‘Where You Been, Homie?’: Black Men Blast Obama for ‘Insulting’ Their Intelligence

By Wendell Husebø

Some members of the black community appear unhappy that former President Barack Obama just showed up on the campaign trail to scold them about Vice President Kamala Harris’s waning support.

• Obama emerged on the campaign trail last week after polling showed Harris performing poorly among the black community.

  Nationwide polling shows Harris has about 12-15 percent less black voter support than Biden in 2020. Black voters appear to be trending toward leaving the Democrat party. From 2018 to 2022, the Republican share of the black vote jumped from nine percent to 13 percent.

  Obama was direct in his remarks last week to the black community, and in particular to black men, who are failing to support Harris with the numbers they utilized to support President Joe Biden. Among black men, only 80 percent support Harris, a Washington Post/Ipsos poll recently found, while a NAACP poll found one in four under the age of 50 showed support for Trump.

  “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities, as we saw when I was running,” Obama black male Harris supporters in Pennsylvania. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and reasons for that.”

  Obama’s comment struck some as pandering.

  “These are people who should have been easy for Harris,” a Georgia labor organizer and former Atlanta City Council candidate, Ken Wainwright, said of black men while speaking with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And now Obama is mad. Where you been, homie?”

  Trump’s increased support among the black community has rung the alarm bells for the Harris campaign. On Monday, it published an “Agenda for Black Men.” That agenda included legalizing marijuana, a new loan program, preferred banking options for entrepreneurs, preferred apprenticeship and mentorship programs, and preferred expanded health screenings.

  “Marijuana? That’s just disrespectful,” Wainwright said. “We’re fathers. We live in these communities. We want to get kids off that stuff.”

  The Harris campaign walked back the proposal of Wednesday. It will no longer exclusively target the black community.

  “President Obama’s recent call for Black men to support Kamala Harris based solely on her skin color, rather than her policies, is deeply insulting, wrote Reps. Byron Donalds (R-FL), Wesley Hunt (R-TX), and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. “It’s demeaning to suggest that we can’t evaluate a candidate’s track record — especially when Kamala Harris has done more harm than good to Black communities.”

  A part of Trump’s campaign message to black voters is the justice system’s select weaponization against him. Citing the legal discrimination against the black community historically, Trump believes some black voters might relate to Biden’s weaponization of justice against him.

  “A lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against,” Trump told a black audience in South Carolina last week.