Obama sees focus on young black and Hispanic men as focus after presidency

By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Scott Wilson, The Wahington Post

He has lamented growing up without a father before. He has acknowledged, in speeches and in a best-selling autobiography, his anger and confusion about that fact. He has admitted youthful drug use and the pull of other temptations.

But with the ornate East Room of the White House as a backdrop, Barack Obama on Thursday became the first U.S. president ever to publicly utter, “I got high.” He said those three, once politically devastating words standing in front of 19 at-risk black and Hispanic teenagers, to remind them that he was once like them.

Many young black and Latino men in this country face far steeper hills than their white counterparts — or than he did as a young black man raised in a white middle-class neighborhood in Honolulu. Obama condemned the nation’s apathy toward obstacles to minority progress, and called for greater public attention to knocking them down.

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[Photo by United States Government Work]

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