Trump claims to have improved the lives of Black people. The numbers say otherwise

Donald Trump is widely reviled as a racist. Some believe his administration is seeking to prevent many black Americans from voting in the upcoming presidential election through voter suppression.

Yet Trump himself insists his administration has delivered great things for Black Americans.

The President cites metrics like African American unemployment and poverty and legislative achievements such as the recent creation of “opportunity zones”, low-income areas where new investments are eligible for tax breaks.

Further, Trump points to criminal justice reforms and measures to boost social mobility such as funding for black educational facilities.

Trump himself characterises his style as “truthful hyperbole”. And his claims that his administration “has done more for the Black community than any President since Abraham Lincoln” is certainly hyperbolic, given Lyndon Johnson’s government delivered landmark civil right reforms for African Americans in the 1960s.

But how much – if any – truth is in Trump’s claims to have improved the lives of African Americans over the past four years?

Unemployment

Trump claims that before the pandemic struck he had delivered the lowest black unemployment rate in American history.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics only goes back to 1972, but it’s true that unemployment for African Americans did fall to its lowest on record – around 5.5 per cent – at the end of 2019, though this was higher than the national rate of 3.7 per cent.

A deeper question is how much credit for the fall in Black unemployment can be legitimately claimed by Trump.

Falling unemployment was a trend that was clearly in place before Trump entered the White House – and not just for Black Americans but for the entire workforce. To believe that these trends can be credited to him, one would have to believe that the economy would have crashed if he had not entered the White House in 2017.

Due to the devastating toll of the coronavirus crisis, the economy has, of course, crashed now and unemployment has soared. For African Americans it is at 14.5 per cent.

Funke Aderonmu, a policy analyst at the Georgetown Center on Poverty & Inequality, said the pandemic “only exacerbated the fault lines between Black and white economic experiences”.

“Before the Covid-19 crisis, the Black unemployment rate was twice that of white workers, and Black households had one-tenth the wealth of their white counterparts. In the wake of Covid-19, many Black communities face higher threats of illness and death due to Covid-19 and the economic gaps are spreading wider. Black businesses are at greater risk of closing down and Black workers who have not lost their jobs often risk their health as essential workers," she added.

Trump apparently wishes to take credit for the benign trend he inherited but not the massive economic shock that occurred when he was in office and for which he arguably bears far more personal responsibility.

Justice

It’s also worth noting that the US unemployment figures exclude the prison population from the labour force – and that African Americans make up a third of inmates despite constituting only 12 per cent of the US population.

In December 2018, Trump signed the First Step Act – which analysts say reduced some of the structural racial inequalities in the US criminal justice system – into law.

And in 2018, the imprisonment rate of Black Americans (1,134 sentenced Black prisoners per 100,000 Black US residents) was the lowest since 1989 according to US Department of Justice statistics.

Yet the First Step Act passed Congress on a largely bipartisan basis and built on work by the Obama administration, rather than being a Trump innovation. And the trend of falling black imprisonment rates was in place before Trump entered the White House, reflecting a broader trend of a falling US total prison population since 2008.

Arthur Ago, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that overall, things had gotten worse under Trump.

“While the federal First Step Act has corrected some of the injustices that Black Americans suffered historically, the truth is that the US Department of Justice under Trump has actively limited the number of people who have been able to benefit from the act,” he said.  

“The Trump administration has had little to do with decreased incarceration rates, which are falling simply because crime has been falling in the United States for decades. In fact, this administration has actively thwarted criminal justice reform efforts by and on behalf of Black people. It has increased the militarization of police, directed federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges against suspects, reinstated active use of the federal death penalty, and suggested that many people demonstrating for fundamental change in policing around the country be charged federally.”

Wages

Wages for African Americans did pick up sharply last year after lagging behind other groups for much of the last decade, hitting an average of $806 a week for full-time workers in the second quarter of 2020 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yet it’s important to note that the incomes of Black American households are much lower than other groups.

According to the US Census Bureau, African American households had an annual income of $41,000 in 2018 versus $71,000 for white households.

And there has been little sign of that gap being closed in recent years.

There is also a vast wealth gap, with research showing that the net wealth of the average white family in America is ten times larger than that of the average Black family.

Poverty

The US census data for 2018 showed an African American poverty rate of 21 per cent, the lowest on record.

There was though, once again, a trend of decline in place before Donald Trump was elected, with the downward trend beginning in 2013.

And the Black poverty rate is higher than other groups, with Hispanics on 17.6 per cent and whites and Asians on 10.1 per cent, although the highest poverty rates is among Native Americans.

The impact of the pandemic and the lockdown on African American poverty rates is yet to be revealed.

Social mobility

Trump has boasted of the creation of “opportunity zones” in deprived areas as part of the 2017 tax cuts, arguing that this will benefit African Americans.

But critics say the programme – which gives tax advantages to investors in “economically distressed” areas – is likely to primarily benefit real estate developers rather than poor African Americans. And there’s some early evidence to support that fear.

As for Trump’s boasts about giving record government funding to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBUC), educational institutions established before the civil rights act to primarily serving the excluded Black community, some of those involved point out that this was a Congressional initiative rather than something driven by the President.

It’s important to note the context of low social mobility for Black Americans.

Research last year found that Black children in the poorest fifth of households were twice as likely as white children to stay in that group as adults.

And Black children from the highest income quintile are less likely to remain in that group than the average.

“On every rung of the income ladder, Black children have worse prospects of the American Dream than white children – including at the very top,” write Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam of the Brookings Institute think tank.

“It is now quite clear that improving economic mobility in the US will be virtually impossible without a dramatic alteration in the trajectories of Black children, and Black boys in particular. ‘Race-conscious’ policies, such as baby bonds, an expanded earned income tax credit, or a fully refundable child tax credit can increase the chances of black children achieving the American Dream.”

None of that has been on Donald Trump’s policy agenda.

The verdict

On the great concerns of the moment for many African Americans, police brutality and racism, President Trump has been dismissive, unresponsive and often simply hostile to the concerns of peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors.

A number of Black supporters of Donald Trump appeared at the Republican convention in August to lavishly praise the President’s economic and social record for African Americans.

But these Black Trump supporters are grossly unrepresentative of their wider community.

Trump won just 8 per cent of the Black vote in 2016. And polls this year show an overwhelming majority of Black voters backing Trump’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, in November.