With
the race for the presidency entering its last days, Donald J. Trump
last Wednesday once again made his pitch to black America: a new deal
aimed just at them. “I will be your greatest champion,” Trump said at a
campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina. “I will
never ever take the African-American community for granted. Never,
ever.”
The
hyperbolic remarks elicited the same collective eye roll among black
Americans and white progressives that they have since Trump began
regularly including black Americans in his platform in August. It was
then, following days of unrest in Milwaukee after the police killed a
black man there, that Trump flew to Wisconsin to give a speech on race.
He headed not to the heavily black city where the embers of outrage
still smoldered but instead, as his critics noted with glee, took the
stage at the county fairgrounds of a bleached-out, deeply conservative
Milwaukee suburb in order to address the problems of the “inner city.”
There
was, of course, the usual and expected “law and order” and pro-police
rhetoric that elicited hoots and cheers from the crowd. But then Trump,
as he is known to do, added an unexpected twist.
“Our
job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent
who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets,’’ Trump said.
‘‘Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus, or the young child walking
home from school. For every one violent protester, there are a hundred
of moms and dads and kids on the same city block who just want to be
able to sleep safely at night.”
He
pointed out the high unemployment rate among black men in Milwaukee,
the number of households run by single mothers who were living in
poverty and the low high-school-graduation rates. “I am asking for the
vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today
who wants a different and much better future,” Trump told the crowd,
which at times stood eerily silent. “It is time for our society to
address some honest and very, very difficult truths. The Democratic
Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community.” Trump
went on to say that Hillary Clinton “panders and talks down to
communities of color,” “seeing them only as votes, not as human beings
worthy of a better future.” It was time, Trump proclaimed, that
Democrats compete for black votes.
There
was something utterly surreal about that moment. Trump had spent months
whipping up his supporters, focusing on other so-called minority groups
whom he labeled rapists and terrorists, and now he was telling the
nearly all-white crowd that if they voted for him, he’d use his power to
help black residents in the inner cities by bringing jobs back and
improving their wages. Trump’s message did not seem to be directed at
his audience (recent research by professors at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota
showed that white Trump supporters are less likely to support
government programs if they think they will help black people). As one
resident of West Bend, the approximately 1-percent-black town where the
rally was held, put it to The Times:
“They think we owe them something. I don’t want to seem racist or
anything, but the black heritage has been raised in a certain way that
there’s no incentive to get out and work, because all of a sudden you
have five kids and there are no dads around.” Nor was it directed to
black people, who of all the nonwhite voters are the least poachable by
the G.O.P. The message was presumably targeted at white moderates, the
independents and disillusioned Bernie Sanders legions, whom Trump was
most likely hoping to reassure that he was not racist despite his years
of fueling the birther conspiracy theory and months of spewing bigotry
about Muslims and Mexicans.
But
in his speeches, Trump was speaking more directly about the particular
struggles of working-class black Americans and describing how the
government should help them more than any presidential candidate in
years. Let that uncomfortable truth sink in.
Whatever
his motives, Trump was talking about the black working class in a way
that few national politicians do. By now it’s no surprise that when they
talk about black Americans as at all, Republican politicians typically
conflate blackness with poverty, and then quickly blame black people for
their struggles. In March 2014, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said
that the problems in the “inner cities” Trump was talking about were
rooted not in the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of
businesses and the tax base to government-subsidized suburbs, but on an
absence of a “culture of work.”
Liberals
quickly lambasted Ryan for those remarks. But far too often, the way
Democrats talk to, and about, black Americans is indistinguishable from
the way their Republican counterparts do. And President Obama has been
as guilty as anyone. A year before Ryan made his remarks, Obama
delivered a commencement address at the historically black Morehouse
College, where he warned the graduates at the prestigious all-male
school that they shouldn’t use racism as an excuse, and to be good
fathers.
