Invisible black girls

The urgent focus on interventions for boys of color has rendered black girls all but invisible, writes Melinda Anderson for The Atlantic. "The gender-exclusive focus on [black] boys as ground zero ... continues to undermine the well-being of our entire community," says Kimberlé Crenshaw of UCLA and Columbia, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum. Present discourse around boys of color is largely driven by President Obama's initiative My Brother's Keeper, which strives to remove barriers to education and employment for black and brown males. But challenges for females get less attention, even though one in four black girls in the nation's capital, for instance, will become a teen mother, significantly lowering her prospects for high-school completion. Nationally, black girls are six times more likely to be suspended from school than white girls; black boys just three times more likely than white boys. In interviews, black girls describe alienating learning environments, as well as sexual harassment and violence in their everyday environment. Family responsibilities, such as caring for siblings, also disproportionately fall to females. To foreground girls of color in policy talks, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Women's Law Center, and the African American Policy Forum have launched #WhyWeCantWait, urging the president to include females in his initiative and challenging a single-gender racial agenda that erases half the children of color. More

Source:  Public Education News Blast

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Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) is an education support organization that works as a collaborative partner in high-poverty communities.