by Pietro Carignani

In the days following the 2016 general election, as international commentators tried to explain Donald Trump's unexpected victory as U.S. president, analytics agencies began dissecting the composition of the vote. Predictably, African Americans were the racialized group that most opposed the New York billionaire's rise: only 8 percent of Black voters had supported the Republican Party, a derisory percentage when compared to the 46.1 percent garnered by the Grand Old Party over the entirety of voters[1].

The reasons behind this disproportion were not mysterious. A large portion of African Americans had reaffirmed their loyalty to the Democratic Party following the historic election of Barack Obama, the first Black president in U.S. history. For them, voting for Hillary Clinton - the 2016 nominee and Obama's former Secretary of State - felt like a natural choice. At the same time, Trump's rhetoric appeared virtually unacceptable to nonwhite voters: a candidate who made extensive use of racist assumptions, encouraged the use of force by police, and criticized affirmative action policies could not gain too much success in the Black community. However, over the subsequent eight years, something began to change. Slowly but surely, the number of Trump supporters among African Americans increased: the 8 percent in 2016 rose to 12 percent in 2020 and, until a few months ago, had settled at an unexpected 17 percent. Beyond the numbers, the general impression was that the Republican Party, while keeping its political message unchanged, had managed to increase its credibility within a community that had historically been hostile to it[2].

Contrary to what one might think, the closeness between the Democratic Party and the demands of African Americans is relatively recent. It was the Republicans who championed the abolition of slavery, Abraham Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” was a Republican, as were the first Blacks elected to Congress. By contrast, the Democrats had remained on far less progressive positions to the extent that, after the Civil War, they emerged as the dominant political force among white Southerners. This division, which may seem paradoxical today, only changed gradually over several decades: from the early 20th century, the Democratic Party began to embrace more progressive ideas, in a process accomplished only at the dawn of the 1960s. Since then, despite internal frictions and challenges, the Dems have been able to count on a solid electoral base within the African American community, making the alliance between Blacks and the liberal party a common assumption in U.S. politics.

This historical digression is necessary to understand that the political inclinations of African Americans cannot be assumed a priori. Like any other social group, they seek representatives they can feel close to and who propose policies that meet their needs. At the same time, the notion that the Black vote in the United States is monolithic and faceless must be disproven. Although at times they may appear to be a unified bloc, different individuals and communities respond to different stimuli.

Nevertheless, there is a national political discourse for African Americans, and undoubtedly the Democratic Party has managed, over the past century, to present itself as the best option for representing the voice of millions of them. Despite Malcolm X's hope as early as 1964 for a “Black voting bloc” capable of determining the country's political fate has never been realized[3], decades of election results tell us that the vast majority of African Americans vote Democratic, and all indications are that this will be the case again this year.

Thus, we’re far from being able to predict an abandonment of the party by its most loyal base, but the way presidential elections work in the United States, even a small fluctuation could prove decisive.

As is well known, what determines the victory of this or that candidate is often a few tens of thousands of votes, those cast in the so-called “swing states” - that is, those states where, on the eve of Election Day, the margin between the two parties is extremely small. In a balanced environment such as the one that lies ahead next November, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will need to secure these key states to win the White House. It’s within this scenario that the growing investment that the Republican campaign is making to engage the African American community is situated: Trump is fully aware that he can never get a majority of their votes, but he knows that moving a few thousand of them in critical states could be enough to reclaim the presidency.

In some of these swing states, moreover, the Afro-descendant population represents an important portion of the electorate, and has already demonstrated in the past its potential to be decisive. Such is the case in Georgia, among the most populous states in the Old South, which has undergone a profound cultural and demographic transformation in the past decade, shifting from being a Republican stronghold to decreeing a resounding victory for Biden in 2020[4]. In a state where African Americans make up one-third of the population, political forces quickly realized the importance of their vote: this is how we arrived at the 2022 Senate elections, when for the first time in Georgia's history the two major party candidates were two Blacks[5].