Politicians
regularly deploy this type of shaming when referring to, or even when
addressing, black Americans. But it’s hard to fathom a politician,
Democrat or Republican, standing before a predominately white crowd in a
sagging old coal town, and blaming the community’s economic woes on
poor parenting or lack of work ethic or a victim mentality. Those
Americans, white Americans, are worthy of government help. Their
problems are not of their own making, but systemic, institutional, out
of their control. They are never blamed for their lot in life. They have
had jobs snatched away by bad federal policy, their opportunities
stolen by inept politicians.
It would have
been easy, expected, for Trump in his speeches to recycle the same old
personal-responsibility narrative for black voters. But Trump didn’t
call for black people to stop lazing around and use a little more elbow
grease on those bootstraps. He was pushing for more government —
Republican-led government — to help black folks prosper, a racially
specific new deal that included investing in schools, high-wage jobs and
black entrepreneurs. And in doing so, Trump, at least rhetorically, did
something the Democrats and Republicans have largely failed to do — he
took black citizens into the ranks of “hardworking Americans” worthy of
the government’s hand.
To
be clear, I am not arguing that the man who called for the execution of
the since-exonerated Central Park Five (and who still insists on their
guilt) and who seeks nationwide implementation of the stop-and-frisk
program ruled unconstitutional in New York City, and who warns that
voting in heavily black cities is rigged, is a racial progressive who
will enact policies that will help black communities. Nor am I saying
black voters should buy what Trump is selling. (And they aren’t: A poll
released last week by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College of likely
voters in Pennsylvania found that “no black respondent from Philadelphia supported Mr. Trump in the survey.”)
What
I am saying is that when Trump claims Democratic governance has failed
black people, when he asks “the blacks” what they have to lose, he is
asking a poorly stated version of a question that many black Americans
have long asked themselves. What dividends, exactly, has their
decades-long loyalty to the Democratic ticket paid them? By brushing
Trump’s criticism off as merely cynical or clueless rantings, we are
missing an opportunity to have a real discussion of the failures of
progressivism and Democratic leadership when it comes to black
Americans.
Trump
is not wrong when he says that black Americans have suffered in a
particular way in blue cities and blue states. (Of course, they suffer
in red states as well.) The most segregated cities have long been clustered
above the Mason-Dixon line and are Democratically run. Some of the most
segregated schools in the country educate students in New York,
Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee. Efforts to integrate schools
in these cities have met resistance from white progressives. Democrats
did as much to usher in the era of mass incarceration as anyone else.
And in these cities, with their gaping income inequality, black
communities shoulder a terrible burden of gun violence, high
unemployment, substandard schools and poverty.
Though black Americans these days consistently vote Democratic at higher margins than any other racial group, this wasn’t always the case. Before 1948, black voters were fairly evenly split
between Republican and Democrats. Then President Harry S. Truman pushed
a civil rights platform, and a majority of black voters swung
Democratic, though a significant percentage still identified as
Republican. That changed in the 1960s, when black voters moved en masse
to the Democratic Party after Lyndon B. Johnson showed he was willing to
lose the South in order to pass the most sweeping civil rights
legislation since Reconstruction. Southern Democrats abandoned the party
to become Republicans, and Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a
Southern strategy of stalling forward movement on civil rights. And the
party of Lincoln came to be considered anathema to black progress.
In
the intervening years, modern Democrats have been far more likely to
support social programs that help the poor, who are disproportionately
black, and to support civil rights policies. But since Johnson left
office, Democrats have done little to address the systemic issues —
housing and school segregation — that keep so many black Americans in
economic distress and that make true equality elusive. At the federal
level, despite the fact that the National Fair Housing Alliance
estimates that black Americans experiences millions of incidents of
housing discrimination every year, Democrats, like Republicans, have avoided strong enforcement of federal fair-housing laws
that would allow black families to move to opportunity-rich areas. Both
Democrats and Republicans have failed to pursue school-integration
policies that would ensure black children gain access to the good
schools white kids attend. In the 1970s and ’80s, Trump battled housing-discrimination lawsuits,
while Senator Clinton was noticeably quiet when Westchester County,
N.Y., a county that twice voted decidedly for Obama, fought a court
order to integrate its whitest towns, including Chappaqua, the 2-percent-black town she calls home.
