Black leaders in government and the private sector are denouncing an attempt by former President Barack Obama to “shame” black men into voting for Kamala Harris, while the Democratic presidential nominee herself offers to funnel millions of federal dollars to them.
The moves by both Obama and Harris suggest the black male vote is not as reliable for the Democratic Party as it has been for many decades.
“Black Americans are having an ‘OMG’ moment with the Democrat Party,” Kendall Qualls, former Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, told CatholicVote:
From open borders, failing public schools and most insidious, watching the destruction of the two-parent family for 50-years and doing nothing to restore it, black Americans are realizing that they have been duped by the Democrats. The Democrat Party has built a “poverty plantation” with a few black big shots to oversee loyalty votes.
Qualls’ comments come following Obama’s recent scolding of black men in a Pittsburgh campaign field office that their apparent lack of enthusiasm for Harris suggests sexism. Black men, the former president said, “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”
The New York Times referred to Obama’s tone as “admonishing.”
“The former president’s remarks that some Black men are not ‘feeling the idea’ of a female president were blunt and urgent, but also potentially alienating for a vital group of Democratic voters,” the Times’ subheading read.
Virginia GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears condemned on Sunday what she called Obama’s “shaming” of black men into voting for Harris.
Appearing on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Earle-Sears said:
You know, I think that they’ve run out of arguments, the Democrats, and they’re trying to grasp at straws as a drowning man will. And it’s unfortunate because the very black men that they say that they support and that they will defend, that they are now shaming them. How dare you tell us what to do! You make your own choices, and we will make ours. That’s how this whole thing works. It has never been your duty to shame us. And so we’re going to make our own decisions.
The author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, Adam B. Coleman rejects Obama’s attempt to shame him.
That “tactic of racial manipulation by the Democratic Party is what pushed me, a black man, away from the party into political independence,” Coleman wrote in an op-ed at the New York Post following Obama’s stern reprimand of black men. “The idea that someone deserves my vote only because I exist in a particular image while everyone else gets a choice has always felt incredibly insulting to me.”
And Coleman apparently believes other black men are just as insulted:
“Elitists like Obama are incapable of reading the room,” Coleman said:
The optics of a multimillionaire former president chastising the average working-class black man about real problems they face and Kamala’s involvement in them as vice president doesn’t sit well with most rational people.
Following Obama’s “shaming,” Harris rolled out her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” with the promise of “tools” for “black men to build wealth, support their families, and lead in their communities.”
“She knows that Black men have long felt that too often their voice in our political process has gone unheard and that there is so much untapped ambition and leadership within the Black male community,” her agenda claims.
In an op-ed at USA Today last week, columnist Nicole Russell characterized Harris’ agenda for black men as “the epitome of identity politics” and a strategy that “also demonstrates that her campaign is weak among a voting bloc that for decades has overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates.”
Russell observed that, while Joe Biden won 87% of black male votes in 2020, a New York Times / Siena College poll released October 12 found Harris with only 70% of backing from black men.
Among the giveaways Harris promises is one million “fully forgivable” loans of up to $20,000 for black business owners and “others.”
While Harris, Russell pointed out, “skims past the cost to implement her plan,” her “forgivable loans” to black entrepreneurs “could alone cost as much as $20 billion.”
Despite these most recent glaring displays of identity politics by Obama and Harris, Qualls, the founder of TakeCharge, a Minnesota-based organization committed to urging black Americans “to take charge of their own lives,” told CatholicVote that “Obama and the Democrats have a lot more to worry about than black men voting for Trump.”
“In the last three years,” Qualls said,
we have seen, with little media attention, Kenneth Paschal, the first black Republican to be elected to the Alabama state house in 140 years; Mesha Mainor switch from the Democrat Party to Republican Party, making her the first black woman to serve in the state house in the history of Georgia; and the mayor of Dallas switch from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party, making Dallas the largest city in the country with a black Republican mayor.
Qualls said he is “thrilled” by this awakening among black Americans.
“It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “Many Americans, regardless of race, are seeing the light and truth of what the Democrat Party has become – anti-nuclear family, anti-Israel, anti-God, and anti-American.”
