Insulting Black Political Outreach
As the 2024 election season heats up, both current president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump are appealing for votes. However, both Trump and Biden’s recent attempts at black outreach rely on embarrassingly crude stereotypes. Black people who are part of either party must reckon with the fact that they are merely seen as political props as opposed to full human beings with complexities and needs. Where black Americans are concerned, both parties are generally more interested in performing cheap gimmicks than addressing policy concerns.
While speaking at the Black Conservative Federation Gala in South Carolina, Donald Trump said, “These lights are so bright in my eyes that I can’t see too many people out there, but I can only see the black ones. I can’t see any white ones.” Perhaps most egregiously, Trump also likened his repeated indictments for his manifestly illegal activities during his tenure as president to the discrimination that black people face in modern criminal justice. As if this commentary was not bad enough, Trump attended Sneaker Con in Philadelphia and released an objectively hideous pair of $400 golden sneakers, which some commentators have claimed is garnering him black political support.
None of this behavior from the Trump campaign should leave anybody flabbergasted. The idea that he would even consider mounting a sophisticated outreach effort to black Americans that takes into consideration black people’s needs and complexities is silly. It is perfectly on brand for Trump to offer commentary about seeing dark skin, release risibly gaudy sneakers, and trivialize discrimination by likening his being held accountable for illegal behavior while holding the highest office in the land to racial discrimination. Trump clearly thinks that most black people are materialistic ciphers with a tendency towards criminality.
Insulting black political outreach is often highlighted when it happens on the right. However, when it occurs on the left, albeit in less outrageously offensive ways, there is little attention paid to it. In a shameless display of political pandering, President Biden’s reelection campaign released a video of him eating burgers, fried chicken, and fries (out of take-out boxes, lest we forget that he’s Regular Ol’ Joe) with a black family, consisting of two boys and a father. Predictably, the first thing that the young boys mention when the president inquired about their lives is that they play basketball. One of the boys also talked about going to a small dry-cleaning business with his school, and the president condescendingly pretended to be thoroughly impressed. This is what the Biden campaign thought was a fine video to release that would reach out to black Americans.
It’s curious that the Biden administration could not find any young black scholar from anywhere across the country to talk about their ambitions of becoming medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots, professors, or politicians. Frankly, even a black tennis player would have been a refreshing deviation from the stereotypical black athlete. The Biden campaign had to lean into the lazy, stereotypical portrayal of young black men as aspiring hoopers whose finest cuisine while dining with the sitting President of the United States is fried chicken and fries. The intent was obviously to show Biden’s relatability, but it only succeeded in being a glaring example of the bigotry of low expectations.
It is also important to note that this kind of political outreach by the Biden campaign would be the norm if the sophomoric idea of political colorblindness were to take root in American political culture. While Trump clearly mentioned race and was offensive in doing so, Biden did not mention race, but was also offensive. If colorblindness were to be the prevailing political approach to politics, it would lead to politicians attempting to appeal to racial groups, sometimes even using offensive stereotypes, and nobody would be able to point out these stereotypes without being accused of being “the real racist” for daring to notice, since race was never explicitly mentioned. In this example, we would be forced to pretend that fried chicken and basketball were utterly coincidental and had nothing to do with race.
Fundamentally, both the Democratic and Republican approaches to black voter outreach demonstrate that they have little concern for the issues that black people face in America. For the most part, they do not even care enough to feign an overall positive view of black people or a rudimentary belief in black potential and ability (aside from athletic ability, of course). Their outreach to black people always means appealing to the lowest common denominator. To them, sneaker-loving criminals and fried chicken-eating wannabe hoopers are the best that black people have to offer.
Rather than this offensive guff from both sides, a party that is serious about outreach would have a suite of public policy proposals and arguments that are specifically targeted to black people. Instead of the promotion of the idea of eliminating race from politics, what is necessary is for race to be used forthrightly and responsibly. It is perfectly fine to single demographic groups out and tell them exactly what policies are going to be implemented to benefit them. (Notice how, in the video above, Biden was awkwardly trying to shoehorn his student loan debt cancellation into the conversation.) What is always offensive, however, is the use of racial politics that lean into vulgar racial stereotypes with nonexistent public policy proposals to convince thinking people to vote for a given political party.