By Uche Onyebadi

AT the outset of his presidency, President Barack Obama must have calculated that it was not in his strategic interest to single out minorities in the U.S. for special attention. His mantra was that he was elected the president of the United States, not of a faction or fraction of its population. It was a way of being politically correct. He needed to serve two terms of office and sending any signal that he would pay more attention to the two most important constituencies that elected him to office – African Americans and Hispanics – may have been politically naïve.

But, times have changed. Obama will soon waltz into what Americans call ‘lame duck’ presidency where real attention will shift to whoever his successor might be; and the aura and indeed the power of his office will begin to diminish, at least in public’s eye. He no longer has any re-election to worry about. Perhaps, Obama is now looking toward shaping his legacy, for how might it be said that a president from the minority group served for two consecutive terms of office and left no tangible imprint that would enhance the status of his constituency of origin.

President Obama chose the last week of February (27) to do what some critics say he should have done years ago. He addressed the issue of uplifting the economic condition of young black and Hispanic men, and went on to identify  never-has-been-done concrete steps to deal with the issue.

Unlawful activities

The fact is, minorities, especially African-Americans perhaps unfairly populate the jail houses in the U.S. They are more likely to find their way into doing drugs and other unlawful activities that are likely to land them in jail. They are more frequently harassed and killed by the police. When they appear before judges in court, they are more likely to get harsher sentences.

They have a higher school drop-out rate. They are more likely to be a product of single parentage in their upbringing (including Obama). The murder rate resulting from black-on-black violence is quite high, especially in Chicago (again, Obama’s home city). They suffer from other forms of discrimination more than their compatriots. And, the worst scenario is that the cycle goes on from one generation to another.

Having engaged other minority issues such as gay rights and the rights of women, President Obama must have found it appropriate to focus on African Americans and Hispanic young men. So, he called them to the White House and brought in some affluent and powerful people to match words with money and action. And the businessmen and power-brokers pledged an initial sum of $150 to support the programme which Obama appropriately called My Brother’s Keeper,and whose primary objective is to find credible ways to uplift the socio-economic conditions of minority kids.

Here is what Obama said while inaugurating the body that will champion this initiative: “I believe the continuing struggles of so many boys and young men – the fact that too many of them are falling by the wayside, dropping out, unemployed, involved in negative behaviour, going to jail, being profiled – this is a moral issue for our country. It’s also an economic issue for our country…….We’ve become numb to these statistics, we’re not surprised by them, we take them as the norm. We just assume this is an inevitable part of American life, instead of the outrage that it is.But these statistics should break our hearts. And they should compel us to act.”

President Obama has acted. But, even before the event at the White House was over, critics have started making scurrilous remarks about it.

Scurrilous remarks

Of course, at the vanguard of the attacks is the conservative wing which sees anything with an Obama imprint as bad and repugnant. One of the acolytes of this wing, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, apparently fired the first salvo while interviewing Valeria Jarrett, White House senior adviser in his programme. To him, the trouble with the African-American youth has to do with their “gangsta” culture that lands them in jail or at the morgue.

I suspect that the next phase of attacking Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper campaign will be to remind him that he also has brothers who are neither African-American nor Hispanics. He might be reminded that he had pledged to be the president for all Americans, not just that his African -American community. Now that all efforts by his critics to situate Obama in Kenya where his father was born have apparently held no traction, it might be easier to characterize him as a sectional leader of the “gangsta” race. The conservative groups never get tired of creating anything, any label that will make the president look like a misfit in the White House.

But, I like the argument put up by CNN’s Don Lemon to pre-empt this charge of sectionalism against President Obama. He admits that for once Obama has shown himself as the Black President but opines that it is a good thing to do so, because it does not diminish his position as the president of the entire United States. Then, he stated that no one called Obama the president of the auto industry when he bailed out the ailing industry; nor did anyone label him the president of the Wall Street when he bailed out failing banks and financial houses.

My Brother’s Keeper is not only a bold programme but one whose time has indeed come. It is equally commendable. It is overdue. The beneficiaries of the programme are no less Americans than their mates on the more privileged side of the economic and social fence. When the young men of today succeed tomorrow and become creative in ways that would uplift America, it is their country that will take the pride, not just their minority communities.