Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

What is particularly striking, however, is that there was no significant difference between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers in 1948. The unemployment rate for black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. For their white counterparts, the unemployment rate was 10.2 percent. For 18-year-old males and 19-year-old males, the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent for whites and 10.5 percent for blacks. In short, there was no significant racial difference in unemployment rates for teenage males in 1948,37 when there was no effective minimum wage. After the effectiveness of the minimum wage law was restored by recurring minimum wage increases in later years, not only did teenage unemployment rates as a whole rise to multiples of what they had been in 1948, black teenage male unemployment rates became much higher than the unemployment rates for white teenage males—usually at least twice as high for most years from 1967 on into the twenty-first century.