It�s a good thing President Obama will be having a jobs summit because the recovery of the African American community from a recession, as part of the general recovery of the national employment picture, is not assured. My view is that this will be a grand opportunity to figure out how to boost job growth for everyone, but also to do some targeted work with those communities that are especially hurt by the downturn in the economy as well.

My conclusion that blacks will need to be targeted for help comes from the fact that in the last recession during the Bush Administration, blacks were the only group not to recover to their pre-recession level of employment or wage earnings. This occurred for at least two reasons. The first was that blacks had to compete at the lower levels of the labor force with immigrants. In the decade between 1990 and 2000, 13 million immigrants came into the United States, the largest since the European immigration at the turn of the 20th century. The Center for Labor Studies at Northeastern University says that about 8 million of those entered the labor force, most of them were males, and they constituted half of those entering the labor force in that decade.

The second reason was that the economic boom of the late 1990s was led by the tech sector and blacks were not positioned to get the nearly 4 million jobs created in that decade. The Clinton administration provided incentives for computer-related companies in Silicon Valley to lead business growth, but less than 7% of blacks were employed in the computer industry and therefore, were not able to compete for jobs when they grew.

This �pincer movement� attacking both low-income and professional jobs simultaneously prevented the black community from participating in the recovery and caused the stagnation of the black middle class and the growth of poverty. In this recovery, blacks have lost significant jobs in construction and therefore, are not able to obtain �shovel-ready� jobs. They will not be able to take advantage of expected growth in �Green jobs� unless the jobs summit is sensitive to the problem of their disproportionate suffering and devises solutions.

A big part of the solution is that, although Obama is being held responsible for the lack of job growth, the Stimulus funds are being spent at the local level by governors and mayors. Many of these jobs were promised to be �shovel-ready� but were not; so Obama has gotten the blame for what states said they could do quickly. This is not the Roosevelt administration that established a number of agencies that created essentially government jobs. Obama has tried to work with the modern economy that is driven by the private economy on the assumption that if he and his administration could get the financial system working, it would finance the companies that were responsible for employing workers.

The Summit could consider funding small banks. Much of the TARP money went to the big banks, but the administration should take some of the 300 billion that has been returned by some of the financial institutions and re-direct it to the community banks that did have �toxic assets� and did not make many of the subprime mortgage loans. With federal government financial assistance, these banks would be more able to abide by the Community Reinvestment Act that directs neighborhood banks to fund local economic projects.

Finally, the White House Jobs Summit should fund black job-creation projects directly and recognize that black businesses are being shut out of the recovery disproportionately and if they do not financially support them, they will disappear, such as the auto industry, financial services such as accounting, banking, the communications industry and others. They are not being included in the deals that are being made by the big banks, finance houses, auto industries, and etc. and they disproportionately employ African Americans.

In other words, the Summit should not avoid taking race seriously when it is a critical dimension of the overall economic problem the nation faces, and because the economic condition of blacks and other large populations is material to the health and future of this country.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Dr. Ron Walters, is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Center and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest book is: The Price of Racial Reconciliation (The Politics of Race and Ethnicity) (University of Michigan Press). Click here to contact Dr. Walters.