Before the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic workers in the US had fallen to record lows. But the aggregate numbers wouldn’t capture the disparity seen in different US cities, where in many cases the racial gap was far wider than the national average.

*Note: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, an error in how responses to the household survey were classified meant the unemployment rate would have been roughly 3 percentage points higher than reported. But to maintain data integrity, the BLS does not reclassify survey responses, so the official US unemployment rate stands. There also were misclassifications in the April survey, so the directional change in employment rates was not affected; the overall rate for May was lower than in April either way.

📬 Sign up for the Daily Brief

Our free, fast, and fun briefing on the global economy, delivered every weekday morning.