Symbolism won’t persuade Black men to vote for Harris. Here’s what will.
Democrats must go beyond token gestures and champion an agenda for the material progress of Black men.
As Kamala Harris inherits the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, she also inherits his sagging poll numbers with working-class Black men. The historic nature of Harris’s candidacy will be viewed by many Black male voters as cold comfort unless she finds a way to address their material and cultural concerns.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued that Harris will struggle to win unless she advocates on behalf of the “long-neglected working poor.” His argument is all the more relevant for Black men, who are largely of working-class status, and among the more endangered segment of the group.
The Harris campaign will no doubt ignite enthusiastic support from circles of professional women, and Black Democratic women in particular. But the Black voting community is larger than that demographic alone. Harris must devise an agenda to improve the living standards for Black men or risk losing their support to either ambivalence or to Donald Trump.
Harris shares the blame for Biden’s neglect of a “Black men’s agenda.” In January 2023, for example, when she served as Biden’s liaison to Black male voters, there were miscues that led to bruised feelings with grassroots community organizers like W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project and the mayor of Enfield, North Carolina.
It led him to question her sincerity: “People come to our communities two, three months before an election, talking about proverbial fried chicken and church fans with nothing else to offer us, nothing to address the issue that’s really plaguing our lives.”
A similar dynamic cropped up during the Stacey Abrams’s 2022 run for Georgia governor. The campaign relied on her celebrity status as a historic woman candidate — and the urgency of the election — to generate turnout among men. The campaign platform, however, tended to highlight issues of concern to women voters. When men failed to respond, pundits blamed it on their political shortcomings.
In contrast, the campaign of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp appealed to working-class men — including a segment of Black labor — with attention to their “pocketbook” concerns. Abrams gradually adjusted her platform with a set of policies called the “Black Men’s Agenda” that gained attention, but she was too late to make up for lost ground. This experience should provide insight for the Harris campaign.
To older Black men, Harris’s biography is atypical, and she can be seen as an enigma. Her immigrant parents were from the upper classes of Jamaica and India, and she was predominantly raised in a South Asian household. The often frosty relations between Blacks and Indian immigrants was perhaps best reflected in the 1991 Denzel Washington movie “Mississippi Marsala.” Black men may have doubts about her incarceration practices as a prosecutor in California, and, less important, about her marriage to a wealthy white corporate lawyer. Harris cannot neglect this class if she wants to win in November.
Building on the ideas of Stacey Abrams, a Harris “Black Men’s Agenda” should include targeted policies on voting rights, criminal justice reform, health insurance access and debt reduction. Particular focus should be given to the following three areas:
First, Harris must show concern for the strain of border immigrants on the underfunded public resources in Black communities, which include homeless shelters, affordable rental housing, mental health services, emergency room services and community recreational facilities. She should call on Democrats to revisit the oft-touted bipartisan Senate bill on border security and establish guidelines that safeguard the funding of community resources and that prioritize local residents.
Second, Harris should recognize the effects of immigrant workers on the wages and job prospects of local workers that compete in similar occupations. Social media pundits ridiculed Trump when he referred to the notion of “Black jobs” being taken by immigrants, but he had a legitimate basis for raising the issue. The 2010 report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission concluded that illegal immigration harmed Black wages and employment. A separate 2010 study cautioned, “As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined, and the incarceration rate rose.”
While Black male employment is influenced by many factors, including automation, immigration is one factor the government can control. Harris must ask Senate Democrats to revise the border security bill as it relates to work authorization. The bill appears to authorize an unlimited number of permits to border migrants, but it fails to adapt provisions to safeguard local workers in competing fields.
Harris can point to the long history of employer favoritism of immigrants over Black Americans, which has resulted in Black workers being squeezed out of specific occupations and networks of information over generations. The construction industry, for instance, has a long reputation for acts of harassment and discrimination against Blacks in the skilled trades, according to a 2023 report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The high rates of Black displacement and discouragement are exacerbated by union racism, contractor preference for immigrants and corporate exploitation of the globalization of labor. As such, the racial demographics in construction are 60 percent white, 30 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Black American.
Harris must champion inclusive hiring and contracting of underrepresented classes in the civil construction and electric vehicle industries that receive federal funds. The Congressional Black Caucus supported Biden’s signature industrial policies with the expectation of thousands of good-paying jobs for their constituents in the renovation of transit and public building projects, and the development of infrastructure for electric vehicles.
Third, Harris should endorse initiatives for the uplift of young men estranged from the economic system — and often from society itself. This could become a model for a national program of youth recovery. As vice president, she has called attention to issues of development for girls but said little about the plight of Black boys. Yet, far too many suffer from a crisis of confidence and diminished environments that prevents them from seizing opportunities. She would do well to revisit former President Barack Obama’s initiative, the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which promoted a support system for boys.
Harris — and Democratic elites — should not assume that working-class Black men will support her campaign for symbolic reasons alone, nor that the policies geared to women and children will appeal to their needs. Democrats must go beyond token gestures and champion an agenda for the material progress of Black men.
Roger House is professor emeritus of American Studies at Emerson College and the author of “Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy” and “South End Shout: Boston’s Forgotten Music Scene in the Jazz Age.” His forthcoming book is “Five Hundred Years of Black Self-Governance.”