The Girls Obama Forgot
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw:
My Brother’s Keeper Ignores Young Black Women
LOS
ANGELES — “ANYTHING that makes life harder for women makes life harder
for families and makes life harder for children,” President Obama told an approving crowd last month, at a White House summit meeting on working families.
But this seemingly obvious point is not reflected anywhere in the president’s signature initiative on race — My Brother’s Keeper,
a five-year, $200 million program that will give mentorships, summer
jobs and other support to boys and young men of color, most of them
African-American or Hispanic, and that entirely omits the challenges
facing their mothers and sisters. At a meeting
in Washington last week to announce new commitments to the program from
corporations, school systems and nonprofits, Mr. Obama gave a
perfunctory shout-out to “all the heroic single moms out there,” but did not utter the word “girls” even once.
Mr.
Obama has told us why men of color are his focus. His moving story of
the Kenyan father he knew for a month and the Kansan mother who went on
to raise a president speaks volumes about his passion. But My Brother’s
Keeper highlights one of the most significant contradictions of his
efforts to remain a friend to women while navigating the tricky terrain
of race. It also amounts to an abandonment of women of color, who have
been among his most loyal supporters.
Perhaps
the exclusion of women and girls is the price to be paid for any
race-focused initiative in this era. “Fixing” men of color —
particularly young black men — hits a political sweet spot among
populations that both love and fear them. Judging from the defense of My
Brother’s Keeper by many progressives and the awkward silence of their
allies, the consequent erasure of females of color is regarded as
neither politically nor morally significant.
Gender
exclusivity isn’t new, but it hasn’t been so starkly articulated as
public policy in generations. It arises from the common belief that
black men are exceptionally endangered by racism, occupying the bottom
of every metric: especially school performance, work force participation
and involvement with the criminal justice system. Black women are
better off, the argument goes, and are thus less in need of targeted
efforts to improve their lives. The White House is not the author of
this myth, but is now its most influential promoter.
The evidence supporting these claims is often illogical, selective or just plain wrong. In February, when Mr. Obama announced
the initiative — which is principally financed by philanthropic
foundations, and did not require federal appropriations — he noted that
boys who grew up without a father were more likely to be poor. More
likely than whom? Certainly not their sisters, who are growing up in the
same households, attending the same underfunded schools and living in
the same neighborhoods.
The
question “compared with whom?” often focuses on racial disparities
among boys and men while overlooking similar disparities among girls and
women. Yet, like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls are
at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores.
Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls.
They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other
girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently. The disparities among girls of different races are sometimes even greater than among boys.
Proponents of My Brother’s Keeper — and similar programs, like the Young Men’s Initiative,
begun by Michael R. Bloomberg in 2011 when he was mayor of New York —
point incessantly to mass incarceration to explain their focus on men.
Is their point that females of color must pull even with males in a race
to the bottom before they deserve interventions on their behalf?
Women
of color earn less than both white men and their male counterparts from
the same ethnic or racial groups, across the spectrum. Even more
disturbing: the median wealth
of single black and Hispanic women is $100 and $120, respectively —
compared with almost $7,900 for black men, $9,730 for Hispanic men and
$41,500 for white women.
In its defense, the White House points to
the Council on Women and Girls, the Lilly Ledbetter pay equity law and
efforts to increase participation of girls in science, technology,
engineering and math — “it’s not either/or,” says
Valerie Jarrett, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers — but those
efforts aren’t remotely comparable to a now $300 million public-private
initiative focused on boys.
Moreover,
the presidential memo setting up My Brother’s Keeper requires
government agencies to monitor outcomes and to recommend best practices
to enhance life chances for men and boys of color. The exclusion of
girls of color from data collection means that there will be fewer
“evidence based” interventions for girls — because there was no interest
in marshaling evidence to support interventions for them in the first
place.
Supporters of My Brother’s Keeper use the analogy of “the canary in the coal mine”
to justify both a narrow focus on individual-level interventions — as
opposed to systemic policies to narrow the persistent racial gaps in
education, income and wealth — and the exclusion of women and girls.
Black boys are the miner’s canary, the argument goes, and so efforts to
save them will trickle down to everyone else.
But
the point of the canary’s distress was to alert everyone to get out of
the mine, not to attend to the canary and ignore the miners. Implicit in
rescuing only the males is the idea that the mine itself isn’t the
problem — and that females are resilient enough to survive the toxic air
or can hold their breath and wait. What needs to be fixed are not boys per se, but the conditions in which marginalized communities of color must live.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a professor of law at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and the executive director of the African American Policy Forum.
No comments:
Post a Comment