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.

Harris’s progressive racialism is the sort of worldview that is more attractive to college-educated professionals than working-class black Americans. That she is struggling with a portion of black America is not indicative of sexism, but instead that she is perceived as symbolic of an elite status quo with which they are fed up. They understand, where many in the media do not, that just because a Harris presidency might be a narrative victory for the Democrats doesn’t mean it will be a gain for black working-class Americans.


Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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