YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY: Black Women’s Caucus to Launch: Congressional group answers White House initiative focusing on men and boys.
Three Democratic House members are launching a new caucus specifically focused on issues affecting black women, saying that Congress “altogether ignores the systemic challenges they face.”
Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey, Robin Kelly of Illinois and Yvette D. Clarke of New York announced on Tuesday the launch of the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls, calling it a long awaited answer to the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which focuses on black men and boys.
“From barriers in education, to a gender-based pay gap that widens with race, to disparities in both diagnoses and outcomes for many diseases, our society forces black women to clear many hurdles faced by no other group, and asks them to do it with little assistance,” Watson Coleman said in a news release. The group will launch formally on April 28 with a reception.
The #SheWoke Committee, a grassroots effort among seven national women activists focused on minority women issues, spurred the caucus’ creation in the wake of Sandra Bland’s death in July 2015 after her arrest for a minor traffic infraction in Texas.
The caucus is the answer that black women advocacy groups have been hoping for since My Brother’s Keeper launched in 2014.
While the White House Council on Women and Girls aims to incorporate women and girls of color into their initiative, Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper program hit a nerve among minority women groups.
Advocacy groups argued that it was another way black women and girls were being excluded from policy issues. They pointed to the pay gap for black women, the increased number of black girls in juvenile confinement and the brutal treatment black women sometimes receive from police officers, which can include sexual assault.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director for the African American Policy Forum, was among the advocates in 2014 who criticized the Obama administration for excluding women and girls from My Brother’s Keeper. She said she remembers feeling shocked when the initiative was announced.
When victimhood is power, victim status must be heavily guarded.