President Obama addressed a Town Hall meeting the other day, to announce the expansion of an important initiative on racial justice. The room was packed and all sorts of people were there including members of the National Basketball Players Association.
The subject was mentoring and record keeping and bringing public and private resources together to help all young people reach their full potential.
Except the president didn't talk about “all” young people; he only talked about boys and men. And that’s the most obvious problem with his new initiative. You can start with its name: My Brother’s Keeper.
What about the sisters?
As my colleague Kimberle Williams Crenshaw said in an op-ed in the New York Times this week, when the president talks about families, he stresses the central importance of women. “Anything that makes life harder for women makes life harder for families and… children,” he told a White House summit on working families earlier this summer.
And yet when the subject switches from family and so-called "women’s" issues to race, the president focuses only on the male half.
Now no one is denying men of color face specific challenges, says Crenshaw, but while racism may affect boys and girls differently, it certainly doesn’t affect girls any less.
Quoting her again, “Like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls are at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores. Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls. They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently.”
So what would be so bad about My Brother’s Keeper adding sisters?
At the president's Town Hall meeting this July it was announced that along with $300 million dollars of investments by foundations and private corporations like AT & T and The Discovery Channel, the NBA is creating 25,000 mentors for boys of color as part of the president’s new program. I bet the WNBA could be persuaded to offer a similar program for girls, don’t you?
It all reminds me of a book that came out years ago, in the early 1980s, with the title, “All the Women are White and all the Blacks are Men....”
The message was simple: it’s time to end the invisibility of women of color and stop the splitting of race from gender.
It is now, surely, way, way beyond time.
You can see my newest interview with Crenshaw and some of her colleagues, and sign your name to a letter calling for the expansion of My Brothers Keeper at GRITtv.org.
And sign up there for our e-newsletter.
For GRITtv I’m Laura Flanders.
