how do we create real jobs locally in the state of California that provide people with an opportunity to support themselves and their families," she said. To make that happen, she said, prospective workers need to be trained in cutting-edge, alternative-energy technology and other needed skills in "green" construction, healthcare and other growing fields.
Targeting federal stimulus money to "the community that suffers disproportionately from unemployment so we can reduce racial and ethnic disparities" is an essential part of the fix, says Austin Algernon, a sociologist who directs the Economic Policy Institute's Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy.
But, that alone won't be enough to bring down black unemployment substantially.
"There's no way the black community will improve without the rest of the economy improving," he said.
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ron.white@latimes.com
marc.lifsher@latimes.com
