Where does trust come from?
I’m a historian, so I don’t know the ins and outs of political science. Forgive me (aka send me essays and papers and things) if I’m musing about something ultra basic.
Yesterday, Bakari Sellers tweeted that criticism of Joe Biden wouldn’t fly with black voters in South Carolina because they trust him. I understand the popularity and electability arguments, but the trust argument is one that I haven’t quite understood. I always thought that trust was something hard to come by in black politics. That the more relevant question was which candidate made the most sense strategically or pragmatically, in terms of being most likely to deliver on issues of concern to the community.
Buzzfeed News’s Darren Sands shared an article which reminded how black voters stuck with Biden during his 1988 presidential campaign, despite opposition from Jesse Jackson who’d been one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s top aides. Jackson ran on a platform of racial and economic justice, while Biden framed equality as colorblindness and transcendence:
“Americans — black Americans, white Americans — in each of these cases brought to life the promise of America by choosing excellence and competence over race,” Biden said. “These Americans are saying that their cause is our cause and ours is theirs. For this is the moral issue that goes to the core of our soul as a nation. And it’s quite frankly bigger than anyone’s political ambitions. It’s bigger than any personal agenda, and it’s bigger than any presidential campaign.”
The speech established Biden as a mainstream Democrat who would not capitulate to Jackson or the left but at times also burnished some liberal credentials. He railed against “right-wingers” and spoke approvingly of the recently scuttled nomination of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. (The future attorney general in the Trump administration had faced accusations of racism, including disparaging comments about Biden’s host that day, the NAACP.)
Biden also presented himself as someone willing to speak frankly to the black community and alluded to his longtime opposition to busing as a means to desegregate schools.
“The bitter but honest truth is that for a decade, our cause has been stalling,” he said early in his remarks. “And we all know in our hearts that we’ve made some mistakes. For when our priorities were access, accommodation, education, and voting, we triumphed. All America stood with us. However, in the last decade we allowed the agenda to drift from these goals. Busing and quotas became the priorities, and our enemies on the right used the initiatives to regain the initiative. To the nation, they cast the civil rights debate in terms of black children being able to move ahead only if white children were forced to slide behind.”
Archived video from C-SPAN shows Biden received at least a partial standing ovation at the end of his 40-minute speech.
“Give our senator another great big hand,” Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, said before repeating Biden’s last line: “Our time has come.”
These are patronizing and paternalistic politics. The very kind that MLK was talking about when he criticized white moderates as those who constantly said they agreed with black people in their goals of freedom but not their methods, and harbored a shallow understanding of the movement. Biden’s focus then, as it is now, was on building consensus rather than achieving justice and reparation. It wasn’t just about unity, but a right-ward shifting unity. Do black voters deem candidates who champion integration/assimilation to be more trustworthy than those who champion transformation? From the Associated Press:
After Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden’s past opposition to school busing in a nationally televised Democratic presidential debate, the former vice president who prides himself on strong relationships in the black community was in an unfamiliar place, playing defense on race.
But Bebe Coker had a message for the man she’s known for decades: don’t back down. The 81-year-old education activist remembered the history differently than Harris’ portrayal, recalling black parents encouraging Biden to reject forcing black students to attend white schools.
“I told him not to back down off of that,” Coker, who is black, said in an interview. “I know Joe’s heart. I guess that’s why I’m rather defensive of him. Joe has always been straight-up Joe. But when things come back at people that don’t look like us, they will say it’s racist because it doesn’t sound right when it’s coming out of somebody else’s mouth.”
So, what does it mean to know someone’s heart in the context of electoral politics? I guess it always comes down to who meets the most people:
People who have known Biden for decades speak to the depth of good will he has among black voters. They talk of Biden as someone who has known and courted black voters for more than a half century. That, they say, could make it difficult for other candidates who hope to persuade some black voters to change their minds.
