This post was written by Erica L. Williams, Deputy Director of Campus Progress

As a young person dealing with a dramatically depressed economy, I wish that I had the luxury of viewing our current crisis as simply a matter of dollars and cents. As a member of the most diverse generation in American history (the Millenial generation) who voted on a platform of unity, I wish that I could discuss the solutions to the crisis as equally beneficial to all Americans. And as an unabashed supporter of large, progressive investments in our education, health, and energy sectors, I wish that I could judge the success of Obama’s work in these areas, particularly as it pertains to job creation, only in numbers.

But as a person of color, the staggering statistics released daily about the state of our national economy become that much more disheartening when viewed in color and through the lens of race.

The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, issued a report last week analyzing racial and ethnic jobless rates in the 50 states. It said the 18-month recession has erased many recent gains for minorities because manufacturing, construction and trade jobs, often the easiest for them to obtain, are melting away.

African-American communities for decades have suffered from higher jobless rates than white neighborhoods, a phenomenon that in recent years spread to Hispanic and Asian centers, the EPI report found. But in this crisis, the gap is quickly widening.

The national unemployment rate for blacks typically is twice that for whites and for Hispanics, it is 1.5 times higher. But at the end of the first quarter of this year, for example, Alabama’s black jobless rate soared to 15.1 percent from 5.3 in the 2007 fourth quarter. For whites, however, the rate rose to 5.8 percent from 3 percent.

Just as problems like the gaps in the education system, disparities in access to and quality of health care, and the placement of dirty energy in lower income communities, consistently fall along racial lines, so too inevitably will the solutions.

While increasing overall employment is central to the recovery effort, the success of the process will also depend on an equitable distribution of those work opportunities. Similarly, how resources are deployed – where money is spent, who benefits from the spending, and what is accomplished with the spending – is just as important as deployment itself. The federal government must keep equity considerations in mind as the implementation of the recovery proceeds. And it must issue measures and benchmarks by which to judge implementation with

America shouldn’t only be concerned about the causes of these persistent patterns of disparity, but equally, if not more so, concerned with making sure that these patterns are not replicated in seemingly progressive solutions to our current national crisis.

Equity and impact assessment must be a priority for Congress and the Administration moving forward so that our economic future can be more just and fair than ever before.