President Obama is stepping up his commitment to tackling the opportunity gap for blacks and other minority men in poor communities across the country, but it’s still unclear whether his diffuse set of long-term solutions will do anything to prevent another outburst of racial unrest in the coming weeks and months.
Americans are bracing for a summer of racial clashes after watching Baltimore explode into riots, looting and destruction over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. Baltimore prosecutors subsequently leveled homicide charges against six police officers, setting up a super-charged legal fight sure to capture the national spotlight for months to come.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released May 3 found that 96 percent of those surveyed predicted more violent disturbances this summer, although the numbers show that blacks and whites are deeply divided about why the violence occurred.
Amid the growing recognition that the unrest is symptomatic of broader national problems, Obama on Monday announced a spin-off of his already-existing “My Brother’s Keeper” Initiative into a non-profit foundation and pledged to make fighting opportunity inequality for black and minority men his life’s work into his post-presidency years.
The opportunity gaps for men and women in impoverished communities across the country begins early, often at birth, and compounds over time, he argued.
“The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way,” he said. “We can have courage to change. We can make a difference.”
“This will be my mission, not just for me and Michelle for the remainder of my presidency, but for the rest of my life.”
The president spoke at length about sky-high unemployment rates for minorities in poor areas and the scourge of drug addiction and fatherless families with a large percentage of men in jail for non-violent drug offenses.
Earlier in the day, the president held a roundtable event that included singer John Legend and basketball star Alonzo Mourning with several young men from the New York area.
Obama said for him, Legend and Mourning, the issue is deeply personal.
“We see ourselves in these young men,” he said. “I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift … the only difference is, I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”
Once again, he echoed his call for local communities to follow the recommendations of his 21st Century Task Force on Community Policing, which he created in 2014 in the wake of the death of Michael Brown and the riots in Ferguson, Mo.
And he repeated a laundry list of potential partial solutions: more investment in early childhood education programs for poor areas, criminal justice reform to help reduce sentences for minor drug offenses, and more business investments in blighted areas.
But Obama also continued to take thinly-veiled swipes at Republicans instead of trying to build consensus on specific, more bipartisan proposals that have a chance of gaining traction on Capitol Hill, such as additional federal funds for body cameras.
“Some argue that all of these social programs won’t make a difference, and politicians talk about poverty and inequality and then gut programs aimed at reducing poverty and inequality,” he said. “And we wait for the next outbreak of violence and the same pattern all over again. So in effect, we do nothing.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has led a bipartisan move to equip police with body-worn cameras and study their impact on both preventing police brutality and misconduct from citizens in their interactions with law enforcement.
Earlier this year, Paul joined with a group of Democrats, including Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Reps. Corinne Brown of Florida, and Keith Ellison on Minnesota, to write a bill calling for matching funds to help local police rent or lease body cameras.
Obama, however, has sent mixed messages on his support for body cameras, calling for an expansion of their use and touting Justice Department block grants to help localities buy them just last week while his press secretary stressed the need for more studies on their effectiveness.
On Friday, the Justice announced that it would pursue a $20 million body camera pilot program but those funds fall short of the amount needed to supply police departments around the country.
Republicans on Capitol Hill also are becoming convinced that the race relations have reached a national crisis level, but true to their limited government beliefs, they aren’t coalescing around a Washington solution.
“Public servants should not violate the law,” Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend. “If these charges are true, it’s outrageous and it’s unacceptable.”
Boehner also said he believes at least some federal dollars should be used to help buy body cameras, although he noted that “a lot of police grants” that already exist could be used for it.
His spokesman on Monday clarified that Boehner does not support additional federal funds for body cameras right now.
The president and like-minded Democrats have blasted this year’s GOP budget, accusing it of undermining programs that help poor areas.
But Boehner and others on the right argue that the government already spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year in programs designed to help people out of poverty.
“We’ve been doing this for decades,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “But from what we’ve seen around the country, it’s clear this approach is not working.”
In the wake of the Baltimore unrest, Republicans also are blasting the president for eliminating the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004. The $20 million program provides private-school tuition for nearly 5,000 students, 95 percent of whom are black, but for the seventh straight year, Obama has proposed eliminating it.
And at least some agencies in the Obama administration also support the idea of helping children move out of poverty-stricken areas altogether.
The same day the president was up in New York calling for more investment into poor communities, the Department of Housing and Urban Development touted the results of a 10-year research project on the benefits of moving families away from high-poverty neighborhoods and providing government vouchers to help them do it.
The lengthy study by a group of Harvard University professors relied on HUD and IRS data and found that poor children who moved to lower-poverty towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than those left behind. The study found that of the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore.
