Black America suffered a depression, not merely a worse recession than whites.

Evidence

But in black America, the reality was even bleaker. I mean this beyond the familiar platitude that says “whenever white America has a cold, black America has the flu.” The reality is that by every relevant statistical measure (employment, wages, wealth, etc.) black America has experienced and is experiencing a depression. This is more like the symptoms of a national congenital disease than the flu. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 46

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘Great Black Depression’ as a distinguishing concept — a structural, congenital condition rather than a cyclical ‘flu,’ which becomes the diagnostic frame for the value gap.
• SEED: The congenital-disease-vs-flu distinction is a clean rhetorical frame the reader could carry into their assessment of whether the 2008-era analysis still holds post-2020.