Equally important will then be some of the Rust Belt states, the region that was decisive for Trump's victory in 2016 and returned to Democratic hands in 2020. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Black Republicans are attempting to make up lost ground by leveraging distrust of Democrats, a theme that came out forcefully from the last convention in Milwaukee by the mouth of Senator Tim Scott, arguably the most influential Black conservative. 

Finally, in North Carolina, where Dems have won only once in the past four decades, Republicans have nominated Mark Robinson, another name on the rise among African American politicians, for governor. Just weeks before the vote, Robinson ended up at the center of a scandal over a series of racist statements, going so far as to call himself a “black Nazi,” and now he risks jeopardizing his party’s chance in this key state.

In analyzing these cases, it becomes evident a deliberate Republican strategy to win over votes from what should be the Democrats' most solid base. To this end, the increasing number of African American candidates is synonymous with a desire to create a narrative that resonates with citizens. Rather than on their political agenda, Trump and his allies are trying to appropriate a Black identity different from the one invoked by the Democrats, thereby leveraging on the facets of the electorate to break the opposing bloc.

The decline in popularity suffered by Biden in recent months has certainly aided this strategy. The same electoral base that supported the current president in 2020 has gradually distanced itself from his policies, impatient with his many broken promises. At the same time, Biden faced an image problem: his profile as a normalizer suddenly seemed inadequate, damaged by the signs of age and no longer able to inspire confidence in his party.

His retirement, however, and the subsequent candidacy of Kamala Harris, have reversed this trend: suddenly the Democrats are presenting a Black politician at the top of the ticket who is young and seemingly a break from the last decade of American politics. This turn seems to have surprised the Republican establishment; Trump himself showed difficulty in handling the challenge posed by Harris, and to compensate he has raised his game. In the weeks since Biden's retirement, the tycoon has presented himself as “the best president for the black population since Abraham Lincoln”[6], has claimed a closeness to African Americans due to his judicial record[7], and he even went so far as to question Harris's blackness by accusing her of “happen[ing] to turn black”[8]. The feeling is that this change of direction blew his strategy, and with it many of the votes he expected to receive from African Americans.

Relying exclusively on identity-based politics has hurt the Democratic Party, leading to alienating the sympathies of part of the Black community; however, the Republicans' choice to focus on an identity strategy also seems to have backfired on them. In this sense, the continued manipulation of the electorate seems to have made them lose sight of the imperative to listen and respond to the needs of a political subject. Regardless of who wins in November, this will be the challenge for those who wish to engage with the African American electorate in the years to come. 

Notes:

[1] https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2016

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-race-ethnicity-and-education/

[3] Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet, Cleveland (OH), April 3rd, 1964. 

[4] Perry Bacon jr., How Georgia Turned Blue, FiveThirtyEight, November 20, 2020, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-georgia-turned-blue/.

[5]  Zac Cheney-Rice, The Future of Black Politics Is at Stake in Georgia, Intelligencer, October 26, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/raphael-warnock-herschel-walker-black-politics-future.html.

[6] Jessica A. Botelho, Trump Says He Is the ‘best president for black people’ Since Abraham Lincoln, NBC Montana, August 1st, 2024, https://www.nbcmontana.com/news/beyond-the-podium/i-love-the-black-population-of-this-country-trump-says-to-open-national-association-of-black-journalists-convention-2024-presidential-election-joe-biden-kamala-harris-race-hispanic-white-politics.

[7] Lalee Ibssa, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Soo Rin Kim, Trump Claims Black Americans Relate To His Criminal Prosecutions, ABC News, February 24, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-claims-black-americans-relate-criminal-prosecutions/story?id=107509919.

