It’s the season for Donald Trump to audition for his running mate, and we the public are left guessing who will be the lucky winner.
The political gauntlet was on full display last week when the entire Democratic establishment seemed to rise up to attack Florida Rep. Byron Donald, who has been put on multiple media outlets’ shortlists as President Trump’s running mate.
What did he find offensive? He made comments that sounded to many people, including me, like nostalgia for the bad old days of Jim Crow segregation.
“During the Jim Crow era, black families were one,” Donald said at a Black Republican Party outreach event in Philadelphia last week, according to Politico. “Black people aren’t just becoming more conservative, more black people are voting conservatively because black people have always thought conservatively.”
He also criticized decades of anti-poverty policies under presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, saying they fostered a culture of dependency that many conservatives criticize today.
Unsurprisingly, media coverage of his comments was followed by backlash from allies of President Joe Biden, including the Congressional Black Caucus and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York.
“I found myself being confronted by a so-called leader who made statements that contradict the facts that Black people were better off during the Jim Crow era,” he wrote on Twitter about the scathing comments made on the House floor last Wednesday.
After listing some of the tragic aspects of that era, from lynchings to the suppression of the black vote, he concluded: “How dare you make such ignorant statements?”
Shocking. But was he right? Different ears, through different experiences, will hear what he said.
I’m old enough to remember the last days of Jim Crow as a black kid visiting relatives in the South, and I can tell you, we’re better off now. There’s nothing about the Jim Crow era that would make me want to go back.
But I know that Donald is right to praise the conservative values of family, faith and hard work that enabled black American families to survive and thrive during that era, and to celebrate the dangers of overreliance on government programs.
The jobs and income that come with economic prosperity make this dependency easier to avoid. (A comparison between my generation and my son’s generation immediately brings to mind affordable college tuition.)
While research shows that the racial income gap has narrowed slightly, class disparities across race persist, and I have long called for greater attention to these disparities through policies that recognize the economic hardships we all experience, regardless of race.
Unfortunately, some political leaders see short-term gain in exploiting class conflict and stoking class resentment, rather than working together for mutual benefit.
Our memories have limited influence on the emerging younger electorate, who have their own concerns that veteran politicians must address.
This may help explain why Joe Biden has lost support among young African-Americans, even as New York Times/Siena College polls show that more than 20% of black voters in six key battleground states consistently support Trump.
This is surprising because, according to the Pew Research Center, Trump won just 8% of the national Black vote in 2020 and 6% in 2016. No Republican presidential candidate has won more than 12% of the Black vote in nearly half a century.
Those polls were conducted before Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts, and Democrats are expecting voters to regain their support by November.
On the other hand, it’s encouraging to see both parties actively working to win over the black vote, which I believe is waiting to be revitalized in the post-Obama era. Choice is the essence of democracy, or at least it should be.
Nostalgia is fine if it doesn’t help us address the challenges of today’s world.
Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com
