Black men went big for Trump? Not really. Let’s dig deeper into the numbers | Opinion
After the ridiculous election-season clown show that was Kanye West, Ice Cube, 50 Cent and Lil Wayne I continue to hear the narrative that suggests that Black men did not support Hillary Clinton in 2016. This narrative is being reaffirmed with headlines saying that Black men flocked to support President Trump. Newsweek went so far as to claim that “Only 36 percent of Black men said that Biden’s selection of a Black woman was a good idea.”
While we all know about Lil Wayne, very few of us knew about the letter of support that was signed by 100 Black male celebrities in support of Sen. Kamala Harris during Biden’s selection process.
A review of the Pew Research Center’s “examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters” shows, in fact, that the narrative that was created about Black men’s lack of support for Hillary Clinton was pure propaganda. In fact, the Pew report showed that Black men broke 81 percent for Clinton to 14 percent for Trump.
The claim of Black men’s shift to Trump serves to sow dissension and division in our communities. It is a sleight of hand that helps to define us as less American and less supportive of our own community, while at the same time absolving the real culprits who backed President Trump.
What was most notable in 2016 is that despite having a woman on top of a history-making ticket, 62 percent of men and more than 47 percent of women supported a man who bragged about moving on a married woman “like a b!tch,” and who boasted that since he’s a star, he can “grab ‘em by the p---y.”
In this cycle, election-eve poll findings by the African American Research Collaborative (AARC) — one of the rare Black polling firms — showed that, overall, Black voters’ support for Biden remained at a historic high of 89 percent over 9 percent for Trump. For Black men, it was 86 percent to 12 percent. These numbers are in line with other firms’ exit polls. HIT strategies, another African-American polling firm, suggests that once the numbers are tallied, Black men’s support for Trump may in fact be as low as 7 percent. Both firms focus on the African-American electorate and include bigger samples of Black Americans in their surveys.
Black Trump supporters have received more visibility in the media than their numbers warrant. Nonetheless, one has to admit that the pictures of Black men with MAGA hats screaming their support for the president do make for more interesting story-telling. Indeed, even as we account for the small increase (2 percent to 3 percent) of Black voters who went for Trump, in the key battleground states with significant Black populations such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, African Americans will be shown to have been the reason we can now say “President-elect Biden.” We saved Biden’s candidacy and once again pulled this country back from the precipice of disaster. We are not monolithic but the final numbers will show that there was no major shift of Black voters toward MAGA.
We continue to love this country despite its flaws, and as much as we want to see the union be perfected, the Trump fiasco is not our cross to bear alone. The destruction of American democracy does not rest on our shoulders; saving it has to be a burden that all Americans carry. Nonetheless, as patriots and Democrats, we will continue to stay on the right side of history and do our part to help bend the arc of history toward justice for all people.
Johnny Celestin is a faculty member at the Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs program at the New School University in New York. He was co-president of Ayisyen Pou Biden (Haitians For Biden) a grassroots movement of Haitian Americans who mobilized the Haitian vote for the Biden-Harris ticket.