Instead
of seeking aggressive racial-equality initiatives, Democrats too often
have opted for a sort of trickle-down liberalism. If we work to
strengthen unions, that will trickle down to you. If we work to
strengthen health care, that will trickle down to you. If we work to
make all schools better, that will trickle down to you. After decades of
Democratic loyalty, too many black Americans are still awaiting that
trickle.
While Republicans rarely
make any effort to court black voters, Democrats do reach out to them.
But Democratic politicians have also shown again and again that they
will sacrifice the needs of their most loyal constituents in order to
win larger political points. I will never forget how in February 2013,
President Obama flew to Chicago to give a speech that touched on gun
violence. He spoke of the random shooting of Hadiya Pendleton, a Chicago
teenager who had performed at his inaugural events. “There’s no more
important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important
for us reducing violence than strong, stable families — which means we
should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood,” Obama told
the predominantly black audience. But two months earlier, when he gave a
speech about the Newtown shooting, he’d said no such thing about
fathers and marriage, even though that violent act was carried out by a
young white man from a broken home. Instead, he emphasized Congress’s
inability to pass gun control. The message: Black killings are the black
community’s fault; white killings are a failure of government.
Trump,
in turning the usual rhetoric on its head — claiming that black people
are living in inner-city hells and should therefore spurn the Democratic
Party — has forced progressives, both black and white, into the
uncomfortable position of arguing that things aren’t nearly as bad for
black America as Trump would have us believe. In the weeks before
Trump’s alleged sexual improprieties overtook everything else, writers
dashed off thousands of words arguing that the “inner cities” are
improving (gentrification!) and that poverty is not just in the inner
city but in suburban America too, and that there are lots of
middle-class black folks doing just fine, thank you. Writers pointed out
that Trump was wrong when he said nearly half of inner-city black
children are poor when it’s actually just one-third. If Trump
had raised these statistics and said black people needed to simply work
harder, these same people would be arguing that candidates needed to be
talking about what they were going to do address the systemic causes of
devastatingly high poverty and unemployment rates that black Americans
experience. And they would have been right.
Most
black Americans live neither in poverty nor in the inner city. And even
those of us who do live in inner cities aren’t living in hell. But the
inequality that black Americans experience is stark. Black children are
more segregated from white children now than at any point since the
early ’70s. United States census data shows that a black middle-class
family is more likely to live in a poor neighborhood than a poor white
family. The wealth gap between white and black families is the widest it
has been in nearly three decades. This is true in cities and states run
by Republicans. This is true in cities and states run by Democrats.
Regardless of how you feel about Trump, on this one thing he is right: The Democratic Party has
taken black Americans for granted. The problem is — and this is where
Trump’s rhetoric is just that, rhetoric — black people aren’t loyal
Democrats because they don’t know any better. They are making an
informed decision. As Theodore R. Johnson, an adjunct professor at
Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert on
black voting behavior, points out in his research,
black Americans are an electoral monolith out of necessity. Black
people care about the environment and the economy and international
issues, and they generally fall across the spectrum on a range of
issues, just like all other human beings. But while the Democratic Party
might be accused of upholding the racial status quo, the Republican
Party has a long track record of working to restrict the remedies
available to increase housing and school integration and equal
opportunities in employment and college admissions. And most critical,
Republicans have passed laws that have made the hallmark of full
citizenship — the right to vote — more difficult for black Americans.
Since first securing the right to vote, black Americans have had to be
single-issue voters — and that single issue is basic citizenship rights.
Maintaining these rights will always and forever transcend any other
issue. And so black Americans can never jump ship to a party they
understand as trying to erode the hard-fought rights black citizens have
died to secure.
But
it is also true that black Americans have not always been single-party
voters, and they don’t have to remain so. If Democrats want to keep
black voters, they need to work for those votes, because one day
Republicans might wise up. Until then, when Trump asks what the hell do
black Americans have to lose? Well, a hell of a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment