(NNPA)—When I interviewed Marie Johns, then the outgoing deputy secretary of the Small Business Administration, a year ago, she said the SBA does not separate figures by race, though it hopes to do so at some point.
Technically, she was correct in saying the SBA does not separate agency-wide figures by race. But the SBA’s 8 (a) program figures can be broken down by race and that’s where she was being disingenuous. I specifically asked her twice about the status of Black businesses under Obama and twice she was less than forthcoming.
Now, I know why: The Obama administration’s record of guaranteeing loans to Black businesses is worse than it was under George W. Bush.
Yes, that was documented recently by the Wall Street Journal in its analysis of data for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
“Black borrowers received 1.7 percent of the $23.09 billion in total SBA loans. The percentage is down sharply from 8.2 percent of overall SBA loan volume in fiscal 2008. By number of loans, Black-owned small businesses got 2.3 percent of the federal agency’s roughly 54,000 loans last year, down from 11 percent in 2008,” the newspaper reported.
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