Obama’s comments reveal what the Democratic Party thinks about the Black electorate

Former President Barack Obama is the gift that keeps on giving, at least when it comes to placing blame on Black folk for not being monolithically ecstatic about the Democratic Party. Citing some minor movement of Black men toward possibly not voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, Obama during a surprise campaign stop in Pittsburgh on Oct. 10 blasted away at what he saw as straight-up misogyny. Black men “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” and they are hiding behind “other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama said.

There has been too much of a tendency among Democratic politicians like Obama to suggest that Black Americans have not done enough. Most recent polls contradict Obama’s sternness about Black men; support for Harris among all Black voters is at the same level or higher than it was for President Joe Biden before he quit his race in July. If anything, the polls suggest that perhaps Obama should be speaking with Latino men, whose support for Harris is lukewarm at best.

At least when Ronald Reagan went to the South Bronx in 1980 to tell a crowd of beleaguered Black and Latinx folks that “the federal government” couldn’t “come in and wave a wand” and rebuild burned-out communities there, he directed his vitriol to that community directly.

It’s all been part of a larger issue with the Democratic Party and its center-right politics. There’s an expectancy of total support for any Democratic presidential candidate, no matter how abhorrent their policies and politics. The theme of tough love toward the Black electorate has been a part of the more liberal party’s playbook since Bill Clinton’s so-called Sista Souljah Moment, one born out of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Clinton compared the rap artist and activist to one-time Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke for suggesting that the anger of Black gang members be unleashed on white folks. 

But really, the Sista Souljah Moment, like Obama’s tongue-lashing, is an example of punching down. Clinton used a comment from a lesser-known artist to suggest that any rage toward white people was on the same level as systemic racism and a then-125-year-old white supremacist organization. Both Clinton and Obama point to a certain respectability politics that overgeneralizes about cultural degeneracy among Black folk while ultimately downplaying the latticework of endemic racism Black people face, including from the Democratic Party.

What has made this quashing of differences worse over the past two decades is that more often, the faces and voices calling for Black folks to fall in line with the Democratic Party’s neoliberal tough love are Black and biracial. Obama’s keynote speech at the all-male HBCU Morehouse College graduation ceremony in 2013 is an example of him downplaying racism and calling for Black men to take personal responsibility for systemic issues (much like President Clinton did in a speech on welfare reform at the University of Texas in 1995). “We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices… Well, we’ve got no time for excuses,” Obama said. Obama was preaching to 500 or so Morehouse graduates, a group full of fellow travelers, a group who after years hearing this respectability rhetoric, had long been among the converted. 

Now Harris has come up with a set of initiatives that target Black men as beneficiaries. At her campaign stop in Erie, Pa., Harris revealed her multi-pronged plan, one long on loans and financial incentives meant for more than just Black men and short on how any of her plan actually helps ordinary Black men. The part about federal legalization of marijuana is especially racist, both in terms of assumptions around Black men and because the main beneficiaries of legalization have been white men. These are symbolic gestures, not real plans to actually help Black men, whether with their mental health or with overcoming their own misogyny in a wholly misogynistic society.

Maybe Obama and Harris are not exactly the best of Black people, but they are successful Black folk. That Obama would call out all Black men because a small number may be considering not voting at all is the equivalent of beating down on the second-most loyal group of Democratic voters (after Black women, of course). Harris’s attempt to pander is just that. It represents a mere symbolic attempt to build enthusiasm at a time when the booming economy’s impact on ordinary Black folk is limited. Yet the genocide abroad and the discrimination against immigrants of color in the U.S. — and Harris’s support for such — is quite extensive. It’s hubris, and it’s distasteful.

Donald Earl Collins is a freelance writer and a lecturer of history and American Studies at American University. He is the author of “Fear of a ‘Black’ America: Multiculturalism and the African American (2004).”