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October 16, 2024 - 10:00am
Last week, Barack Obama proclaimed that he had to tell “some truth” to America’s black community. In a condescending speech to black workers at a Kamala Harris campaign field office in Pittsburgh, the former president took time to castigate “the brothers” for “coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses” for not enthusiastically rallying behind the Democratic candidate. In his telling, this scepticism could only be due to sexism, not political differences, a spiteful desire to block the progressive achievement of a first female president.
With the backlash from Obama’s faux pas intensifying, to the point of jeopardising the black male vote even further, the Harris campaign this week released the “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men”. As a set of policy proposals dangled specifically in front of black men, some seem fair and innocuous — such as launching an initiative to address sickle cell anaemia which disproportionately affects African American males compared to other demographics. Others are patronising and cringe-inducing, such as making access to cryptocurrency easier for black men — black people are disproportionately into the crypto market, apparently — and promising to legalise marijuana.
These policy ideas are at least consistent in that they stem from Harris’s progressive racialism. As a senator, and in her current role as Vice President, she has championed similar “race-conscious” policies such as racially based hiring programmes and schemes to improve “representation”. During an “audio town hall” yesterday on The Breakfast Club in Detroit, an appearance geared towards courting a black male Millennial and Gen-Z audience, she went further, stating that she recognised the “disparities” which affect black people and that reparations would be “studied” and considered.
Really, these proposals are cosmetic, despite the obsequious praise for them from the Democratic Party universe. Black working-class Americans need jobs in a dynamic economy in order to facilitate social mobility, not slightly improved conditions for low-paying gigs and side hustles. Yet that would require structural changes in the American political economy so as to engineer social benefits for the working class, a process which the Democrats have no intention of overseeing. They are content to manage current arrangements — which Harris’s progressive racialism serves to legitimise — where a heavily unequal society is maintained so long as disparities between races are kept under control.
This anxiety over too many black men straying away from the Democrats also reveals a “gender gap” in voting among African Americans. According to a September NAACP poll, around a quarter of black men — especially younger ones — would vote for Donald Trump, compared to 8% of black women. This is symptomatic of the wider gender gap across America, in which men are generally more likely to vote Republican, and women are more likely to vote Democrat.
The black male voters who are receptive to Trump tend to be younger and more working-class. They grew up in the Nineties, 2000s and 2010s against the background of increasing black cultural and political influence within the mainstream. They are not embedded in the black church, nor in the Ivy League university system. Thus, they haven’t been inculcated in the traditional norms of communal solidarity or the progressive liberal concepts which heavily favour the Democrats. They resent the Democrats as the party of the elite — including the black political elite — and even admire the proud recalcitrance of Trump.
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SubscribeThis is a good article, which rightly mentions this:
A very laudable initiative for sure. But meanwhile, in the not-so-real real world, Scientific American, that bastion of woke nonsense in the past argued that race is a social construct. So why is it that black people are 24 times more likely to be born with sickle cell trait than white people? Can we not just get rid of this problem with a bit more DEI training? Or by giving Ibram X Kendi another 50 million dollars for his anti-racist research centre?
I often wonder if black people in the US ever really pay attention to what activists on the political left are doing for the “black community”. Legalizing marijuana. Making it easier to buy crypto? Financially hobbling the police force to make it difficult to enforce laws around petty theft, trespass, narcotics possession etc? Enlarging the scope of Affirmative Action policies so it’s easier for less-educated blacks to get into the good schools?
What is the message here? Apparently that black people belong within the uneducated, drug-taking, petty criminal demographic and that the Dems are looking after their best interests.
For once I agree with Malcolm X when he’s talking about Democrats: “You been had. You been took … You going to choose a northern dog or a southern dog? Because either dog you choose, I guarantee you, you’ll still be in the doghouse.”
On a very minor scale, a similar thing is happening in Wales, where I live – but the politicians are going much further. Effectively, they want to pay extra money to black people so that they can become politicians. The next step could be that the controlling body needs to have a majority of members from minority races. (This is clearly racist.)
Could the Dems not do the same and pass laws to say that half of the legislature must be black? That would show that they really meant business.