Obama touches raw nerve of Black voters

Former US President Barack Obama, and the first Black to have held the highest executive post, expressed frankly his apprehension that Black men are not fully supportive of Democrat candidate Kamala Harris. He shared with campaign volunteers his sense that Black men have second thoughts on a woman president.

The general assumption is that Harris enjoys the support of Blacks, Latinos, Asian communities and middle class white Americans, the traditional Democrat voter base. Though Harris is leading Trump by three percentage points in many of the surveys, many political observers feel that it is a close race, and everything depends on swing states like Pennsylvania. It is then to the field workers of the Harris campaign in Pittsburgh that Obama said, “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as a president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that. “

Obama said that there is not the energy in the Harris campaign he saw in that of his own in 2008. Surprisingly, co-founder and executive director of Win With Black Men, Khalil Thompson, said he agreed with Obama. He said, “I believe President Obama is speaking to a tangible, visceral understanding of what it means for all men to relate to women in America. Calling out misogyny is not wrong.”

This reveals an interesting social and psychological issue. The first is whether Americans in general are willing to accept a woman as the president of the country. America might be the most advanced democracy in the world in many respects but when it comes to the issue of gender, the sensitivity of the American male is quite far behind that of many other countries, especially Asian.

There is a tacit, white male assumption that a woman at the head of the table is a still a hard fact to accept. Of course, there are conscious attempts made by the American corporations to have more women in the boardroom and also as the CEOs. But it has not yet become the norm.

Kamala Harris is the first woman Vice President in America. And it will be quite a leap of imagination on the part of the American people for her to become the president of the country. What might catapult her to the top post is the fact that Republican candidate Donald Trump is quite brazen about his authoritarian style of functioning. He makes no attempt to hide it or even rationalise it. And many Americans do feel that in the Trump way lies anarchy.

There is also the social psychological fact that the American Black male ego is much more fragile and brittle because of the racial discrimination he experiences at every turn, especially when the American Black male happens to come from the lower income bracket, and he is an unjustified suspect in the eyes of the police in every American city. And this becomes a hurdle for the American Black male to accept woman as a leader. Obama seems to have sensed it and he spoke out against it. It might seem odd indeed to distinguish between male and female among the Blacks, but as Khalil Thompson has pointed out it is “tangible, visceral”.

The question arises as to whether speaking out about the underlying fault-line of the Black mind, Obama has harmed or helped the Harris campaign. But Obama knows that his candour is one of his charming aspects of personality, and he hopes that he will persuade the fence-sitters among the Black men to go out and vote for Harris, and also gather more support for Harris among Black men.