‘My Brother’s Keeper’: Obama’s new priority

last updated 8 January 2015

What took him so long? Five years into his historic presidency, President Obama is finally launching a program specifically aimed at the “social and economic crises afflicting young men of color,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. The nation’s first black president has often spoken of the need for inner-city black and Hispanic men to stay in school and avoid drugs, crime, and unwed fatherhood, but the new program, called “My Brother’s Keeper,” establishes a public-private partnership that will use $350 million in private funding from 10 corporations and foundations to provide young men with mentors, jobs, training, and other programs designed to help them succeed. In his first term, “Obama bristled” at criticism that he wasn’t doing enough for black Americans, said Elahe Izadi in NationalJournal.com. But now that he no longer faces another election, he’s embracing his role as a model for young black Americans.

No one needs a $350 million program to come up with a cure for poverty, said Karin McQuillan in AmericanThinker.com. Here’s the cure: “Finish high school, get married, defer your first child until you are 21.” Studies show that if you follow that simple prescription, “your chance of being poor is 2 percent. Your chance of joining the middle class is 72 percent.” If Obama really wanted to help young black and Hispanic men, he’d stop showering them with government benefits, which leave America’s poor “stuck in a trap of destructive, self-indulgent, wasted lives.” Not incidentally, a program that discriminates on the basis of race is probably unconstitutional, said Roger Clegg in NationalReview.com. Aren’t there poor whites and Asians and women out there, too

Obama had to know he’d be attacked “for focusing on the black half of himself,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. That’s undoubtedly why he waited. But better late than never: Obama “is the right messenger” to address the “poor school performance, truancy, delinquency, and, ultimately, high incarceration rates” that haunt the black community—all of which can be traced to out-of-wedlock births and missing fathers. If Obama—a dedicated father himself—really does make these problems a priority of his remaining years as president, it will be “great news for the country,” and not just the poor.