Black men should embrace their role as political homewreckers

The most confident prediction I can make about this upcoming election is that black men who don’t vocally support Vice President Kamala Harris will be treated with the same contempt as the 53% of white women who voted for President Trump in 2016. The attacks have already begun. MSNBC host Joy Reid recently claimed that black men with traditional values are “white-adjacent.” Social media is rife with stern warnings to black men who don’t fall in line. This type of public slander is not new.

In 2020, Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper called black men voting for Trump “traitorous MFs.” One Democratic candidate for Congress said one in five black men voted for Trump because “they hate black women.” Black men voting Republican have been characterized as politically unsophisticated race traitors who just want access to the power and privilege of their white counterparts.

The unholy matrimony between black feminists and white liberals makes efforts to strengthen the black family difficult because both groups minimize the role a man is meant to play in the home.

Some people fear this type of rhetoric will intensify if the election doesn’t go the way Democrats hope. I have a different perspective. I see it as an opportunity to accelerate a needed divorce between radical black feminists and the party they’ve been married to for more than 50 years.

To progressives, allegiance to the party is far more important than peace in the home. Democrats want white women to rebel politically against their husbands, but the left expects black men to submit to black women and follow their lead in the voting booth. One reason black feminists feel comfortable publicly slandering rebellious black men is directly related to the decline of the black family over half a century.

Among adults who are 18 and over, 63% of Asians, 57% of whites, 48% of Hispanics, and 33% of blacks are married. Likewise, married couples only constitute 28% of all black households, compared to a national average of 47%. This marriage void has been filled by the union between black feminists and white liberals that powers the modern left. The forces of feminism and big government paternalism erode the foundation of the family by sowing discord between the sexes and encouraging women to treat politicians like pseudo-husbands.

Black women were Joe Biden’s strongest supporters. And even as other progressives were calling for him to withdraw from the election, they were determined to stand by their man. The same black women who typically claim that straight white men are the biggest threat to progress in America fought for Joe Biden with every fiber of their being.

This “entanglement” just got a little more complicated now that Kamala Harris is the party’s presumptive nominee for president. The pressure campaign to increase black turnout support will be intense. Black men who don’t vote for her should expect to be viciously attacked in the public square.

The connection between sex, family structure, and political engagement is quite clear. Men in every ethnic group vote more conservatively than their female peers. Likewise, married adults vote more conservatively than their unmarried counterparts. It’s easy to see why. There is no more conservative institution than the nuclear family. It is built on the foundation of marriage, which itself represents a lifelong commitment between one man and one woman. For most married couples, this commitment extends to any children that are birthed within that union.

Fathers have traditionally been responsible for leading, protecting, and providing for their families. Mothers have traditionally been responsible for nurturing the children and caring for the home. Every family has its issues, but everyone in the household benefits when Mom and Dad prioritize the family over anything outside their four walls. The notion that a woman should be more loyal to a political ideology or party than to her husband is an outgrowth of feminist indoctrination meant to free women from “oppressive” patriarchs lording over the home.

Since the 1960s, the government has made it possible for millions of women to “marry” Uncle Sam in exchange for food, shelter, and other basic needs — a new family structure targeted specifically at the black community. In this political love triangle, the government becomes the new patriarch, black women play the role of loyal partner, and black men are treated like teenage sons – old enough to have some independence but still under the rule of Mom and stepdad.

This dynamic has evolved in recent decades as women have attained higher levels of education and greater financial independence. The left has adjusted by tweaking its patronage scheme to highlight influential appointments for black women, including Kamala Harris as vice president and Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The unholy matrimony between black feminists and white liberals makes efforts to strengthen the black family difficult because both groups minimize the role a man is meant to play in the home. The reason so many black women in the media are critical of white women who follow their husbands' lead in the political sphere is because male headship is a foreign concept in any community where marriage is no longer a cultural norm.

I would much rather hear words like “loyalty” and “protection” be used in the context of marriage and family, not in reference to a political party and candidate. This is the challenge facing black America today. Politics play an outsized role in our public discourse and hopes for upward mobility. Any plans to create generational wealth are pointless if fealty to one party is considered a more important sign of unity than a man marrying a woman before giving her a baby.

The phrase “till death do us part” is meant for the marital union, not Uncle Sam. It’s time for black men to get comfortable playing the role of homewrecker.