For decades, the Democratic Party has pushed Black men as the scapegoat for election losses. Every cycle, they put forth a different excuse for why this demographic is unique in its political beliefs and attitudes toward voting. This time, they trotted out the misleader-in-chief, Barack Obama to scold Black men and lob accusations of misogyny rather than engage with legitimate political grievances.
“You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses,” Mr. Obama said, addressing African American men. “I’ve got a problem with that. “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,” he said, adding that the “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time.
“When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting.”
On social media platforms, and in barber shops, beauty salons and barrooms, African Americans took issue with Obama’s remarks, attributing Black men’s lack of enthusiasm to Obama and Harris’ failure to address injustices such as that experienced by Williams, or Brown before him. Since George Floyd’s 2020 lynching, police across the U.S. have slain more than 1,000 African Americans—the vast majority Black men—and the Biden administration has failed to pass any meaningful legislation to discourage police violence.
Similarly, while the White House held no sway over Williams’ prosecution by the state of Missouri, couldn’t Harris have used her bully pulpit to urge a new trial for Williams?
“I don’t think patriarchy or misogyny is why we are more open to sitting on the couch in this election,” Desjon Yisrael, an African American activist and researcher in North Carolina told Black Agenda Report in an interview. “We are tired of the Democrats pandering to us for the past 60 years.”
Dating back to the Jim Crow era when politicians manufactured serial Black rapists to foment violence against Black voters, “there has been an agenda to put down the Black man to make us the poster child and emblem of every social and economic problem in this country,” said Yisrael, whose Facebook profile is a photograph of Williams.
But beginning with the Reagan era, the duopoly has doubled down in its attempts to portray Black men as menacing to the civic project. In George Bush’s 1988 presidential bid, his campaign advisor Lee Atwater broadcast ads denouncing the Democrat’s presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, as a liberal responsible for a Black convict named Willie Horton who raped and murdered a white woman while on parole. To counter the strategy, the Clinton administration passed the 1994 omnibus crime bill targeting African American offenders.
Stiffer criminal penalties have combined with a post-industrial economy and banking practices to destabilize African American communities, resulting in the worst hard time for Black men especially.
“Police,” Yisrael said, “continue to use Black men for target practice.”
Continuing he said:
“The Democrats don’t have an agenda for Black people. Why not? (Green Party presidential nominee) Jill Stein does. She has plans for dealing with cop cities, ending food deserts, reparations. Kamala has admitted publicly that she will not do anything that will benefit the Black community specifically.”
“Obama and others are really trying to make this into a gender thing, to deflect from the fact that the Biden/ Harris administration really hasn’t delivered. She wants to continue to supply Israel with weapons to continue the genocide in Gaza.”
He paused, then completed the thought:
“Black men aren’t going to turn out to vote for Kamala in big numbers because she is really Obama 2.0, not because she is a woman.”