What about Black Men? The Cost of Excluding Them From Your Workforce

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By: Dr. Bentley Lorene Gibson 

On September 9, 2026, President Trump took the stage at the first ever GOP Midterm Convention in Dallas and told the crowd his first two years back in office were "the most successful two years, financially and every other way in the history of the presidency." It is a line he repeats at rally after rally, and it is also, on its own, almost meaningless. It obscures a labor market story that is landing hardest on Black men.

“There are more people working today in the United States of America than at any time in the history of our country.”

That statement is technically true and economically empty. The U.S. population keeps growing, so the raw headcount of employed Americans rises over time regardless of how the economy is actually performing. Every president since the government started tracking this data in 1948 could have said the same thing at some point in their term. What the topline number leaves out is a labor market story that has centered on Black women for most of the past year, while a substantial, and by some measures larger, deterioration among Black men has drawn far less attention. The National Urban League found that roughly 567,000 Black men lost their jobs between November 2025 and February 2026 alone, and the Economic Policy Institute found Black men's employment population ratio dropped 1.7 percentage points over the same year, while Black women's held essentially flat.

The two stories are not competing. They are two components of the same underlying vulnerability, and the data show they are structurally different. Among Black women, the deterioration was concentrated among college graduates, while employment among Black women without a college degree actually rose enough to keep the overall rate unchanged. Among Black men, it was close to the reverse. Noncollege Black men drove the decline, while employment among college-educated Black men held up or improved. Different pressures are hitting different parts of the same community at the same time, and a conversation that only tracks one half of it will keep missing where the risk actually sits. Black men are also concentrated in the sectors absorbing the hardest hits this year: transportation and logistics, construction and manufacturing, and the federal workforce, where cuts have landed disproportionately.

The Risk Organizations Are Taking

Every one of those numbers represents a decision made somewhere, a hiring freeze, a layoff round that leaned on categories no one checked, a budget cut that quietly fell hardest on the teams where Black employees were concentrated. Organizations rarely set out to eliminate Black workers as a stated goal. It happens anyway, because leaders do not check. That should concern every executive reading this, and not only for moral reasons, though the moral reasons are real. If your organization is courting Black consumers, Black cultural influence, or Black political engagement, or teaching and advising Black students, while your own leadership, faculty, and layoff decisions do not reflect that same community, that gap will find you. Loyalty built on marketing without representation behind it is not loyalty. It is a transaction waiting to end.

McKinsey estimates closing the racial wealth gap could add $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion to U.S. GDP by 2028. Citigroup put the cumulative cost of systemic racial discrimination to the American economy at roughly $16 trillion over the past two decades. Nielsen found 70% of Black consumers say they will stop buying from companies they believe devalue their communities. Every organization that lets Black employment quietly erode is not managing a headcount number. It is spending down trust, output, and competitiveness it will not easily rebuild.

If leaders really care about this, they need to act now or pay later. Your moral conscience, if you have one, and your organization, will pay for it either way. Audit your layoffs by race, not just headcount. Check your vendor and contractor relationships, not just your W-2 workforce. Name structural decisions honestly instead of routing them through performance language. And if you are serious about getting this right, and not just seen as getting it right, reach out. I do this work, and I want to hear how this is showing up in your organization, and in your own professional and personal life. Through The Bias Adjuster, I help organizations run the audit before the damage is done, not after: equity assessments that show you exactly where representation is eroding, implicit bias training that changes how decisions actually get made in the room, and leadership development that builds the judgment to catch this before it becomes a headline or a lawsuit. If your organization is ready to stop guessing and start measuring, let's talk.


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Sources

About the author: Dr. Bentley Gibson, PhD, is a cognitive and developmental psychologist specializing in implicit bias, and the founder of The Bias Adjuster. Her published research includes studies on the early development of racial bias in children (Journal of Cognition and Culture).

Connect with Dr. Bentley on LinkedIn.

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