[8] Eric Bradner, Aaron Pellish, Donald Trump Falsely Suggests Kamala Harris ‘happened to turn black’, CNN, July 31, 2024.

by Gabriel Seroussi

In just under two weeks, between the end of April and the beginning of May 2024, the public image of Drake, one of the most influential and richest artists of the last fifteen years, was torn down by his fellow artist Kendrick Lamar. In a diss that will go down in the history of the genre, the song that stood out was “Not Like Us”, the track which gave Lamar the victory beyond any reasonable doubt. A full-blown culture clash took place between the two, the implications of which go far beyond music. In fact, Kendrick accused Drake of appropriating the culture of the black community. Drake is allegedly “guilty” of being Canadian, half-Jewish and from a wealthy family. All facets of a complex identity which distances him from the history with a capital “H” of African-Americans, which would instead belong to Kendrick Lamar, born and raised in the legendary Compton County, Los Angeles. A rhetoric similar to that used to delegitimize Drake’s Black identity, is now being deployed against Kamala Harris. Within weeks of the release of “Not Like Us”, former President Trump claimed at the National Association of Black Journalists rally  that Kamala Harris was «Indian» «until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black». His running mate, Senator JD Vance, accused Harris of being «phoney», «grown up in Canada» and using «a fake southern accent» during a speech.

Beyond the inconsistency of these statements, it is interesting to note how attentive Trump and his team are to the internal debates within the Black community, in order to gain political advantage from them. A similar case, again related to rap, is that of Young Thug, the legendary Atlanta rapper who is currently on trial in Georgia for gang-related offences. Trump, who is under investigation in that very state for trying to overturn the vote in the 2020 elections, didn’t miss the opportunity to campaign for Thug’s freedom. During a live chat with streamer and influencer Adin Ross, the former President stated he had learned that prosecutor Fani Willis had «unfairly treated» the rapper. Trump’s attempt to attract the vote of a section of the Black community is surprising up to a point. The New York businessman has been playing with rap since forever, well before the beginning of his political activity.

In December 1999, journalist Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article for Vibe Magazine exploring the complex relationship between rap and Trump, moving from his attendance at hip hop mogul Puff Daddy’s birthday party. Among superstars and strippers, at New York’s Cipriani Club there was also the future President, who swaggered to the author about introducing the birthday boy to Hampton high society. «Sean said he wanted me to sit with him», Trump said proudly. «Trump is respected by people in hip-hop because he’s not a corporate guy. He’s a self-made entrepreneur, and that’s key to the hip hop mentality. They respect him for being a “fuck you hero”» - Nelson George, author of Hip Hop America, told to the journalist. That Trump is a self-made man could be debated at length, but it is indisputable that this is the perception of himself that he has cleverly presented to the outside world.

For many, the Tycoon embodies the figure of the hustler, a man who has managed to enrich himself in American society through hard work. This figure also plays a key role in American rap rhetoric. In fact, it could be said that “being a hustler” has been the Black community’s way of reinterpreting the American Dream. Lester Spence extensively discussed this in his book Knock the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. According to the author, this mentality can be attributed to the neoliberal turn that the American economy took from the 1980s onwards. A section of the community, impoverished and without any valid political leadership, embraced the brutality of American capitalism, developing its own philosophy for living within such a system. African Americans thus had to start thinking of themselves in entrepreneurial terms[1]: hence the figure of the hustler and the - almost philosophical - concept of hustlin’ were born. Rap has played a key role in interpreting, spreading and, somehow, inflating this idea, and indeed many rappers have quoted Trump as a positive figure in their songs. It doesn’t matter, then, that the Tycoon inherited his real estate empire from his father and grew it through discriminatory policies - so much so that he was indicted, yet in 1977, for applying racist strategies in housing sector - or that in 1989 he subsidised a media campaign in favour of the death penalty for the “Central Park Five” - a group of black boys unfairly accused of raping a girl in New York. Trump is a hustler, embodying some of the values that many rappers are ambassadors for, and that’s enough to make him the star of many iconic bars. «Rae’s a heavy generator/ but yo, guess who’s the black Trump», Raekwon raps in his Incarcerated Surfaces.

With Trump’s election in 2016, the relationship between him and rap got complicated, although for some the fascination with this figure has remained unchanged or, even, taken on new nuances. In fact, even if the bulk of the rap scene has openly come out against Trump’s candidacy, there were more than a few rappers who had openly supported him over the years. In its own way, the picture of Kanye West with the former president in the Oval Office remains historic, but also Ice Cube - to keep with hip hop legends - made explicit endorsements to Trump in a recent interview to Fox News. The cases of Lil Wayne and Kodak Black are emblematic, with the two rappers expressing their support for the former President and receiving a pardon in return shortly before the end of his term. Thanks to this choice, Trump also won the support of the new American rap queen Sexyy Red: «They thought he was racist, saying little s–t against women. But once he started getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money…».

