My Brother’s Keeper destroys Black male mentoring movement

By Phillip Jackson
Guest Commentator

The White House’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative is destroying the Black male mentoring movement in America — decades-long work to save Black boys. Virtually all of the small, community-based agencies that comprise this substantial, historic effort to mentor Black boys have been left out of the overall conversation, the planning, and the funding essential to save Black boys and to chart a new course for their continued survival. Many of these groups provided mentoring for Black boys long before President Barack Obama became president and they will be working to save Black boys when he leaves the office.

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 two percent for the past 15 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-heeled 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.

Where are the “Brothers” in the My Brother’s Keeper initiative? My Brother’s Keeper can be a good thing for young Black men in America — just not in its current, shallow iteration. Experienced stakeholders and grassroots leaders need to be a part of this initiative for it to succeed. And this initiative must succeed!

It is hypocritical for America to continue to fail/destroy Black men and boys and still consider itself to be one of the greatest, most humanitarian countries in the world.

Phillip Jackson is founder and executive director of The Black Star Project, Blackstar1000@ameritech.net.