The last decade has been one of significant bounty for Black Americans.

We�ve scored major economic gains, which has fueled a further expansion of the Black middle class. We�ve charted highly visible "breakthroughs" in such different sports arenas as golf and tennis and even the Winter Olympics. A very small number of Blacks have now ascended to the tops of Fortune 500 companies. This year for the first time two Black actors won moviedom�s Oscars for the best performance by a male and by a female.

And Blacks� participation in the political realm as officeholders is growing. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies just-released (their) annual census of Black-elected officials. The Washington-based think tank found that the number of Black officeholders reached a record 9,040 in 2000.

But that doesn�t mean that the difficulties confronting Black America should be ignored or downplayed. The difficulties�particularly those which beset the roughly 30 percent of Blacks whose incomes hover at or below the poverty line�are severe.

This reality illuminates the defining quality of the Black American Experience: Considering it in "either-or" terms is wrong. The truth is that for Black Americans the "glass"�their overall situation�is both half-empty and half-full.

This was underscored by recent news that the nation�s overall unemployment rate increased in March to 5.7 percent, reversing the downward shift it recorded for February.

While such up-and-down movements are typical of a period when, according to the economic experts, the economy is slowly emerging from a recession, the really bad news within those figures is that the Black unemployment rate shot past the double-digit line, to 10.7 percent.

This means that from February to March, while the unemployment rate for Whites rose by a tenth of a percent, to 5 percent, and that of Hispanics rose from 7.1 to 7.3 percent, the jobless rate for Blacks increased by 1.1 percent�to its highest rate in five years.

This increase, and the fact that joblessness increased so rapidly among Blacks, ought to alarm everyone.

After five years of progress in whittling unemployment among Black Americans down below double digits, that rate has now crossed the double-digit divide again.

No one can pretend now that this is a matter of Blacks not wanting to work, or not understanding the value of work, even if one has to take jobs of the lowest wages and the lowest status.

For one thing, in an economy that�s lost 1.6 million jobs since March 2001, we know that workers aren�t giving up their jobs. They�re being laid off.

For another, the decline of the Black unemployment rate to its historic low of 7.2 percent in September 2000 was almost solely due to young Black males with minimal education and low skills rushing to take low-wage service-sector jobs the booming economy had brought into being.

That proved that what the Black poor, especially poor Black males, lacked wasn�t an understanding of the value of work. What they lacked was the opportunity to work.

The difficulties this segment of Black America�and all of America�faces is amply examined in a new report Professors Harry Holzer and Paul Offner, of Georgetown University, have just produced for the Brookings Institution.

Their study shows that the unemployment rate of young, less educated Black males is lagging significantly behind what it used to be, and behind the current employment rates of their White and Hispanic counterparts.

Most significantly, it also sharply trails the employment rate of young, less educated Black women, which has increased in the past decade because of the focus on revamping the welfare system to place the emphasis on welfare being a temporary, not permanent, status.