I Am a Black Man. Alarming Signs for Kamala Harris in North Carolina
The news spread quickly. It was the subject of most conversations at Songo’o, the traditional game men used to play during my childhood. I heard my mother, my aunts and the neighbors talking about it. Everyone had their own opinion. The chief of Fanta Citron, our neighborhood, the slum where I grew up in Mvog Ada, Yaoundé in Cameroon, wanted to retire. Papa Ndoumou, as we children called him, was looking for a successor. Unlike in villages where succession was linked to a bloodline, here, in the city, the chiefs were chosen by the adults of the neighborhood. They had huge powers. They were moral authorities. The title also came with perks, such as free beers when they went to one of the neighborhood bars.
A virtual list of potential successors to Papa Ndoumou immediately appeared. It consisted mainly of men. The bets were on. At Songo’o, the men of the neighborhood discussed the strengths of the candidates. Listening to my mother and auntie Blandine, there was no favorite. Among the names circulating, there was that of a woman, one of the oldest in the neighborhood.
“She has no chance,” Uncle Etoundi stated, to the laughter of the other Songo’o players. He didn’t even feel the need to explain why.
From their reaction, the others seemed to agree with him. There was a sort of silent understanding between them. They knew they held the key to the chiefhood.
“She has the wisdom one expects from a leader. She is patient and fair,” I remember hearing auntie Blandine saying one late afternoon, as the women were watching auntie Bébé finish putting the peanut paste in the Ntegue, a traditional dish.
“Sister, don’t forget that she has already seen a lot in this life,” added auntie Nnomo. She meant that the elder had a lot of experience.
More than their words, it was the resigned tone of my aunts that clearly indicated what they thought: the eldest had no chance.
“Sister, stop with the nonsense,” interrupted auntie Bébé, who had a reputation of lacking diplomacy and tact. Her directness often got her excluded from the secrets her sisters and other women in the neighborhood shared. It was known that to really find out the inside story of a situation, one had to ask auntie Bébé, because she didn’t sugarcoat it. She ignored social conventions. She didn’t stroke egos.
“You think these men are going to anoint her in such a visible position? Let her be the face of the neighborhood?” she rhetorically asked with sarcasm. “They won’t let a woman be their leader. It’s not going to happen and we all know it. So, stop telling us that the ‘Doyenne’ is wise. We all know she is wise. But look at them over there,” she added, pointing in the direction where the men were playing Songo’o. “They don’t even talk about her. Let’s move on.”
As often in these moments of raw truth, my mother and the rest of my aunts looked at each other, wondering why they had brought up such a delicate subject in front of their little sister. In my mother’s tribe there was a popular saying, that you have to roll something in your mouth at least ten times before you spit it out. Basically, not all truths are good to say.
As I listened to Damnit Wesley, a multi-faceted artist and an important voice in the Black art scene and Black community in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the first leg of my visit to the four swing states with a large Black population, in this final month of the 2024 presidential campaign, it is the image of auntie Bébé that comes to mind.
Born Jimi Thompson, Damnit, 38, is a visual and performing artist. His art has always talked about blackness and racism. BlkMrkt CLT , the art gallery and studio he co-owns in Charlotte, since 2017, with photographer Will Jenkins, is a platform for artists of color. It showcases their work. In 2020, for example, the gallery presented work by primarily women of color.
The same year, when Kamala Harris was picked by Joe Biden as his running mate, Damnit drew a design using a picture of a young Harris with a pair of oversized handcuffs laid down behind her head. The design was accompanied by a message, with a slang word, that read “finna lock his ass up.”
Damnit, who cofounded Durag Fest, a festival which celebrates Black culture in Charlotte, said, at the time, that her background as a District Attorney would lead to Trump being arrested. Last May, the former president became the first American president to be convicted of felony crimes in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election.
Those are the many reasons I wanted to talk to Damnit, to understand whether North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes can go to Harris on November 5, as the polls suggest a tight race because of a growing diverse population, especially a large number of Black voters. Vice President Kamala Harris is all in: she has visited the state at least nine times this year. North Carolina has not voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate since 2008.
Are the polls painting an accurate reflection of the reality on the ground? Is the Black vote an asset for Harris or does it carry some hope for Trump, who won North Carolina by only 74,481 votes, or 1.34%, in 2020.
The latest Marist College poll on North Carolina shows that 13% of Black voters say that they support the former president. This is 6 points more than in 2020, when a CNN exit poll indicated that the real estate billionaire received 7% support from Black voters. The solid showing among Blacks is due to the fact, as polls indicate, that Trump is attracting some Black men, especially young Black men, a trend that we’ve been seeing across the country for several months now.
Blacks represent 20.5% of the total population of the state, which is one of the seven states which will decide the identity of the future president of the United States, according to the 2020 US Census.
“The biggest reason why I’m voting for Kamala is that she’s not Donald Trump,” Damnit told me, adding that the reluctance of some Black men in his state to support the Democratic candidate is due to various nuanced reasons. Still, that is not reason enough, according to him, not to support her, because the civil rights gained by Black men in the 1960s are in danger.
