Barack Obama’s Tiresome Condescension Toward Black Men

Before Barack Obama delivered his speech supporting Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh on Thursday, he made a more intimate appearance at the Harris-Walz campaign offices in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood. “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 or other reasons for that,” he told the assembled staff and volunteers, referring to a specific kind of Harris-skeptical Black man he anticipated they would encounter during their voter outreach. “You’re thinking about sitting out, or even supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you?” Obama likened this attitude to betrayal. “Women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time,” he said. “When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting.”

The erosion of support among Black men for Democrats, including Harris, is a real trend. According to polling from NBC News, Black men have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at lower rates in every general election since 2008, when it peaked at 95 percent. (It fell to 87 percent in 2012, 82 percent in 2016, and 80 percent in 2020.) A recent New York Times–Siena College poll found that only 79 percent of Black voters overall intend to back Harris in November, while Black support for Donald Trump is tracking higher than ever at 14 percent. Maybe most remarkably, a September poll by the NAACP found that 26 percent of Black men under 50 years old said they would support Trump.

Obama’s broadside, which quickly went viral, was further proof of his status as the party’s resident scold. The glaring exception to his 2012 declaration that he was “not the president of Black America” has always been Black men, over whom he is assumed to have special providence. This perception has allowed Obama to exploit stereotypes, blaming underwhelming Democratic performances at the ballot box on “Cousin Pookie,” a mythical layabout who would rather watch football than perform his civic duties. He has also chided Morehouse College graduates — during their 2013 commencement ceremony, of all occasions — for a supposed Black tendency to make “excuses.” What all his lecturing has not occasioned is an honest reckoning among Democratic elites with why some Black men might be souring on them to begin with.

One assumption embedded in Obama’s remarks is that a significant share of Black men is skeptical of a Harris presidency simply because she is a woman. This is undoubtedly true — Black men are men, after all, and not immune to the prejudices that afflict their gender. I have argued in the past that the GOP’s quickest path to racial parity may be composing a de facto men’s party, given Trump’s recent successes with that cohort across racial lines and the endorsements he has received from a range of Black male celebrities, including Kanye West, Ice Cube, and Lil Wayne. But it’s also true that Black men support Harris, and Democrats more generally, at much higher rates than men from any other racial group, despite Obama’s efforts to single them out. If anything, Trump’s inroads with traditional Democratic voting blocs between 2016 and 2020 were most pronounced among Hispanics and women. Even Harris’s shakier numbers with Black men casts doubt on the idea that if she loses, Black men will have played an outsize role.

The more fundamental assumption of Obama’s remarks concerns Black political identity, which in his view entails a broader set of ideological commitments. To hear the former president tell it, these commitments include rewarding allyship of Black women in kind while punishing denigration of them by Trump and his racist-misogynist acolytes. Setting aside the fallacy of equating Harris, a Black former law-enforcement official, with Black women protesting police violence, you could infer that a commitment to racial equality and opposing bigotry in general are included as well. Yet if these obligations form the pillars of a Black political agenda that must naturally reject Trump, it is less obvious why they should naturally embrace Harris or most Democrats.

Black loyalty to the Democratic Party in the post–Civil Rights era has become something like a law of American politics, and the argument for its continuation is relatively strong: civil rights, reproductive rights, and workers’ rights are better served by a Harris presidency than a Trump one. What, then, do we make of the fact that, just as Trump has denigrated Black men as feckless criminals whose human rights are negotiable, Obama has used his bully pulpit to cast us as lazy and uninterested in politics? What are we to make of Obama undermining protest actions that sought to deliver us justice, such as urging NBA stars to halt a strike called in protest of police brutality?

One need not equivocate to recognize that there are substantive reasons for Black voters to reject Democrats like Obama and Harris on the same basis as they do Republicans. The framework Obama uses leaves little room for misgivings about the fact that Harris is going to great lengths to collapse the distance between herself and the GOP. When she learned that former vice-president Dick Cheney, a chief architect of the United States’ atrocities during the War on Terror, was planning to vote for her, Harris unironically thanked him for “what he has done to serve our country.” She has become more hawkish on immigration in response to Trump’s naked xenophobia, and she has recommitted to unconditionally sending arms to Israel amid its slaughter of Gazan and Lebanese civilians — a dogmatic position held by Democratic and Republican administrations alike, including Biden’s and Trump’s. During a recent appearance on ABC’s The View, Harris seemed to flub an easy opportunity to distance herself from the unpopular incumbent when she struggled to explain how she would govern differently. But she recovered later that day by reiterating an earlier promise that, unlike Biden, she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet.

Obama’s remarks are being hailed as a much-needed reality check — few besides him, reads an op-ed at the Root, would dare to “call BS on some Black men refusing to back Vice-President Kamala Harris for reasons that aren’t rooted in sexism.” But just as his condescension is unlikely to move actual votes, it leaves unanswered the question of how destructive Democratic policies have to be before they merit the same moral opposition as Republican ones. By focusing on the sliver of Black male voters who refuse to support Harris because she’s a woman, Obama and those who subscribe to his analysis neglect the myriad reasons why they might be skeptical of her because she’s a Democrat. And as long as this attitude holds sway among the party elite, it risks a continued erosion not only of Black loyalty but of claims to a moral high ground that gives them license to deliver sermons.