RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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President of the National Black Empowerment Council
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Democrats need massive support from Black voters to win key races this fall . But that support is at risk if they keep letting the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) run on its ballot line and allow a group deeply misaligned with their community to increasingly define the party. Black Americans aren’t just the Democratic base. We need to over perform for the party to win inevitably close elections.
However, recent Democratic primaries in swing states have laid bare the glaring disconnect between the DSA and Black voters. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a DSA-aligned candidate for Senate, narrowly won in Michigan earlier this month, but without Black support. He won because of younger, Whiter, farther-Left voters unrepresentative of the coalition ultimately needed to win the general election. On the flip side, in Wisconsin, David Crowley, the Black Milwaukee County Executive who won the gubernatorial primary against a DSA member, won exactly because of a swell in Black turnout.
This contrast exists for a reason: the DSA is skeptical, if not outright hostile , to many of the pillars of Black advancement in this country and, as voters, we are sophisticated enough to understand that. The DSA gives nothing and seeks only to use our communities as a launching pad for their political agenda and tries to use our painful struggles to maneuver their way into power.
Over the past 100 years, Black America has advanced on our own terms. We have moved ahead by forging our own political power; owning homes and starting businesses, while sending our kids to the best schools and colleges. But, despite claiming to fight for “working people” and minorities, there is nothing in the DSA agenda about Black generational wealth creation and entrepreneurship, likely because those ideas do not fit into the DSA worldview. In fact, their Housing Justice Commission describes its goal not as increasing minority homeownership, but as “the abolition of private ownership over land and shelter.” Many in the DSA also define the ownership of property as racist and engaging in a “White supremacist structure.”
Try telling that to a Black family who can finally buy a home. That’s an achievement denied to us for generations through racist policies such as redlining, the denial of mortgages, loans, insurance to residents of certain neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity rather than individual creditworthiness. Informing Black America that by buying a home, they are supporting White supremacy is ludicrous in its condescension. It’s also shocking in its deployment of dogmatic ideologies that they are arrogant enough to impose on us—when, by and large, the DSA isn’t even from Black and Brown communities. In fact, while they cannily run candidates of color, it’s not an organization of Black and Brown people or of working-class Americans. The Democratic Socialists of America’s membership is over 80 percent White, and by and large higher up on the income scale.
The DSA may cloak itself in the appropriated language of Black liberation, but, in practice, their policies create shackles for us.
Our neighborhoods have experienced decades of gangs, guns, drugs and disinvestment, and our communities have disproportionately high crime rates. While some candidates have tried to distance themselves from the defund-the-police movement, the DSA itself and associated parties have not. Prominent examples have gone further, calling for total abolition of the police and prisons. Nobody needs to tell us that relations between the police and our communities can be fraught, that more oversight is always critical, and that policing and reforms must go-hand-in-hand. But abolishing public safety tools and corrective accountability structures is not just theoretical to us. It means more dangerous communities.
Finally, a movement whose bedrock message is a near-obsessive focus on the conflict in Gaza reveals itself to us as having little actual focus on the priorities of Black Americans and no idea what to do about those struggles. As my organization heard on the ground repeatedly over the last two months while we worked in St. Louis and Detroit, Black constituents expressed exasperation and disbelief that the DSA focused on, “the Middle East and not the Midwest.”
Yet, the DSA seems dug-in. This fundamental disconnect can be an opening to the Democratic Party—if they’ll take it.
Since the New Deal and the Great Society, Black voters have been overwhelmingly loyal to the Democrats. The alliance, like all marriages, isn’t always easy. To be sure, there are exasperations with the Democratic establishment: the pace is too slow; fundamental change is slow to come; our votes are fundamental at election time, but priorities can drift post-campaign. But the benefits are clear overall, which is why we stay together, even if we wish that outcomes were sometimes stronger.
One way to counter the DSA’s creeping influence is for mainstream Democrats to heed the call for generational change and focus on priorities which are demanded by all working- and middle-class communities, not just Black and Brown constituencies. In fact, mainstream Democrats should look to Black America for a policy agenda that’s in and of itself a political solution, that can isolate the Democratic Socialists of America and expose them for what they are: a segregated, elitist movement that’s out of step in a populist era.
Darius Jones is the founder and president of the National Black Empowerment Council.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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