My Brother's Keeper

This week, President Obama announced a new public-private initiative, “My Brother’s Keeper.” With $200 million in privately raised “seed money,” the initiative looks to stop the cycle of unemployment, incarceration, and hopelessness that pervades the lives of young black and Hispanic men. It is an effort long overdue.

            Life experiences alter your perspective. Such simple words containing so much truth. I held very definite opinions about a whole lot of issues. And the beauty of my opinions was I knew they were right because in my little world they were true. Then came August of ’08, and arrest, followed by imprisonment and divorce and I realized I knew very little about the real world.

            For a lot of people the world is a cruel, difficult unfair place. It is tough to be a young black or Hispanic man in America. There is a correlation between your race, your gender, and your likelihood to be incarcerated. And before anyone says that black and Hispanic men commit crimes in greater numbers, disabuse your mind of that. The fact is whites and blacks break the law in the same percentages; whites usually get the breaks at sentencing because economic status determines the quality of your legal defense and length of sentence (the converse is true with white collar crimes; prosecutors “throw the book” at lawbreakers like me to prove “all are equal before the law.”) A black teenage boy is four times as likely to go to prison as a white teenage boy, even when arrested for similar charges (welcome to drug-disparity sentencing).

            That many men of color behind bars breaks down communities. The out-of-wedlock birth rate in many poor black communities is approaching 80%, that’s four out of five children not growing up in a two-parent home. And that matters because two-parent homes provide a level of emotional and economic stability not seen in most poor minority families.

            It becomes a vicious cycle. Poor single parent families in neighborhoods lacking job opportunities and good schools become breeding grounds for gangs, and drugs, and murder, and hopelessness. There’s a reason I move so easily among the young black guys in school – I’m the first adult male most of them have met who has an education, lived “the good life,” traveled, owned a home; and the fact that I listen to them, and answer their questions, and try – even when they screw up – to give a damn about them; well it matters. And the irony isn’t lost on me that I play that role while incarcerated, that in my old “perfect” world I’m now considered the screw up, the bad dad, yet those guys always tell me, “I wish my dad had been around and talked to me the way you do.”

            Every time a young black or Hispanic kid gets locked up it is like a pebble thrown in a pond. The ripples reach outward. Every bad school that fails in its duty to teach its young students basic skills so that those students can go and seek the American dream creates still more ripples. Every day that a young child doesn’t have hope in the future, doesn’t believe he matters, doesn’t believe that his or her family, or neighborhood, or country gives a damn about them, there are still more ripples. Those ripples become waves, and those waves a tsunami; and that tsunami will flood us all.

            Something has to break the cycle. Income disparity, racial injustice, educational inefficiency, they are leading to the loss of not just one generation but many generations of young black and Hispanic men. The cost – in dollars and lives – is staggering.

            “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Everyone knows the answer. President Obama’s initiative is long overdue. America can’t afford the cost of prisons, anger and hopelessness.