US President Barack Obama on Monday acknowledged a lack of opportunity in minority communities and harsher treatment of black and Hispanic men by police for fueling a sense of “unfairness and powerlessness.”
He called for a nationwide mobilization to reverse inequalities and said the cause will remain a mission for the rest of his presidency and his life. “There are consequences to indifference,” Obama said, Al-Jazeera reported.
Obama said the catalysts of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Baltimore were the deaths of young black men and “a feeling that law is not always applied evenly in this country.”
“They experience being treated differently by law enforcement — in stops and in arrests, and in charges and incarcerations,” he said. “The statistics are clear, up and down the criminal justice system. There’s no dispute.”
Obama pledged during a speech in the Bronx, a borough in New York City, to spend “the rest of my life” working to improve battered urban communities through the re-launching of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which aids and mentors young minority men and boys, as a not-for-profit organization. But even as Obama was announcing the initiative, American news stations paired his remarks with images of the again-heightened unrest in Baltimore, where a single fired shot had once again led to a wall of police officers facing a growing crowd of residents.
