“The gender-exclusive focus on boys (of color) as ground zero … continues to undermine the well-being of our entire community,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia who cofounded the African American Policy Forum, a gender and racial-justice think tank based in New York City. “We have to accept that there are wrongs that are happening to black girls.”

Much of the current discourse revolving around boys of color is driven by President Obama’s signature initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, which is aimed at removing barriers to education and employment—closing the “persistent opportunity gaps” faced by this demographic. Launched last February, the program has since expanded to include 60 of the nation’s largest school districts, pledging to improve access to preschool and gifted courses, reduce suspensions and expulsions, and boost graduation rates. And in a nod to this initiative, just last week Obama announced a nonprofit spinoff—My Brother’s Keeper Alliance—which comes with more than $80 million from major corporations, among other backers, for programs earmarked for young black and Latino men.

The president’s crusade is spreading across the country. In Washington, D.C., for example, the public-schools chancellor and mayor earlier this year promoted their own version of My Brother’s Keeper: An initiative titled “Empowering Males of Color,” which aims to bring the public and private sectors together and invest $20 million in specialized programs to shore up the academic performance among black and Latino boys.

The emphasis on boys is also gaining traction in Boston. There, Nikki Delk Barnes, the principal fellow at KIPP Academy Boston, which is part of the national KIPP charter network, has designed programs to change the trajectory of boys’ lives. “Our school is 100 percent black and Latino, so everything is targeted to that group,” Barnes said. When school staff looked at trends for the 2013-14 year, however, a troubling pattern surfaced: The boys were suspended twice as often as the girls were. “While our suspensions are lower than the average [rate] in Boston Public Schools, we were not excited about this,” she said. “It was my job to change our culture and build up our male students’ ability to manage their emotions.”



Barnes in part credits gender-exclusive advisory groups that meet daily with empowering the school’s boys—giving them the agency and voice of which they’re so often deprived. “It’s the place where we learn that their parents broke up, dad just got out of jail, or a brother was shot,” she said. “It’s where they have a chance to argue and fix it before they jump into work for the day. It’s absolutely crucial to our desire to have students’ voices heard.” Moreover, to build rapport and trust with the school’s families, Barnes started after-school “Mother to Son Meetings,” in which mothers, grandmothers, and aunts get together to discuss raising males. Based on the Langston Hughes poem, Barnes said, the meetings offer a “very organic space to cry, laugh and be open with their challenges.” Genuine student-teacher relationships, paired with high expectations for all students, are the school’s core ingredients, Barnes continued, but these factors are especially important for black boys because “low expectations have been their enemy.”

