Black men search for political home
NEW YORK — For Phillip Agnew, engaging Black male voters ahead of the general election isn’t just about persuading them to choose former Vice President Joe Biden over incumbent Donald Trump.
As an activist and organizer who gained acclaim after leading protests in Florida over the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Agnew sees an opportunity to keep the 14.4 million Black men of voting age politically engaged well beyond 2020.
That effort begins with keeping it real about this year’s candidates. Trump’s positions on race and Biden’s decades-old controversial record on criminal justice make neither candidate particularly attractive to Black men.
“You don’t lie, you acknowledge the truth, and admit that the choices before Black people in the year 2020 are abysmal,” said Agnew, an organizer with Black Men Build, a group created to empower Black men.
His group has paid to run targeted ads on TV and music-streaming services such as Hulu and Spotify, supplemented by mailers and organizers on the ground. The message is geared toward Black men who feel politically homeless.
“We are not choosing a champion, we are choosing an opponent,” Agnew said, adding that he is also telling Black men that “a Biden presidency allows for terrain to organize under that is more favorable.”
Following an unprecedented surge of protests against racial injustice and the killing of Black people by law enforcement, partisan and nonpartisan organizations have poured significant resources into increasing Black men’s participation in the election.
And they’re doing so with an acknowledgement that no major political party can lay claim to being a consistently loyal advocate for Black men and women. Whoever comes out ahead among Black men, advocates say, will have succeeded in reaching more of those who are apathetic or feel politically left out.
Iraq War veteran Leo Dunson is a 35-year-old Black conservative activist and former Democrat who feels both parties have forgotten Black men. Dunson said he’s not planning on voting for Biden or Trump, and is disappointed with how both major parties handled providing relief for Black Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.
Black men “would be job creators too, if you gave us $100 million,” he said, criticizing the relief funding that went mostly to large, white-owned corporations.
In a political party, Dunson said he now wants “to find something that is going to work for us.”
There’s evidence that get-out-the-vote campaigns targeting Black men have worked. As of Wednesday, more than 67.1 million votes had been cast in the 2020 general election, with Black voters making up about 9% of that total — a proportion that is similar to the number of registered voters who are Black.
And 39% of those votes were by Black men — a similar gender breakdown to numbers reported in the 2016 general election. Turnout has been boosted by traditional grassroots organizing within venues like Black churches, where “souls to the polls” campaigns have stressed voting early, in-person or absentee.