There’s a candidate in the US presidential election who seems to think black men are tragic dopeheads. And who frets over black men’s sexism. And who worries that black folk are susceptible to the manipulative tactics of foreign actors. Probably as a consequence of all that weed they’re smoking. It must be Donald Trump, right, the man branded a racist menace by America’s coastal-dwelling, opinion-making classes? Actually, it’s Kamala Harris.
What is Team Kamala’s problem with black men? Something’s up. Even the Nation thinks her appeals to black male voters have ‘miss[ed] the mark’. They’ve done more than that – they’ve depicted black men as a singular blob whose most pressing needs include the right to partake in some Mary Jane and the prising open of their lazy eyes to the scourge of their own sexist thinking. If you want to see racial stereotyping of African Americans, forget Trump – check out Harris.
Harris’s pitch to African American males has been alarmingly oafish. She kicked it off a couple of weeks ago with a ‘black-friendly’ policy agenda that included a promise to legalise weed and protect crypto-currency assets. This led to a headline at NPR, America’s painfully woke public broadcaster, that giddily said: ‘In outreach to black men, Harris to vow to legalise weed, protect crypto.’ Can these people hear themselves? One is left with an image of black men holding a doobie in one hand and browsing the Bitcoin exchange with the other.
Harris thinks chilling the rules on the production and sale of marijuana will help to ‘lift Black men up’. She says that when a ‘national cannabis industry’ starts to ‘take shape’, she will ensure that ‘Black men’ are at the front of the queue for the ‘wealth and jobs in this new market’. How could they resist? Get Kamala in the White House, fellas, and you might enjoy a new career as the grower of psychoactive substances for bored rich white kids.
What next – appealing to Irish American voters by promising to cut the price of a pint of Guinness? Trying to win over New Jersey folk by offering a free fake tan? As Michael Deacon says, Harris’s weed focus is ‘staggeringly crass’. Worse, it’s kind of racist. If a white politician tried to entice black voters with talk of marijuana, he’d be accused of ‘perpetuating racist stereotypes’, says Deacon. Indeed. Imagine if Trump took to the stage at one of his rallies and said ‘Black men, vote for me and I’ll make sure you have all the weed you need’. The same NPR that gushes over Kamala for pushing this policy would be thundering about Adolf Trump viewing all black men as drug addicts.
Also, what a turnaround. When she was the attorney general of California, Harris was known for aggressively prosecuting dope-related crimes. And this impacted harder on African Americans than whites. In the identitarian mind, where people are treated less as individuals than as representatives of their ‘race’, it seems there’s a thin line between punishment and pity, between viewing an ethnic group as a troublesome bloc that must be locked up and viewing it as a hapless bloc that must be ‘lifted up’. It strikes me that both Harris’s ruthless pursuit of black men selling dope and her new promise to provide black men with jobs selling dope are underpinned by a view of this group less as citizens than as caricatures.
There have been other crass clangers, too. In a recent interview, Harris banged the knackered drum of ‘Russian interference’. Shady foreign actors have ‘already started with the misinformation and the lies’, she said. Then, a startling claim: those evil Ruskies who butted into the 2016 election made a point of targeting ‘black folks’, she said. Well, with all that weed and crypto browsing, they’re easy prey for online demagogues. The condescension is off the scale. It seems the Democrat elites flat-out refuse to believe that they might be losing minority voters because their policies are crap – no, Kremlin bots must be stealing away the wide-eyed little people by filling their heads with lies.
Then there’s the sexism issue. Top Dems have convinced themselves that some black men prefer Trump to Harris because they trust men more than women. Barack Obama chided the ‘brothers’ who won’t vote Kamala because they are not ‘feeling the idea of having a woman as president’. Democrat kingmaker Stacey Abrams said ‘sexism remains real’ in certain communities.
Maybe there’s a ‘special place in hell’ for voters of colour who don’t want to vote for this woman of colour? That’s what Madeleine Albright said in 2016 about women who didn’t vote for Hillary – that they were destined for the netherworld. Gloria Steinem went one worse, saying that young women who supported Bernie Sanders rather than Hillary were probably thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’ Time and again, Dems chastise women and minority groups who vote the ‘wrong’ way. They really think they own these people. They really think the brothers and the ladies are indebted to their Democrat overlords, and if they even think about voting for the other guy then they’re idiots or traitors whom hell awaits. As the Washington Post said following Obama’s hectoring of the ‘brothers’, maybe such ‘scolding’ is not exactly a ‘winning pitch’.
For me, Harris’s worst ‘black-friendly’ policy is her promise to hand out a million fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 to black entrepreneurs. Now, this idea might actually help African Americans, certainly more than the depiction of them as dope-smoking crypto bros who have a problem with women. But it’s still problematic. It still siphons black people off from the rest of the American citizenry as a uniquely troubled group requiring state-led special treatment. It’s economic racial favouritism. And racial favouritism is the very death of class politics. Americans of all backgrounds are struggling right now, post-lockdown, with inflation soaring. To offer one group, and one group alone, large handouts to get their businesses up and running is a recipe for social resentment and even conflict.
It is such a sign of the times that while the supposedly ‘far right’ Donald Trump is out there talking about protecting jobs and improving wages, the ostensible leftists of the Democrats are witlessly pitting blacks against whites in a scuffle for scarce resources. You don’t have to buy the idea that Trump is a billionaire Wat Tyler to be struck that he seems fairly comfortable talking about class, whereas all Kamala has to fall back on is race, and gender, and identity. Why have the Democrats ‘lost support among Black men’?, asks Vox. Oh, I don’t know – maybe people expect more from their leaders than stereotyping, scolding and bungs disguised as loans.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
