I am a fortunate Black American; I can honestly say that I've never had a problem finding employment when I try hard enough and look for it. Part of that has to do with the way I speak, and look, and the fact that the areas in which I've worked have usually been places in which ideas like "diversity" hold sway. But for many, many African-Americans, this is not the case. In response to this brave Alternet piece, Cyrus responds:

There are some lies that go down easy and some that are just brutally, shall we say, un-lubricated. One such yarn is that of black unemployment. For years Black males have been described as endangered, lazy, shiftless, more obsessed with flash and bling than with opportunity or substance, but . . . there is another side. When are we going to talk about the systematic discrimination that creates a forty percent unemployment rate for Black America? Why? Forty percent is higher than the unemployment rate for the depression. Black America has endured this for over a decade even in the middle of one of the greatest economic boom cycles to date.

Its facts like these that make me dust off my old epithets and toss out an oldie – racism. I’m not talking about your grandparents racism or even yours, well maybe yours. What I am talking about is a belief that human life has a price. Actuaries, accountants, human resources managers, insurance salesmen and financial planners are all vested in the commodified life. The idea that there is a utility cost to every action and every choice and that the sum total of these actions and choices, mediated through monetary networks of exchange, constitute or are equivalent to that collection of experiences and memories we call life. Electric word life . . .

This was the view held by masters in the colonies when they engaged and enslaved indentured servants. It was exacerbated by the intensive labor required to feed a European Jones for sugar, cotton, alcohol and tobacco. It inevitably resulted in the mass relocation of untold millions of Africans and the prosperity of a Mediterranean backwater called Europe.

My point? Depression era unemployment for over a decade because manufactures would rather drive a Bentley instead of a Mercedes. The result? We don’t hire Blacks. No Blacks need apply.

I expect no help from the SCLM. But I hope that more in the blogosphere will try to keep this in mind, as we discuss economic "reality" and the people who feel that reality the most.