In the last few months, the Republican leader has then stepped up his efforts to associate himself with an imagery connected to rap, using deeply racist stereotypes. An emblematic example is Trump’s famous mug shot, taken after his arrest on August 24, 2023, which has become a valuable resource for political propaganda. This picture has contributed to the construction of a narrative in which the former President appears as a victim of justice, simultaneously generating a myriad of memes and montages on social media which portray him as a “gangsta”. In this perspective, it cannot be surprising that surviving an assassination attempt has fed a distorted idea of Donald Trump, making him a victim to empathise with or, worse, a model to identify with. Shortly after the attack, a meme appeared on social media depicting him as 50 Cent in the famous Get Rich or Die Tryin’ cover. Released in 2003, the album tells the rapper’s extraordinary story, marked by an assassination attempt on May 24, 2000, that he miraculously survived, despite being shot nine times in the torso and face. Trump and his supporters did not limit themselves to share the meme on social media - as 50 Cent himself did -, but also turned Many Men, the song in which the rapper tells about the shooting he was involved in, into a sort of campaign anthem. The former President himself used it for his triumphant entrance at the Milwaukee arena during the Republican convention.

It would therefore be shallow to portray the relationship between some rappers and Trump merely as a relationship between some millionaires and the candidate who most strives for defending the wealth of the super-rich. The story of the relationship between Trump and rappers has ancient roots and has to do with the most controversial - and to some extent fascinating - aspects of this culture. It is hard to say how much this relationship has fed the Republican candidate’s still-minority growth in the Black community. Certainly, there is a lot more under memes’ irony. As Barack Obama himself said at the Democratic National Convention last August: underestimating Trump and his political acumen is a big mistake.

Notes:

[1] The author is not suggesting that forms of black entrepreneurship did not exist before. The idea of building an economy that would allow the “black dollar” to roll in was a political prerogative of many community-based organisations. In the 1980s, however, this collective, or at least solidarity-based, notion of the economy increasingly faded and was replaced by a more individualistic conception that saw personal enrichment as an existential goal.

by Mattia Marzà

The temptation to read the United States as an all-too-familiar context, progressing along the same paths of evolution and tension as Europe - in short, to read the West as a unique, if detailed, experience - is very strong, amplified by decades of cultural production and imagery; yet, often things are not only more complex than they appear at first glance, but are even the opposite. Suffice it to say that, to a European, the term “red stronghold” in electoral and political terms refers to a certain leftist tradition; while in the United States, the same term describes a Republican fiefdom. Between Emilia-Romagna and Carolina lies not only an ocean, but a universe of meanings hidden among the folds of language.

In addition to clarifying the different attributions of meaning, to investigate among these folds means, first of all, giving depth to watchwords and performative recurrences, which, rather than reflecting a meaning, create and impose it. While the Democratic Party has recently had a good run at making allegations of populism against its Republican rivals, essentially accusing them of employing a rather vague, cheap rhetoric to speak to the electorate's gut, it is worth noting that such remarks were first directed at Barack Obama himself. Indeed, his “yes, we can” motto and his emphasis on the theme of change served not only as a rhetorical glue but also as an effective form of concealment of an ideologically vague political program. Similarly, in spite of the - almost formulaic - accusations of communism, the Democrats’ political agenda over the last two decades has been, to say the least, moderate on social issues, if not to all intents and purposes right-wing[1].

Of course, these impositions of meaning are not limited to attempts to attach a derogatory label to one's competitor; rather, they find their most authentic and relevant dimension in efforts to naturalize and historicize trends and decisions in order to legitimize them. With the end of industrial society, the traditional gender divide in the Western electorate has reversed: if before, the left's emphasis on the working class (embodied by the male breadwinner figure) and the right's ideological aggregation around religious and traditional themes meant that, on average, men would vote left and women right, with the advent of post-industrial society and the collapse of twentieth-century identities a reversal occurred, mirroring the average shift by which the various political formations had attempted to find new recomposition factors (nostalgic pessimism on the right, and a focus on race/gender identities on the left). The United States, however, represents a partial anomaly: both because of the absence of pre-industrial conceptions of social hierarchy (crucial in delineating twentieth-century European conceptions), the massive waves of immigration, and, above all, the centrality of the race issue in the U.S. political genealogy[2].

