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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, has 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?
It has been argued in the recent past that legalising drugs, including marijuana, disadvantages black males because it would deny them the opportunity of a dishonest living
Of course, in reality, in many areas where marijuana has been legalized recreationally, the drug dealers are thriving due to the high taxes and total cost for legitimate buyers.
Good points. Race is biological, not social. Not quite like sex, since race is more a spectrum and sex is more binary. But there are differences between races that have nothing to do with social constructs.
As to the proposed sickle cell anemia initiative, that seems to be a blatant case of political pandering. Initiatives like that often do more harm than good, Even if it gets funded you get a sugar rush kind of effect in the medical community focusing on that and when that is over the community is the worse for it. What is needed is stable, long-term support.
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.
Could the Dems not do the same and pass laws to say that half of the legislature must be black?
They have done a version of that by manipulating district lines to ensure that minority candidates are elected. What a paradox that a country with a civil rights era and with it, explicitly anti-discriminatory legislation that was later negated by race-based policies like affirmative action and DEI.
Is it perhaps time to stop analysing the electorate along race lines and more along class/education lines?
This episode was a real misstep by the Democrats. (Their “Man Enough” video was absurd.)
However, delving into all the online backlash from black men (and women), I’ve learned lots of new things and all kinds of new words.
“Zesty” (as in “a zesty black man”) – flamboyantly gay (I guess an equivalent phrase in British English would be to say someone is “as camp as Christmas”)
“Simp” – someone who shows excessive attention towards someone else, especially if that person does not reciprocate (I guess it comes from “simpering”).
“Dusty” – ugly/disgusting, although one of the videos I watched used the word more in the sense of being poor/down at heel.
I do not think, as a white European female, I will be using any of these words – but good to know!
Simps are generally male, and simp towards women. I think this is already pretty widespread outside the US.
First of all, that was no “faux pas” from Obama. That’s identity politics that is now ingrained in the left’s DNA. Second, black men got a clear view of how Harris saw them when she was AG in California, and locked up scores of minor drug offenders, periodically hiding exculpatory evidence and using some prisoners as slave labor. Of course, she’s patronizing them. It’s what Dems do with any minority group.
The fact that she now enthusiastically identifies as “black” despite having little to do with her black parent, says a lot of how they view the black voter base – as ignorant fools incapable of independent thought and driven only by their skin colour.
“Harris’s progressive racialism is the sort of worldview that is more attractive to college-educated professionals than working-class”
That is a damning indictment of Western universities, and especially the (largely female, and across races) groups that comprise the administration class, and non STEM students/ teachers.
And this election is basically them versus the rest of US society. As is the case elsewhere too, Labour wouldn’t get into power here without their “contribution”.
Probably the most utterly useless, toxic and pathetic bunch of people that any civilisation was ever afflicted with.
Won’t do the “dirty” manufacturing/ non office jobs, don’t build businesses, or fight wars, or become breadwinners, while also looking down on motherhood.
And also happen to be the class that consumes enormous taxes (government salaries, unpaid student loans) with little return, other than incessant victimhood.
And the most worrying thing is this parasite class also disproportionately controls fields like teaching, media and HR, spreading their venom through society.
Great article. It prompts the question: How do the Democrats reconcile the laissez faire approach to grotesque wealth inequality across questionably defined social classes with the feverish and shrill need to eliminate inequality altogether across similarly questionably defined ethnicities. What warped thinking gets them there? Feels like blackwashing, if there is such a term.
Could Harris’s message be any more condescending? I guess Black men value being high all the time relative to any other demographic, so I will prop getting them unfettered access to weed. I will also offer to buy their vote with $20,000 handout (that she won’t be able to deliver on because it is unconstitutional to offer on e group handouts based solely on race), and think they are dumb enough to believe her. Her campaign is awful.
Exactly. Being English, I’m still surprised that some Americans haven’t outgrown this sort of nonsense. I also came across a clip of Joy Reid on MSNBC the other day lamenting that black male Trump voters had fallen victim to a “fascist” ideology. Well, that’s helpful.
Worth mentioning that in his speech Obama tried to talk ‘street’, implying that black men can’t understand his normal speech. No wonder they felt patronised.
Kamala offering the legalizing of marijuana as a sop to black men is especially insulting since she probably oversaw the conviction of black men for possession and/or distribution of marijuana and other drugs when she was a prosecutor. I believe marijuana should be legalized across the board in the States, and a majority of Americans favor decriminalization if not full legalization, so Kamala could make this case without it being insultingly catered towards black men. Kamala is pandering to black men based on insulting stereotypes and cliches, but Trump is doing that to through this “They’re trying to throw me in prison, just like the police try to do to you to” shtick.
The mask is slipping a tiny bit. The condescension and disregard have been there, massively, for a long time.
Obama is rich. He doesn’t understand what his “black brothers” go through on a day-to-day basis.