The current economic crisis has waged a particularly severe attack on the Black middle-class in the United States, experts say.

For African Americans, “2008 was not a good year,” said Algernon Austin, director of Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute, “and unfortunately, it looks like things will get worse.”

The adage that when America sneezes, Black America catches a cold has held true, making it almost inevitable that African Americans would bear the brunt of the country’s financial woes, economists say.

“Whenever there is an economic downturn, African Americans are the most negatively affected,” said Jon Schmitt, senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research.

The disparity can be explained by a persistent gap in wealth between Blacks and Whites among other things, he added.

“The unique challenge for African-American middle class is they tend to have much less financial wealth (like stocks and bonds) and wealth in general so they have much less of a margin to get through tough times,” the economist said.

It was just a decade ago that journalist Ellis Cose declared that “it’s the best time ever to be black in America.” A tight labor market saw marked increases in employment, higher wages and homeownership and declines in joblessness and poverty that promised a robust growth of the community’s wealth base.

However, Austin said, unlike other Americans, Blacks generally have not recovered what they lost during the 2001 recession, making them even more susceptible to the downswing in the economic cyc