Sociologists have written two pieces in the most recent edition of The Nation, discussing how the Great Recession has hit some groups harder than others.

Katherine Newman and David Pedulla write:

We know that those who enter the labor market in times of economic decline are seriously affected. For example, economists have studied what happened to the cohort who tried to find a toehold in the market of the early 1980s, the last time unemployment exceeded 10 percent. Analyzing a rich longitudinal data set, Lisa Kahn at the Yale School of Management recently examined the outcomes for white male college graduates who entered the labor market before, during and after the recession of the early 1980s. She finds that even fifteen years afterward, the workers who had entered the labor market during the recession continued to face significantly lower wages.

Men have also fared worse than women on the job market:

In the Great Recession, men have suffered more than women in the employment sweepstakes, leading some to deem this downturn the “mancession.” The gender disparity is not unprecedented; during the 1930s, women had an easier time finding and keeping jobs than the men in their families because they were cheaper to employ and the occupations they typically filled did not feel the impact of the Depression in the same way that men’s jobs did. Construction, steel, heavy manufacturing—those were industries that men flocked to, and they were all but destroyed in the early 1930s. We are seeing a similar pattern of male disadvantage emerge now, exacerbated by the relative success of women in higher education, which is translating into some degree of protection in this storm that men are increasingly going without.

But Newman and Pedulla cite the effects on young workers as the most troubling trend:

Most worrying for the long-term health of the American worker is the experience of young people; unemployment for people between 16 and 24 is roughly double that of all workers. The pages of our daily newspapers are filled with the forlorn faces of freshly minted college graduates, burdened by debt, who cannot find work. Their counterparts who have less education are far more desperate. But, any way we cut the deck, it is the new entrant to the job market who is really out of luck in the Great Recession.

Young black men are the most disadvantaged of all in the job tournament, but young workers across the board are in terrible shape in this labor market. And if previous recessions are an indication of what’s to come, we can expect these stumbling entries into the world of work to translate into long-term disadvantages, relative to those who come of age in a climate of opportunity.

Orlando Patterson weighs in on the recessions’ consequences for African Americans:

What for white Americans is a Great Recession amounts to a virtual depression for a substantial number of African-Americans. Unemployment rates stood at 15.5 percent in May, compared with the overall national rate of 9.7 percent. For black men the situation is almost as desperate as during the nadir of the Great Depression of the 1930s: more than one in six is unemployed, compared with the national average of 9.8 percent; among black teenagers, many of whom are out of school and seeking full employment, the rate stands at a shocking 38 percent.
The unemployment figures reflect only part of a broader pattern of socioeconomic disparity between blacks and whites; nearly all indexes—income, wealth, educational attainment, homeownership and foreclosures—show growing gaps and a retreat from gains made in the 1990s, gaps that are being devastatingly widened by the Great Recession…

But perhaps the most startling recent development has been the finding of several recent reports showing that the black middle class as a group is not only losing ground compared with other groups but is failing to reproduce itself. A 2007 Pew Foundation/Brookings Institution study found that a majority of black middle-class children earned less than their parents and, even more alarming, that almost half of downwardly mobile offspring had fallen to the bottom of the income distribution.

Patterson points to a separation between public success of African Americans since the Civil Rights Movement and exclusion from private success, especially when it comes to residential segregation.

However, accompanying this historic public achievement has been a stunning failure: the persisting exclusion of blacks from the private sphere of American life. Outside elite circles, blacks are as segregated today from the private domain of white lives—their neighborhoods, schools, churches, clubs and other associations, friendship networks, marriage markets and families—as they were fifty years ago…

Both these forms of separation reflect a crucial source of racial apartness: residential segregation. The nation is as segregated today as it ever was, with hypersegregated and growing metropolitan areas—where blacks are concentrated in vast inner cities. Nowhere is the paradox of public integration and private exclusion better reflected than in the fact that America’s most segregated places are its most liberal metropolitan areas, where blacks play major roles in public life—New York City (with its black state governor), Chicago, Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles and Boston (which also has a black state governor).