Prologue

Two hundred million over five years does not promise to knock a ‘small dent’ in President Obama’s White House Initiative “My Brother’s Keeper,” but thanks to another $100 million -a recent booster shot investment- we not only observe President Obama gliding on “smooth sailing” on his way out of office in 2016, but also setting himself up for what will be a promising post-Presidency philanthropic career afterward.

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President Barack H. Obama Jr. will a Presidential Library, he’ll probably even relocate to Hawaii, his birthplace, so we’ve heard; but one thing is certain at this juncture in his national political icon legacy: He was one of us before he got elected, and he’ll be one of us long after he’s out of office.

I believe that what a lot of people, Black and white, missed about our President is that for the past five and one-half years, he never ceased to be a Black man. Though he readily admits “…the only difference between me and other young men of color is that I lived in a more forgiving environment.”

“I wasn’t going to end up shot,” Obama said at a Town Hall meeting at the Walker Jones Education Campus in Washington, D.C. “I wasn’t going to end up in jail.”

As Black people, we had President Obama’s heart before he became President, and we’re going to have his heart long after he is no longer President.

Maybe for the first time in his short life (he is the first President in my lifetime who is slightly younger than me, lol), he got a glimpse of what it’s like to be that young Black man who ended up shot for no other reason than the color of his skin, and that Black man who ends up incarcerated on skin-color-corporate ‘slave acquisition’ who actually is circumstantially innocent of the crimes of which he has was accused.

The Good Lord, for those of us who care to believe in Him, used President Obama as leverage to not only knock a serious hole in the world’s attitudes about Black people, about Judah’s kinsmen [upon which moment the USA’s internal Second Amendment brigade went ‘stuck on totally stupid’ and started trying to do everything in their power to keep up the nastiness that its unholy most ungodly ancestors had infused on Black people for more than five hundred years], but he also told us, and I repeat [paraphrased] that we really don’t have an “excuse” for being in the condition we’re in right now.

As mad as that made “some” Black folks, who -along with their ‘Tea Party’ compatriots- wanted to know whodahayell he thought he was, the truth is … we do not have an excuse for it.

Not now — and we haven’t had an excuse for it in a LOOONNNNGGG time.

Maybe ‘billions- into- trillions’ in net Black worth is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the country, but it’s a whole helluva lot more than even white people came to this country with when Columbus thought he’d discovered something that only drew his name into the historical mudslide, along with him.

The President shouldn’t have had to ‘rescue’ Black men in America with any more inner-city ‘programs’.

It isn’t like we haven’t had several hundreds of them all over America since before he was elected; but -on the other hand- my heart sank when I heard the news that $3.7 million in funding was locked up for an ‘immigrant training initiative’ at the now-defunct St.

Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, but no one could come up with .

5 million to keep the school’s doors from closing.

Not even last year, when we suggested that sometimes “a mother dies birthing a new baby,” was the money found to save the school so it could be recreated and redrafted into today’s technological standards and used to upgird the Black family who was born IN America — those who are looking for a way out, that is; not the ones who don’t bother to do for self.

Maybe “MBK,” in its old-school program-ish way, is President Obama’s way of showing us how far behind we are on the nation’s economic scale.

Maybe President Obama is giving us yet another example of what an economic PRIORITY looks like in this new program.

One thing is certain above all else — if we, in Black America, have money for what we want it for when we want it for, and every race and ethnicity in the world knows it except us, then it proves that the corporate ‘we’ don’t care much more about St. Paul’s College, or any other HBCU in America, than does anyone else.

The attitude coming from the “Haves” is exactly as it should be: “Why throw good money after bad?”

By the way…was it you that helped invest the additional $100 million into My Brother’s Keeper? Or was that you paying $55 to $230 for the “On the Run” Tour?

I only ask because with $250 million a week to invest in some mega-churches and mega-ministers who couldn’t get the job done in our inner cities in more than 30 years (along with all of the money we spend on hair/weave shops, malls, Chinese restaurants, Popeye’s, KFC, BET/WSHH, and Footlockers for “new release Jordans,” et al), it’s going to be kind of hard to redeem ourselves later if this kind of lowball need in Black America (instead of some bona fide far-advanced Black teaching and high technology)  is still going on in the Black Community four years after Obama’s not President any more.

It’s going to take some pretty big shoes to step into President Obama and First Lady Michelle’s places when they are gone in a couple of years; and so far, we haven’t seen any future contenders who can, or would be ‘willing’ to do so, even if they could.

Epilogue

No ladies, (women and girls) he -and all of the rest of us- need to focus on Black and Colored MEN (or Men of Color, however you want to slice and dice it), for these are your sons, brothers, fathers, nephews, grandsons, and future HUSBANDS.

You’ll be a-ight as soon as they are back on track and in proper position for the Black families across America.