This year the annual Black Investor Survey conducted by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab didn’t get much attention.

When the market is at historic lows, it’s hard to get publicity for wagging your finger at African-Americans for not investing in their employee retirement plans.

It was a challenge to get blacks to invest before the market went crazy, and it’s probably harder now with just about everybody and their mama – black and white – seeing substantial losses.

Over the last 11 years, black stock ownership has fluctuated from a low of 57 percent last year to a high of 74 percent in 2002, according to the survey.

Over the same period, white stock ownership has consistently hovered around 80 percent.

But there’s a good note in the investor survey.

About 90 percent of blacks and whites who are working have access to a defined-contribution plan such as a 401(k). Of those with such a plan, about 90 percent of both groups contribute regularly.

So blacks have listened. They are participating. The next challenge is to get them to put in more money.

Although African-Americans are enrolled in employer-sponsored defined-contribution plans at about the same rate as whites, they save far less each month and have a considerably smaller portfolio balance. The median monthly amount that blacks contribute to their 401(k) plan is $169, while whites contribute about 50 percent more, or $249 each month. As a result, the median total household savings for retirement reported by black respondents is $53,000, compared with $114,000 for whites.

Overall, there’s been an increase in all workers contributing to workplace retirement plans. The number participating in an employment-based retirement plan increased to 41.5 percent in 2007, up from 39.7 percent a year earlier, according to a study released by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). The year-to-year jump was the biggest gain in participation since 1998.

Still, the racial differences are bothersome.

In the EBRI report, Hispanic wage and salary workers were significantly less likely than both white and black workers to participate in a retirement plan. Like the Ariel and Schwab report, EBRI found the gap between the percentages of black and white plan participants narrows when compared across earnings levels.

A wider gap exists for Hispanic workers. For those employed by the smallest of businesses (fewer than 10 employees), 19 percent of white wage and salary workers participated in a retirement plan, compared with 7 percent of Hispanic workers.

The level of Hispanic participation increased with the size of the employer. At companies with 1,000 or more employees, the participation was 62 percent for whites compared with 44 percent for Hispanics. Additionally, when you factor in location of birth, native-born Hispanic workers displayed participation levels near those of black and white workers.

Minority workers are getting the message that they should participate in employee retirement plans, especially since many employers match some of the money that workers contribute.

More than 90 percent of large companies offer an employer match, with the most common formula being a match of 50 cents for every dollar up to 6 percent of pay per year, according to research by Hewitt Associates, a global human resources consulting and outsourcing company.

When it comes to retirement savings, the only color that really matters is green – lots of it.

If we retired like many from the Depression-era generation – with no debt, no mortgages and less sense of entitlement – we could live in retirement with less money than we made during our working lives.

If we didn’t have to worry about the staggering increases in health care and prescription drug costs, we could afford to save less for retirement.

Nobody knows the outlook for the stock market. But this we do know: Living off Social Security is a hard life. As of September, the average retired worker receives a benefit check of about $1,087 a month. Retiree beneficiaries turning 65 can expect Social Security to replace between about 30 percent and 50 percent of their pre-retirement income, depending upon their earning histories, EBRI points out.

I know money is tight for lots of folks. But if you don’t continue to contribute to your retirement plan, it’ll be tighter in your old age.

I just hope that with the markets still in hellish territory, minorities don’t pull back from investing and erode the gains they’ve made in retirement plan participation.