WASHINGTON (AP) — The White
House is planning to focus on improving the lives of girls and women of
color, after months of complaints that they were left out of the "My
Brother's Keeper" initiative for young men.
The gathering comes at a time when black women are in the spotlight courtesy of President Barack Obama's announcement that he would nominate a black woman, Loretta E. Lynch, to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, and midterm elections in which Mia Love of Utah became the first black female Republican elected to the House.
The president, who is on a trip to China, will not attend.
Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation who convened the Black Women's Roundtable Public Policy Network, hopes the discussion will spark a movement to help women and girls.
"This is part of the White House listening and engaging and figuring how they can continue to address issues impacting women and girls and knowing that there are unique things that affect women and girls of color," Campbell said.
Advocates
have called for a separate focus on minority girls and women since the
My Brother's Keeper initiative was unveiled in February. Under the
initiative, businesses, foundations and community groups coordinate
investments to come up with or support programs that help keep young men
out of the criminal justice system and improve their access to higher
education. Several foundations pledged more than $200 million over five
years to promote that goal.
Anything less than full inclusion in
My Brother's Keeper is "basically another frame for separate and still
unequal," said Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, executive director of the
African American Policy Forum. Last June, she made the case for
inclusion in My Brother's Keeper in a letter to Obama that was signed by
more than 1,000 women.
"The
need to acknowledge the crisis facing boys should not come at the
expense of addressing the stunted opportunities for girls who live in
the same households, suffer in the same schools, and struggle to
overcome a common history of limited opportunities caused by various
forms of discrimination," the letter said.
Crenshaw
said the exclusion was "just an intersectional failure that is
breathtaking," considering that minority women were a key, unwavering
demographic that helped lift Obama to two terms in office.
In
the report being released Wednesday, the White House acknowledged that
girls of color face some of the same issues as boys, and other unique
challenges:
—The teen
pregnancy rate for Hispanic and black girls is more than twice as high,
and American Indian/Alaska native girls is nearly twice as high as that
for white girls, despite double-digit drops in pregnancy rates since
1990.
—Asian-American women
make 79 cents, black women make 64 cents and Hispanic women make 56
cents to every dollar paid to white non-Hispanic men.
—Black
girls are 14.6 percent less likely, Hispanic girls are 12.8 percent and
American Indian/Alaska native girls are 16 percent less likely to
graduate from high schools than white girls.
—About
40 percent of Native American girls, 39 percent of black girls and 30
percent of Hispanic girls live in poverty, compared with 20 percent of
all girls.
1 comMENTS:
Yep help them and forget the white people
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