The White House made a strange decision to allow The University of Chicago to be its lead academic partner in the mentoring of Black boys although no visible plan exists to increase that school’s dastardly low Black male student population, which has hovered at about 2 percent for the past fifteen years. The Black males on campus at the University of Chicago have to deal with severe racial profiling from their own campus police, and one Black male student was even put in a choke-hold and “arrested for not properly using the library.” Funding the elite, well-healed University of Chicago as the leadership organization for Black male mentoring while ignoring grassroots organizations that have facilitated Black male mentoring programs for decades guarantees that his initiative will fail!
I support President Obama on many things, but I cannot support the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative as operated in its first year. In fact, this initiative has given America the excuse to say, “We gave Black men “My Brother’s Keeper;'” what else could Black men possibly want? Most insidious is the fact that corporations and foundations that once funded smaller entities that mentored Black boys, now direct those dollars to “My Brother’s Keeper”, essentially putting these effective, mostly Black agencies out of business.
Equally appalling is this initiative’s lack of grassroots leadership and the underrepresentation of Black organizations and agencies in “My Brother’s Keeper.” The failure to include these important stakeholders severely undermines the integrity of the initiative. Who are these people rushing to save young Black men and where were they when there was no money to do this important work? To those of us working long before “My Brother’s Keeper”, the motive remains to save the lives of our children and rebuild our communities-not money or contracts. Now Black-led organizations are being systematically locked out of the process of mentoring Black boys by The White House!