Disciplining Anti-racism: My Brother's Keeper and the Re-Marginalization of Black Women

Organised by

• Department of Law

My Brother's Keeper was the signature racial justice program of the first Black president of the United States, conceived in the aftermath of a shocking killing of a 14-year old Black boy by an armed vigilante in Florida. While the killing was widely regarded as the result of racial profiling, the Obama White House eventually responded to the tragedy with a public-private partnership that trained its focus on manhood training to enhance life outcomes for Black boys and boys of color more broadly. Girls were excluded despite the fact that most of the data used to justify the program were equally applicable across gender. My Brother's Keeper marked the return of a highly controversial analysis of racial inequality in the United States that centered its focus on a supposed gender pathology within African American communities.  This paper unpacks the curious resurrection of this analysis as the consequence of intersectional failures within antiracist, feminist, and queer politics in the US, buttressed by both conservative and liberal repudiation of critical perspectives on law and inequality.