From the stunning attack against a teenage girl by a White male school resource officer at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina last month, to Sandra Bland, who died in a jail cell after a questionable arrest this summer, to Dajerria Becton, 15, who was body slammed by a White cop at a Texas pool party over the summer, violence against girls and women of color in the U.S. is a longstanding problem that needs to be addressed.
That is one reason the White House Council on Women and Girls is hosting a day-long forum today at Wake Forest University. The event will focus on empowering and increasing opportunity for women and girls of color and their peers, officials say.
“Overall, this conference is about recognizing that there are no easy answers to these challenges,”Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Obama and chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, said on a conference call Thursday. “We’ve made a lot of progress, and continuing on that path means we need to be more dedicated, more thoughtful, and more rigorous than ever.”
The Council on Women and Girls released a progress report, “Advancing Equity for Women and Girls of Color,” as a follow-up to the 2014 report, and announced independent commitments to help close opportunity gaps faced by women and girls, including those of color.
The effort is part of two independent commitments. One involves a $100 million, 5-year-funding initiative by Prosperity Together to improve economic prosperity for low-income women. The second involves an $18 million funding commitment by the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research—an affiliation of American colleges, universities, research organizations, publishers and public interest institutions led by Wake Forest University—to support existing and new research efforts about women and girls of color, the White House says.
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The Obama administration announced recommendations on Friday on how public and private entities can participate in a White House initiative meant to support minority men and boys, including a move to focus on summer jobs and recruit adults who can serve as mentors.
“Already we’re seeing, I think, a much greater sense of urgency this summer about putting these young people in opportunities where they can learn the basic skills that they’re going to need to get attached to the labor market,” President Barack Obama said Friday. The former basketball star Magic Johnson and Joe Echevarria, who heads the accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, will help lead the program.
“We’ve got a huge number of kids out there who have as much talent, and more talent, than I had, but nobody is investing in them,” Mr. Obama said, adding that over the next couple of weeks, more specific programs would be announced.
The recommendations come three months after Mr. Obama announced the five-year initiative, called My Brother’s Keeper. Standing in front of a group of young minority men and executives from businesses and nonprofit organizations in February, the president recalled his own experiences as a black man growing up without a father at home and sometimes making “bad choices.”