“She is not going to give police officers qualified immunity for whatever crimes they commit against Black men, right? Kamala Harris is not going to take away the freedom with their bodies of my sister or my cousins, my mother, my nieces, right? I think it’s important for Black men to realize that we just gained our civil rights in the 60s, and we are now facing a party [the Republicans] that is dead set on not only reversing them, but removing them completely,” Damnit said.
Little by little he adopted the tone of a civil rights leader. It is as if he wanted to harangue a crowd. I imagined him addressing, at this precise moment, the bloc of 13% to 20% of Black men who, according to the polls, say they support Trump. To be clear, the former president will not win the Black vote, but what he needs is either to increase his 2020 percentage or for a significant number of Black men to stay on the couch on Election Day.
“I just try to remind people that being a Black man,” Damnit said, “you can’t expect the empathy of a rich White man who has never seen a 40-hour work week, a man who has never seen jail time for a crime that he didn’t commit, a man who has never been held accountable for any bad decisions, a man who has literally failed his way up. From the onset, he cannot empathize. He cannot understand. He will not support you by any means.”
Damnit, a registered Democrat, is organizing a block party on October 22, which will be like a rally for Harris. On Election Day, he will be DJing at some poll stations, and plans, with volunteers, to hand snacks to people waiting in line to vote.
He said he grew up in the Tabernacle Baptist Church, on 400 South Hudson Street in Greenville South Carolina, the oldest Black church In that city. “Everything they talked about was about Black Liberation,” he said, readjusting his position at the purple table we were sitting, as we talked outside of his art gallery on this last day of September. They “used their church space as a communal arena to accomplish common goals.”
He said he understands that there is a need to ease fears and criticism from a “subset” of Black men towards Kamala Harris, but, at the same time, he summoned history and the role Black women play in the Black community. He believes this should be enough to force the hand of the undecided or the pro Trump Black crowd.
“I can also say being a Black man in the South that there are countless times where a Black woman who did not know me stepped in. They have intervened, they have helped, they have assisted, they have given advice, they have prayed. They have given me money. There’s never been a time, I think, in any Black man’s life in which a Black woman has not put you first in some situation. And I just feel personally that Kamala Harris, a Black woman from Oakland [California], who attended an HBCU [Historically Black Colleges and Universities], who has identified with blackness her entire life, and at least made an attempt to change the system for people in general, not just Black folk, has my interest at heart.”
Is Harris being black the reason Black men should vote for her, I asked him. He told me that there’s “a lot of apathy” in the Black community, an apathy that is, according to him, a barrier for political engagement among young Black men who feel unheard.
“We are dealing with a generation of people who lack communication skills, emotional intelligence. So, when you don’t know how to communicate how you feel about yourself, we can’t expect you to communicate your views on politics, right? You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what things you really need as a Black man, right?”
As much as Damnit thinks Harris may win North Carolina, he is nervous because he has heard some Black men voicing their discontent and reluctance to vote for her, which might ultimately help Trump.
“A lot of Black men can’t articulate what it is they want,” he said. “It’s easy for them to predicate it on the idea that Kamala Harris locked up Black men, but they can’t say what they want, right? And if they do say, it might be something like ‘we don’t want to pay child support,’ which really has less to do with the President and more to do with you as a person, and then the state and the judge that you interact with, right?”
Harris was San Francisco’s District Attorney and then California’s Attorney General. She likes to introduce herself as a prosecutor on the campaign trail
Fifteen minutes into our conversation, Damnit told me that the real reason some Black men in his state don’t want to vote for Harris is because she’s a woman. A misogyny that has its roots, he said, in learned behavior, which stems from historical protections against white supremacy.
“There’s a lot of misogyny within the Black community, and unfortunately, the majority of that is rooted in white supremacy,” Damnit told me. “ A lot of Black Americans have had to adopt negative stereotypes about themselves to protect themselves from white supremacy and violence, right? And I don’t think, I don’t think a lot of us have come to terms with that, the psychological and emotional harm that comes with these things.”
But, “N***s are going to have to move past patriarchy. Black men are going to have to realize that gender norms are made up,” he added, talking about male malaise, as changes, especially around work, have shaken our society.
“If you support a party that isn’t about empowering everyone, you can only assume that they’re going to start stripping things away from you. Especially being a Black man, a Black person, you know, you’re on the bottom of the totem pole, and there’s nothing you can do right now to change that hierarchy, right? So, if they’re hyper focused on taking the rights away from women and gays and children and poor people, what are they going to do with your Black ass?”
Listening to Damnit, I realized that behind his raw comments, there was a genuine concern about the outcome of the election. I kept thinking that the Black men who support Trump here in North Carolina will never come home, contrary to the hopes of the Harris campaign. It seems that bridging the gap that has widened between some Black men and the Democrats will take more time than the one month left until Election Day.
Unless a miracle happens.
