This year’s presidential race, like many before it, is tightly contested. Votes are counted city by city, county by county, and state by state. Electoral college votes, nearly all determined by the statewide result, determine the outcome.
Vice President Kamala Harris is a former district attorney and attorney general in California, where she was the first Black woman elected statewide, and also a former U.S. senator from the Golden State. The Democratic nominee is pitted against Republican businessman and former president Donald Trump.
Both campaigns are working to shore up their political bases three weeks before the Nov. 5 election. Recently, there has been hand-wringing over the perceived laissez-faire support for Harris from one part of the Democratic voting base — Black men. In the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania, former president Barack Obama commented that a lack of enthusiasm for Harris “seems to be more pronounced with the Brothers.” He continued, “Part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — 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.”
Recent polling from the Pew Research Center showed that while 85% of Black female registered voters support Harris, only 72% of Black men do. What is troubling is her support among Black men is weaker than President Joe Biden’s was before the 2020 election, even after all the vitriol from him denigrating Black and brown communities.
This situation has spurred Harris to raise the stakes by pinpointing specific elements of her economic plan that would benefit Black voters. Her “opportunity agenda” includes a pledge to provide a million forgivable $20,000 loans to Black entrepreneurs to start businesses. She has also proposed a $50,000 tax deduction for small businesses.
Harris has made herself available for interviews with podcasters, “60 Minutes” and Charlamagne tha God. The author and comedian has a nationally syndicated radio show that is popular with Black Millennials and members of Generation Z.
In the past, Black women have held prominent leading roles in our society. But no woman of any race as of yet has become president of the United States. Women have led governments in other nations. Margaret Thatcher was the first woman chosen as England’s prime minister and became its longest serving one in the 20th century. Indira Gandhi was in her fourth term as prime minister of India, the world’s largest democracy, when she was assassinated in 1984.
More recently and closer to these shores, Portia Simpson Miller served as prime minister of Jamaica and Mia Mottley has led the government of Barbados since 2018. In Africa, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was president of Liberia, a country whose population includes descendants of former African American slaves who voluntarily returned to the continent long ago.
Obviously, women can and do lead other countries of the world. Part of what they need is men to follow them, just as men follow men elected to top office.
So why no woman president in the United States so far? It seems that some men struggle to accept a woman leader, particularly when the stakes are so catastrophically high for our country as in this election season. That apparently includes some Black men.
Elon Musk and his X platform and other right-wing media have gone full tilt in distributing false narratives about Harris and her record, hoping to scare away a few angry, disconnected African American men who seem to feel they haven’t received what they deserve from the current Democratic administration. But if they think Donald Trump and his white supremacist political allies are going to do anything that would make their lives any better, they are sadly mistaken.
It might be easy to get caught up in the false narrative that four years ago everything was better and now everything’s worse. That is factually inaccurate.
Here is another way to look at Trump’s presidency. What exactly, explicitly, did he do for Black people? For Black men? Okay, some additional funding for historically Black colleges and universities. That’s about it, and that’s a traditional token move by Republican administrations going way back.
Was the economy better for Black people? Not because of anything Trump did. He inherited Obama’s economy, which the first Black president pulled up from the Great Recession caused by a financial crisis in the home mortgage market.
Has the economy has been worse under the Biden-Harris administration? It inherited a botched response to the pandemic from Trump, and then his Russian buddy Vladimir Putin started a war with Ukraine that disrupted global supply chains, stoking inflation. Biden can be fairly faulted for contributing somewhat to rising prices by boosting unemployment checks and making forgivable loans to prevent business failures. Some of that money went into Black men’s pockets, though, and if Biden had not stimulated the economy, an economic depression might well have resulted. There are Black people still alive who remember what the Great Depression was like, and none are pining for those days.
I realize that many Black people in our society, and Black men specifically, still face challenges in their quest to make it in America. But choosing a self-centered, racist autocrat who has no interest in making anything in the country or world better—unless it benefits him personally—is not going to provide them more opportunity.
For any Black men who remain undecided, I ask you Brother to Brother, why would you not give a brilliant Black Sister who has committed her whole life to serving the public a chance lead our great nation and instead give it to an angry old white man who consistently spews racist lies, a man who is always on the grift? A man who insults all Black people by claiming we think more of him because he’s been convicted of crimes and continues to be prosecuted for more of his numerous crimes against the American people?
Brothers, as we used to say, don’t go for the okey-doke. It’s a con game from a known con man. Yes, Kamala Harris embraces both her Black/Jamaican and Indian ancestry, but she went to Howard University and joined the historically Black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and, as a senator, the Congressional Black Caucus. She recalls her mother, an immigrant who understood the racial dynamics of this county, stated her intent to raise her two daughters as free Black women. Vote for the Sister who knows who she is and has your best interest at heart.
— Ronald Mitchell