The combination of the respective parties' propagandas and, in our latitudes, the misleading juxtaposition of the Democrat-Republican binomial and the Left-Right binomial in European terms has overshadowed the fact that, until the 1960s, it was the former that represented the segregationist and white supremacist electorate. Rather than an ideological class division, in fact, American party dualism reflects, with due evolution, the Civil War opposition: South versus North, protectionism versus liberalism, metropolitan industrial interests versus those of the agricultural proletariat. The combination of these factors and the resentment felt by the South in the Reconstruction era produced widespread Democratic support in the region, which then translated into the political clout of the Southern chapters within the national party, at the expense of the progressive and more traditionally left-wing instances of the Northern and Western Democrats.

The first Southern-born president elected after the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson, combined his efforts in the international arena - aimed at creating the League of Nations and the political ratification of the United States' new role as a global superpower - with a domestic policy that highly supported racial segregation. As much as it is not definitively proven that Wilson gave rave reviews of Birth of a Nation, Griffith's infamous kolossal that can be described as a long, muted apologia for the KKK, it is nevertheless in apocryphal histories that we can often find the most accurate judgment of political trends and the spirit of an era.

To emphasize how this tendency was expressed from the highest to the lowest levels of governance, the large majority of the opponents to the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement - to name but one, W.A. Gayle, mayor of Montgomery during the bus boycott - belonged to the Democratic Party. It must be stressed, however, that the narrative that the South was a compact bloc, united both electorally and politically around a monolithic and cohesive Democratic Party, is equally inaccurate. As Devin Caughey well points out[3], once in Washington, Southern representatives did not follow a rock-hard line, but rather vacillated between the positions and the party that best represented the specific interests of their constituency; instead, they coagulated when it came to defending white interests, whether through direct enactment of legislation or fierce opposition and all-out stonewalling.

It was only with Kennedy’s presidency, then Johnson’s, that the Democratic Party started to support desegregation more and more openly, thus resulting in the migration of a large Southern voting bloc to the Republican Party. This new scenario gradually stabilized and radicalized, leading to the current configuration, further mutated and complexified by the Trump asteroid. Moreover, the ideological change of pace corresponded to a shift in the racial and religious composition of the donkey party, in which the minorities and the denominations less related to whiteness (Black churches, but also Jews and Catholics) increasingly gained space and visibility; so much so that the only two non-wasp Presidents, i.e. Kennedy and Obama, both belonged to the Democratic Party. However, the complex nuances of  systemic racism cannot be reduced to a “party issue” that draws a clear and simplistic dividing line between supporters and opposers of segregation. Segregationist policies were also supported by Republican Presidents such as T. Roosevelt, and if, on the one hand, the Republican anti-slavery drives were index of a political and economic strategy, rather than an ethical afflatus, the Democratic progressive turn of the 1960s derived primarily from the need to pacify an internal colonial front in order to better face the external one, then concretized in the Vietnam War. This progressive turn accompanied, in a perfectly coherent way, the repressive policies and the targeted assassinations of the leading exponents of the Black Panther Party.

