(Akiit.com) Sexism is raising its ugly head again and this time it is not just white men who trashed Hillary Clinton in 2016. This time the rumblings are coming from some black men. And their target is U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, the first Afro/Asian woman nominee as vice president on a U.S. major political party ticket. Hopefully, the black male inquisitionists and Sen. Harris will sit down together and work this out.
Right out the box, the mentally challenged Trump, who championed the lie that Barack Obama was unfit to be president because he wasn’t USA born did the same thing to Harris. The Senator was born in Oakland to a mother from India and a father from Jamaica, but Trump began spreading the message that her heritage disqualified her as a vice president designee.
These antics are expected from a White Supremacist president who thinks people of color aren’t fit for much of anything, but a nascent anti-Kamala narrative from black male corridors is troubling. The GOP is bringing out its heaviest artillery to suppress the black vote and a black male problem could be detrimental to the life and death cause of getting rid of Trump.
Remember polls show that black women voted an overwhelmingly 96 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but black men voted up to 13 percent to Trump—the man who called football players kneeling in protest of police brutality SOB’s and black homelands “..itholes.” Perhaps if Trump would just throw a few business crumbs their way it didn’t matter how he was crushing voting rights and killing social programs while fattening the coffers of his billionaire cronies.
Now I hear rumbling that the black male vote could go as high as 15 percent for Trump—a sure sign of self-emasculation—because some feel they are being taken for granted by the Democrats and Harris as VP might even make it worse.
How could they throw gasoline on the GOP fire that is already burning down the house of Black America? I raised this question in complete anguish.
What happens when some black men don’t have a house,” Professor Keith Magee, a London-based social justice scholar responded. “Most of the political rhetoric isn’t about black men who are at the bottom. The Talented Tenth are seated at the table and are not including Booker T. Washington‘s Negroes. These poor and marginalized black men are not included in these high and lofty conversations. Whites, no matter how poor they are, have the privilege of their white skin. No matter who’s elected they wake up white, knowing that they will never be treated as badly as Black men. You don’t see white cops kneeing them to death.”
At the center of the harsh feelings some black men have about Harris started in her pre-Senate era. She was California’s attorney general, as well as district attorney of San Francisco. In those positions she reportedly came down like a hammer on black men, often unfairly prosecuting them too heavy-handed on non-violent offenses, especially marijuana.
If her record is not perfect, I’d like to know which politicians in the last 200 years did dot every i and cross every t. Compared to Trump/Pence who were too disrespectful of blacks to even send a representative to the funeral of our hero Rep. John Lewis or take the police to task for the murder of George Floyd, Biden and Harris still smell like roses in a crowd of skunks.
Some of this disdain toward Sen. Harris simply black male sexism, which is as deep-seated in black culture as white male supremacy is in white circles. In 1760 former slave Richard Allen and his group bolted from St George’s church in Philadelphia because of segregated worship services and launched the first African Methodist Episcopal church. Although the struggle was about racism, the preaching pioneers refused to ordain black women. To this day, several black denominations –as well as white ones–still refuse to ordain women as pastors or preachers, preferring to retain this sexist rigidity by not even allowing women to preach from their pulpits.
In the civil rights movement, many recall the famous lines of SNCC head Stokely Carmichaels that the only place for women in the movement was “prone,” In the August 28 March on Washington there were two lines of civil rights leaders marching on separate streets; one for male civil rights leaders and one for their female counterparts. According to USA TODAY, civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks and Dorothy Height walked down Independence Avenue, while the men proceeded down Pennsylvania with the press.
In 1972, I was in the room with unbossed, unbought New York representative Shirley Chisholm, the first black women to win a seat in congress when she was uppity enough to vie for president as a Democrat. I was there when segregationist-minded black male politicians confronted her and worked against her, of course to no avail.
Lately, we have seen the rise of black women politically 122 Black or multi-racial Black women who filed to run for congressional seats in this year’s election; this figure has increased steadily since 2012, when it was 48, according to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP). Good news but black women are still underrepresented. They are nearly 8% of the U.S. population, but 4.3% of Congress and Sen. Harris is the only black women in the Senate, according to a report here by the Center of Women and Politics. If Democrat Joe Biden becomes president, he has promised a black woman will finally have a seat on the US. Supreme Court
Yet, while some Black male egos seem bruised as they see black women rise, they should remember that most Black women as author Alice Walker proclaimed are not feminists, like most of the white female activists who war against men. Black female leaders emphasize lifting the entire family as they climb, especially wanting the Black males at their side. Also, black women have a history of working tirelessly in the background to help men get elected to political office, before they enter in.
Moreover, Black women are statistically at or near the bottom of the battle in wages—in medium income, fair wages, and asceses to health care. The latest statistics show black men earn 75 percent of what white men earn doing the same work and black women earn 64 percent—meaning both groups suffer from economic racism.
Stephanie Myers, co-founder of Black Women for Biden says, “It would be great for Senator Kamala Harris to hold forums with Black Men for Biden and other Black men, to hear about the issues and concerns of Black men.” She also points out that there are several black male led groups working for Biden-Harris within her organization.
Now is not the time for an argument to drag on about which gender is going to reign if Biden wins. If Trump continues his dictatorial reign, thousands more will die because of his incompetence and malfeasance of COVID 19, our children are being forced back into unsafe schools; the Postal Service has been sabotaged to stop mail-in ballots from arriving on time for the Nov. 3 election.
As Dr. King once warned “we either learn to live together as brothers and sisters or die together as fools.”
Columnist; Dr. Barbara Reynolds
Official website; https://twitter.com/revdrreynolds