It’s a modern political tradition to closely scrutinize the behavior of Black voters in presidential election cycles. Yet the partisan battle for Black support has intensified during the Trump era. Polls and surveys showed that Donald Trump made small inroads with Black male voters in 2016, and chipped away further at the Democrats’ historic advantage with that demographic in 2020.
And now, in a narrow, hard-fought contest between Trump and African American nominee Kamala Harris, Democratic leaders and strategists have brought a fresh edge to the quest for Black male votes. Harris herself has downplayed the notion that any Black vote is the rightful sole possession of Democrats, instead stressing that it must be “earned”—but that’s not the dominant strain of rhetoric coming from other party leaders. More and more, anxious Democrats are prone to speak and act as if Black men who do not support the Democratic Party are guilty of an act of racial betrayal.
Take, as just one prominent recent example, the scolding that Barack Obama delivered to his Back male audience as he stumped for Harris in East Liberty, Penn. Speaking to a group of committed Harris supporters who were volunteering for her campaign, Obama oddly went out of his way to castigate Black men for hesitating to support a female presidential candidate.
“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said. He went on to note that the problem “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
In an effort to reverse the decline of Black men’s support for the Democratic Party, Harris recently released an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.” The plan would provide 1 million forgivable loans of up to $20,000 to Black entrepreneurs to start a business. Harris’s program also includes education, training, and mentorship initiatives to help Black men secure “good-paying” jobs in high-demand sectors, including pathways to becoming teachers. Harris also advocates the legalization of recreational marijuana, thereby opening up new opportunities for Black Americans to succeed in the cannabis industry while eliminating at least one source of racialized over-policing. She also proposes to safeguard cryptocurrency investments for the roughly one-fifth of Black Americans who own crypto assets.
As the grab-bag character of these proposals suggests, Harris’s plan is less a full-blown agenda than an attempt to answer a question that our current politics cannot address directly: What should the federal government do for Black men? Any answer fails because there is no policy Harris can advance that only benefits Black people. (Indeed, it’s far from clear how any of her proposals are specifically targeted to Black men, unless one perpetrates the stereotype that they are disproportionately heavy weed smokers.)
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Put another way, the Harris agenda seeks to prop up Black male voters as an interest-group constituency, rather than aggrieved citizens seeking structural change. Again, look at the marijuana plank. Legalizing marijuana would undoubtedly help reduce arrests among Black offenders; however, the real problem here is the way Black Americans are policed at large—the legality of a given controlled substance plays a lamentably small role in the practice of police brutality or over-policing, as a former prosecutor like Harris well knows.
Or take the education proposal. It’s also a worthy goal to increase the number of Black men in education. Research shows that when Black students have a Black teacher, they earn higher test scores and are more likely to graduate from college. But here again, the deeper issue is structural: Black teachers have higher turnover rates than white teachers. (I know because I used to be one.) After Black teachers enter the profession, they often leave because of low pay, or because school administrators fail to support them, or value their contributions in the classroom.
Harris’s defense of crypto investments, meanwhile, is less virtuous on the merits. I have written for The Nation about the ways that the push to herd Black men into the cryptocurrency market exploits the well-worn social myth of Black self-help as the surest path to collective self-determination. As I noted then, the formula here is simple: “Lure African Americans into the dream of wealth building, then pillage the wealth of unsuspecting Black investors on a still greater.… Because Black Americans have been denied the ability to build wealth through more stable and conventional channels, they are more likely to be drawn to cryptocurrency and other sketchy financial instruments billed as more accessible and democratic paths to investment wealth.”
Laid alongside the proposals to treat over-policing and education deficits in the Black community with surface-level and symbolic overtures, the crypto plank in Harris’s agenda is a revealing lapse into long-standing bootstraps nostrums favored by neoliberal Democratic leaders. These scold-first postures run the gamut from Bill Clinton’s cynical dressing down of Sistah Souljah in the 1992 campaign to Obama’s own pet racial initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, which revived the 1960s-era moral panic over the Black family’s abiding dysfunctions as an incoherent response to the vigilante slaying of Trayvon Martin. In the absence of any viable political path forward permitting Black men to call out the genuine material deprivations behind their plight, they instead find themselves conscripted into roles as stock culture-war villains—or, at best, as wayward entrepreneurs requiring assistance in husbanding their investments in a financial sector that just happens to be the fastest-growing source of campaign donations.
And so despite the belated assistance that Harris’s agenda seeks to muster in remedying the Democrats’ Black male voter problem, it’s still the scolding reflex that stands out in highest relief. Back in East Liberty, Obama expanded on his sermon to “the brothers,” admonishing Black men for casting around for ready rationalizations for withholding their support from Harris. “And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” Obama said. “Because part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to [Black] men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
“The women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time,” Obama continued. “When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting. And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”
A man in front of Obama said, “I’m not.”
Obama replied, “Cousin Pooky might.”
Indeed, some Black men are sexist; however, that sexism is not more pernicious than the sexism that exists among white men, nor is Black male sexism a particular brand of sexism that only exists in the Black community—we live in a sexist country that pollutes all men and violates all women. The rote admonitions that Obama has offered are actually rooted in the oldest mythology of Black male behavior: Any transgression committed by Black men is worse. This formula is applied in all sorts of setting to demonize Black men: Crime in general is bad, but “Black-on-Black-crime” is a pathology created by absent Black fathers and self-hating Black male youth that have no reverence for their race. A white Trump supporter is terrible, but the only thing worse than a white Trump supporter is a Black one.
It’s undeniably the case, as Democratic leaders insist, that Donald Trump’s defeat is an urgent mandate. A second Trump presidency would be a stain on the United States and would perhaps irreparably damage its credibility as a functioning democracy. But if Democrats and Kamala Harris are truly serious about engaging Black men’s support, they should short-circuit the sermonizing. Instead, they should meet Black men with the same compassion the party affords to their white male counterparts who have already gone over to Trump.
Here, by way of instructive contrast, is Obama in 2018 talking about white male Trump supporters:
Democracy demands that we’re able also to get inside the reality of people who are different than us so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they’ll change ours. And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you—because they are white, or because they are male—that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.
This is, to put it mildly, a pronounced departure from Obama’s “no excuses” rhetoric that he deploys when speaking to Black men who are not even engaged in the behavior he is condemning. So what would it take to bring the Democrats’ appeal to Black men into line with this same kind of reasoning?
Here’s a start, at least: Black men should refrain from supporting Trump because Trump is a rapist, a white supremacist who supports forced birth, and thinks the results of the Civil War were “questionable.” Black men should not vote for Trump because he menaces non-white communities, fomented a coup attempt to overturn the results of an election, and proposes suspending the Constitution and turning the military loose on his political opponents. There’s at least the promise of genuine civic opportunity for Black men in that agenda, since it treats them like equal political subjects, and not a problem for neoliberal social engineers to solve.
