Private initiative
President Obama launches effort to promote better opportunities for men and boys of color.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama launched a private-sector initiative on Monday to promote opportunities for men and boys of color, decrying the “sense of unfairness and of powerlessness” that fuels such violent eruptions as the Baltimore riots and pledging to make equality a cause of his lifetime.
The program, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, is built on an initiative Obama started last year to highlight and close the gap between minority students and their peers in school performance, higher education and career trajectory.
“We are in this for the long haul,” Obama told a crowd at Lehman College in the Bronx, N.Y.. Referring to the first lady, he added, “This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle, not just for the rest of my presidency, but for the rest of my life.”
The new program shows Obama using the power of his office to convene community and business leaders to work on social problems. It’s a strategy he has turned to repeatedly to make up for an inability to kick-start new government programs or win funding from Congress.
Monday’s pledge comes just days after Obama spoke with clear frustration about the circumstances that led to the rioting that broke out in Baltimore — not just the mortal injury to a young black man in police custody, but the broader issues of poverty and lack of opportunity that dot urban areas around the country.
Many of Obama’s predecessors left the White House with a desire to make changes they couldn’t effect from the Oval Office. President Jimmy Carter sent a new standard of activism with his Habitat for Humanity and global peace work, and the first President George Bush runs the world’s largest organization devoted to volunteer public service, the Points of Light.
Obama has been gearing up his effort for years, said Joshua DuBois, the former head of Obama’s Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Obama worked on healthy families and fatherhood measures in the Senate and started a fatherhood program shortly after becoming president.
“There’s a through line of concern for men and boys of color that started long before he was in the White House and will last long after he’s closed the doors to that building for the last time,” said DuBois.
The effort took on more urgency after the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, when Obama began to talk publicly about the importance helping men and boys of color thrive.
In conversations with staffers, Obama has repeatedly returned to the idea that the real problems require a concerted, lasting effort, DuBois said.
“He talks about how we tend to ignore these communities unless it’s a time of crisis,” DuBois said. “This is the opposite of that. This is him paying attention to those issues not just in the moment but in a sustained way.”