Framing President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper
Why Mentorship Wont End Racial Bias.
The summer that the Ferguson protest erupted, I was living in the Congress Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. Congress Heights, like Ferguson, is marked by its predominantly black population and heavy police presence. There are several blocks where officers’ cruisers are always parked, and gunshots and sirens can be heard most nights.
I had moved into the neighborhood to work with a nonprofit. The organization paired volunteers with local elementary schools where we spent our days tutoring students. One day after work, I was watching the coverage of the protests when I noticed that our nonprofit’s CEO had sent us an email about Ferguson. I opened it.
In a winding message, he told us to be calm and to stay away from any demonstrations; then, he concluded by mentioning his plans for a special My Brother’s Keeper mentorship program for black and brown students. It made no sense. What did mentorship have to do with police violence and racial bias?
His email had opened with events concerning institutional racism (police misconduct) and then switched to mentorship (parental and communal guidance). He had swapped the question of “was Mike Brown shot because he was black” for “do kids like Mike Brown have enough positive role models” and hoped no one noticed. His logic was perched on a slippery slope, but admittedly our CEO wasn’t the first to make this argument. Earlier that year, President Obama paved the way for this line of reasoning.
“In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin verdict, with all the emotions and controversy that it sparked, I spoke about the need to bolster and reinforce our young men, and give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them,” Obama said, at the launch for My Brother’s Keeper in February of 2014.
He went on to describe MBK as a program that would “help more young men of color facing especially tough odds to stay on track and reach their full potential”, and he said the initiative would achieve this by “providing the support they need to think more broadly about their future; building on what works, when it works, in those critical life-changing moments.”
But the “emotions and controversy” Obama mentioned when he referred to the Trayvon Martin verdict weren’t in response to a lack of mentorship. Trayvon had two parents who both held full-time jobs and an older brother in college. He had plenty of mentors. Rather, the controversy was rooted in the role racial profiling played in Trayvon’s death. The same could be said for protests following Jordan Davis’s murder. So why was Obama campaigning for mentorship programs instead of directly answering the calls for an end to racial profiling?
The answer: Because it was more politically expedient.
“So often, the issues facing boys and young men of color get caught up in long-running ideological arguments about race and class, and crime and poverty, the role of government, partisan politics. We’ve all heard those arguments before. But the urgency of the situation requires us to move past some of those old arguments,” Obama said at the MBK launch, “we should be able to go ahead and get some things done, without resolving everything about our history or our future.”
While getting “some things done” sounds like political pragmatism here, it is a cop out. Creating a mentorship program will always be much easier than removing racial bias from the criminal justice system, but it misframes the problem of American racism as an absence of parental and communal rearing. It also falls short of Obama’s stated ambitions for his presidency.
In his 2012 Time Magazine interview, Obama described his aspirations for reframing tough national debates. “As President of the United States, the amount of power you have is overstated in some ways, but what you do have the capacity to do is to set a direction. And you recognize you’re not going to arrive with — you’ll never arrive at that promised land, and whatever seeds you plant now may bear fruit many years later.”
But just two years later, this vision, this will to correct warped narratives was gone. My Brothers Keeper was the path of least resistance — a program so toothless even Bill O’Reilly could support it. Today this movement for mentorship continues. And, I don’t want to get carried away, this is undeniably a good thing. Everyone from Steph Curry to Kendrick Lamar has endorsed the program, and I can personally attest from my work in Congress Heights that mentorship is a transformative experience that can broaden black children’s horizons. However, mentorship is not a solution to racial profiling, and it should not be framed as such.
Mentorship will not stop black boys and men for a from being shot while they’re playing in the park, or walking home from the gas station, or shopping at a store. Accomplishing this requires we to set off in a new direction. It asks us to deconstruct our nation’s complicated history with racism and white supremacy. That is a herculean task. It is an end where we might not ever arrive. But it is a promised land, that for all those lost black children, we must try to reach.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, please hit the like button.
Follow me on twitter at: https://twitter.com/BlackSocEnt
