What’s the Matter with Black Males?

I was in a coffee shop recently and accidentally overheard, as happens, some nice older liberal ladies talking politics.

They discussed who they think is going to win the presidential race, and even dropped a reference to Project 2025. Then, one of them said something about black men not supporting Kamala Harris, and another asked, “Do they really hate women that much?”

I’m guessing if you had told any of these white ladies not too long ago that they’d be having a conversation disparaging black men in public that they would have been very surprised. But such is the dynamic in an election where — if current trends hold — a crucial contingent of black men could turn their back on progressivism and become the subject of stinging postelection recriminations.

Back in the George W. Bush years, the question raised by the Thomas Frank book What’s the Matter with Kansas? was all the rage. If Donald Trump over-performs with black guys and wins the election two weeks from now, the question is going to be, “What’s the Matter with Black Males?”

As a piece in the Nation put it, “More and more, anxious Democrats are prone to speak and act as if Black men who do not support the Democratic party are guilty of an act of racial betrayal.”

This is the tack Barack Obama has adopted. Out on the campaign trail a couple of weeks ago, he famously castigated black men. He observed that “we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running” and noted the shortfall “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

“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,” Obama said.

Coming up with reasons for that? Maybe they simply have reasons.

An opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer by a black-radio host named Solomon Jones intones, “Black men can’t afford to spend our limited time and meager resources in an effort to hold back Black women. By doing so, we hold ourselves back, and we weaken our entire community,” weakening “our ability to coalesce politically” and increasing “Trump’s chances of winning the presidency.”

Jones compares the effort to use Obama’s remarks against Harris to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry in 2004.

“Twenty years later,” he maintains, “it doesn’t take millions of dollars to get a group to speak out against its own. All you need is a few true believers and a bevy of fake accounts on social media.”

The assertion that Harris should be considered “one of their own” by black men disinclined to support her is the worst sort of racialism. These men may not be college grads, may not be affluent, may not be woke, may not be the children of immigrants, and may not be as enamored of Joe Biden and his record in office as she professes to be.

Harris probably reminds some of them of the scold who works in HR, knows all the pronouns, and is a clear and present danger to fire them.

Why should they feel obligated to show up for her?

In a surprisingly more nuanced, if still left-wing, take, Charles Blow of the New York Times dissents in part from Obama’s simplistic focus on outright sexism.

“There is a feeling,” he writes, “that liberalism in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, has moved away from the party of hard hats to the party of safe spaces, that it has been feminized and that Trump’s bravado and rampant sexism, no matter how toxic, are at least forms of masculinity.”

If this is indeed the case, the fault is with the party, not the guys who are disturbed by the changing nature of the party.

For all the focus on culture, though, the economy looms large. In a New York Times/Siena poll, a clear plurality of black men — 23 percent — say the economy is the most important issue to them. (Black women say abortion is most important, followed by the economy.) About three-quarters of black voters consider economic conditions only fair or poor, and a quarter of black men expect Trump to help them more personally.

The Thomas Frank argument in his book about Kansas was that Republicans had used cultural issues to distract voters from their allegedly harmful economic policies. If Harris underperforms among black men, the opposite will probably be the case; they won’t have allowed a cultural appeal — basically to racial solidarity and ancestral partisan loyalty — to trump their bread-and-butter concerns.

Who knows whether this will come to pass or not? Trump’s gains among Latinos seem more solid, and the polling underestimated Democratic support among black voters in both 2020 and 2022, as Giancarlo Sopo has pointed out.

One might think it would be a good thing if the electorate becomes a little more divided along class lines and a little less along racial lines, and if, at a time of unthinking partisanship, a group of voters traditionally taken for granted by one of the parties shows some stubborn independence.

But this won’t be the reaction of many Democrats, who will portray these voters as easily misled tools of the patriarchy who have trampled on all that is good and true.

The nice white ladies at the coffee shop will be highly displeased.