This shift in the historical positions of the respective parties and the emergence of the post-industrial society, where the culture wars essentially have taken over the narrative and political role previously played by the class war, has determined the current scenario. However, even when it comes to inclusion and affirmation politics, historical developments aren't as linear and immediate as one might think. Although the first woman to be included on a roster for the Presidential elections was Democrat Geraldine Ferraro, who was on Walter Mondale’s ticket in the disastrous 1984 campaign, the first to play an effective leading role was Sarah Palin, who ran as John McCain’s deputy in the 2008 election. This relevance was gained partly by the intransigency of her positions, openly conservative and to some extent anticipating the future rightward shift of the Republican Party (indeed, Palin was one of the founders of the Tea Party movement), partly with her over-the-top attitude and a certain (studied?) clumsiness and spontaneity, which made her a kind of ante litteram meme. But the former Governor of Alaska is a complex and multifaceted figure: despite the historically pro-life positions of a wide sector of her party - which, incidentally, she shares - not only did she not enact any anti-abortion legislation during her tenure in the Last Frontier, but in 2006 she had spoken in favor of upholding the Roe vs. Wade, the landmark decision that enshrined the federal right to abortion in the United States, then overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022[4]. In conclusion, as a female politician does not necessarily make a government progressive on gender issues, the former vice-presidential candidate is something more than just a caricature eager to hunt moose and polar bears.

In a domestic political landscape increasingly focused on identity issues, at once the bogeyman and new weapon of the Republican Party, and the fundamental ideological battle of the left-wing electorate, which is, however, timidly beginning to perceive its limits, and in a global context of war, Kamala Harris has the challenge of reworking and re-actualising this political and ideological history of which she is the latest, current front-woman. In this sense, her decision to reiterate her support for pro-gun policies, as a proud gun owner herself[5], is emblematic. Rather than confirming the transversal dimension of this support, which is shared by both parties, it is interesting to recall that, although the possibility of owning firearms is often celebrated as characteristically and ancestrally American, it is in fact a rather recent phenomenon, mainly dating from the 20th Century. The towns of the Far West - whose myth, especially in film, was also intended to naturalize and historicise this trend - had much stricter gun control policies than today[6]. After all, it is in the linearity of the exposure that the folds of language are nested.

Notes:

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/

[2] Colin Crouch, Post-democracy - After the Crisis, Polity Press, Cambridge 2020.

[3] Devin Caughey, The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford 2018.

[4] «The law of the land is the law of the land. When we talk about abortion, we can't sign anything that takes away authority from the United States Supreme Court, that has made the ruling on abortion», in M. Simon, 11 days abortion, ktva.com, October 30, 2006. Such a statement, all in all moderate and "institutional", clashes conspicuously with the distrust of existing institutions and legal and electoral mechanisms repeatedly expressed by Trump, and is a faithful reflection of a different and earlier political era.

[5] “This business about taking everyone's guns away. [Gov.] Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We're not taking anybody's guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff”.

[6] Matt Jancer, Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West, Smithsonian Magazine, February 5, 2018.

Crouch, C., 2005. Combattere la Postdemocrazia, traduzione di Marco Cupellaro, Laterza.

Caughey, D., 2018. The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave. Princeton University Press.

George, N., 2005. Hip hop america. Penguin.

Malcolm, X., Baldwin, J. and McCummins, L., 1987. The ballot or the bullet. Paul Winley Records.

Spence, L.K., 2015. Knocking the hustle: Against the neoliberal turn in black politics. Punctum Books.

Bacon jr. Perry, How Georgia Turned Blue, FiveThirtyEight, November 20, 2020, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-georgia-turned-blue/

Botelho Jessica A., Trump Says He Is the ‘best president for black people’ Since Abraham Lincoln, NBC Montana, August 1st, 2024, https://www.nbcmontana.com/news/beyond-the-podium/i-love-the-black-population-of-this-country-trump-says-to-open-national-association-of-black-journalists-convention-2024-presidential-election-joe-biden-kamala-harris-race-hispanic-white-politics.

Bradner Eric, Aaron Pellish, Donald Trump Falsely Suggests Kamala Harris ‘happened to turn black’, CNN, July 31, 2024.

Cheney-Rice Zac, The Future of Black Politics Is at Stake in Georgia, Intelligencer, October 26, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/raphael-warnock-herschel-walker-black-politics-future.html.

Ibssa Lalee, Abdul-Hakim Gabriella, Rin Kim Soo, Trump Claims Black Americans Relate To His Criminal Prosecutions, ABC News, February 24, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-claims-black-americans-relate-criminal-prosecutions/story?id=107509919.

Jancer Matt, Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 febbraio 2018.