Thoughts on My Brother's Keeper.

Today with all the fanfare, splendor, pomp and pulpit of the presidency , President Barack Obama launched his new initiative, My Brother's keeper, designed to help young men of color and reduce the opportunity gap between them and their caucasian peers. I am traveling so this will be brief so pardon the hurriedness.

First, I would like to say that I like the idea. The president himself, as a man of color, understands the many barriers that are in the our path. As a black man myself, it's always amazing to see the president say so many thing that I feel and experience in an eloquent way and with the full power and might of the presidency. The imitative is to lift those young men of color from the deficit they have in education, life preparedness, poverty and try to get them where their white peers are. The are to be encourage in their studies with after school programs, encourage them to graduate high school and even attend college, and to provide them with role models. Other ideas involve targeting those boys of color even earlier in kindergarten to make sure they have a sound foundation to build on later in life. That is to be done with around 350 million dollars pledged by charitable organizations, enterprises and private citizens. Still the initiative is  still to be piloted from the White House, giving much pressure to those organizations to step up and do what they pledged. The president has even managed to involve conservatives, inviting Bill O'Reilly to the white house and having one of his chief advisers, Valerie Jarrett appear on his program to promote his initiative. This shows that the president is fully invested and wants this to succeed. 

My problem with this is that it is like applying a band aid where stitches are needed. Yes, these programs will go a long way in narrowing that gap that separates the young men of color with their white peers. The problem is deeper, systematic racism, as we lefties are fond of saying, and that can only be solved by governmental intervention. Part of why those young man of color are behind is because of the chronic unemployment in the black and Latino communities. You deal with that and it goes a long way. The minimum wage increase would also go a long way in lifting the communities those young boys come from and the better their lives, the better chance of education those young men will have. The other one would be the laws, the laws that make it possible for Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis to be murdered and have their killers walk free. Young black man live under that fear and they resent the system, therefore making it harder for them to invest themselves in prospering in a system that they feel abhors them. All those actions would go a long way in making sure the goals in My Brother's Keeper succeed.

So while I like what the president is doing and appreciate his willingness to want to help out the black and Latino young men. The initiative is not enough, charitable organizations and private citizens as wealthy as they maybe are not enough in reducing the opportunity gap between minority youngsters and their white peers. Legislative and government action is needed to insure the success and progress of this program. This is a good start and I will be watching this optimistically.