On Thursday at the White House, President Barack Obama unveiled a new initiative, created through executive order and partnering with businesses and foundations to spend $200 million (maybe) over five years, “to help young men of color stay out of prison, stay out of jail”.
What an aspiration!
“This is an issue of national importance,” Obama said of his My Brother’s Keeper program, aimed at Black and Hispanic men. “It’s as important as any issue that I work on.”
What a wonderful realization for the nation’s first Black president to acknowledge! And with the parents of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis behind him, no less!
Sadly, the message to minorities – and Blacks in particular – is that we Blacks can’t be expected to take individual responsibility for our lives like our white counterparts … so the government has to do it for us. Blacks should find Obama’s assumptions more than disturbing. Young Black men wouldn’t be wrong to find My Brother’s Keeper downright offensive. And everyone should realize that the first Black president is not holding Blacks accountable to the same standards as whites when it comes to parenting.
And parenting is the real problem here – not the often repeated media narrative of The Troubled Black Teenager upon which society inflicts so many ills , but the long overlooked and systemic problem of the broken Black family.
Read the full story by Crystal Wright at theguardian.com
