The Obama Presidency: Too Little, Too Late For Minority Communities?

Last month, more than a thousand African-American women and several hundred African-American men signed letters to President Obama, advocating that he include young women of color in the My Brother's Keeper program, a mentoring and community service initiative aimed at helping young black men succeed.

Mary Frances Berry, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, signed the women's letter. Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, decided against signing the men's letter. 

While Berry stands by her decision, and strongly believes that the program should include young women, she and Spence agree that the My Brother's Keeper initiative is deeply flawed—and that the issues with the program echo many of the problems they see in the Obama presidency. 

The advantages of My Brother's Keeper, Spence says, "are purely symbolic." The way the program is discussed, he explains, places "a significant...amount of the blame on black boys and black men."

He continues: "And that type of thing actually makes it harder for us to deal with the structural issues than if a program like this didn't even exist."

Berry agrees that the initiative is primarily political. "The president is making a political initiative because he hasn't done very much about the issue of black folk since he's been in office," particularly, Berry says, on social and economic issues.

The black unemployment rate, she notes, is "higher than when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. And all of the black politicians in the caucus and other people have tried to get him to do something about it, to have some kind of targeted program to deal with it, and he hasn't."

Black boys, Berry says, "have parents. And those parents need jobs. And he hasn't done a doggone thing—excuse the expression—about that."

Today, Berry and Spence discuss President Obama's legacy on minority issues. The Takeaway reached out to the White House to reflect on this conversation and received no response.

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