Opinion | When Patriarchy Trumps Race

For over a year, as I’ve talked to Black men and voting organizers, I’ve picked up on discontent with the Democratic Party from some Black men, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it or how widely that sentiment stretched.

Apart from my reporting, polling suggests an erosion of Democratic support among Black men, though I remained somewhat skeptical.

But when a campaign unfurls a closing-stretch strategy to reach and retain a particular group of voters, as the Harris campaign clearly has done with Black men, it means that something — whether in public polls or in its internal polls — has raised a very real concern.

Even a worst-case scenario — something like the 70 percent of Black men that the most recent New York Times/Siena College national poll found in favor of Kamala Harris — would still mean that Black men strongly support Democrats, and the Democratic nominee, more than men in any other racial demographic group. But that slippage of support from recent past election cycles is worrisome; in a tight race it can make a difference.

Barack Obama has come out to give a stern message to Black men. Harris has put forth an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” and done a series of interviews with Black male media figures. Time and energy in the last days of a campaign are precious; she wouldn’t be directing all this effort toward the Black male electorate if her team wasn’t worried.

Obama attributed part of the potential drop in support for Harris, compared with support for him during his presidential races, to the idea that some Black men “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” This kind of misogyny — or misogynoir, the particular form of misogyny faced by Black women — is no doubt part of the issue, but not the whole of it.

The patriarchy is more complex than that, its gravitational pull is incredibly strong, and there are many arenas in which it is active. And because the discontent I’ve detected among some Black men has discrete factions, different manifestations of patriarchal views have different ways of reaching Black men at the level of policy as well as perception.

There are Black power advocates who are anti-abortion because they want more Black babies. They see a Black population that is growing more slowly than other minority groups. Although polls find that nearly three-quarters of Black people support legal abortion, a June Pew Research Center report found that half of Black men and Black women believe that the government promotes abortion and birth control to suppress the Black population. Nearly two-thirds of young Black men had heard of this theory.

There are the Black gender purists and homophobes who agree with the Republican talking point that Democrats “don’t know the difference between a man and a woman.”

There are the Black opponents of immigration who chafe if American resources, at any level of government, go to accommodating recent migrants rather than being spent on native-born communities. Among them are those who work with their hands, whose work requires more proficiency with a hammer than proficiency with language, people who weren’t bothered by Donald Trump’s comment about immigrants taking “Black jobs” because they sense a job-market threat from the arrival of more immigrants.

Then factor in Black men who are against foreign intervention, whom one might call Black America Firsters, who cannot reconcile spending billions of tax dollars in the Middle East and Ukraine while Black communities in this country struggle with longstanding underinvestment.

When it comes to the war between Israel and Hamas, there are those who view the Black American experience as connected to all forms of global oppression, who find the mounting death toll in Gaza unconscionable. It’s not that they believe Trump would have a better Middle East policy; it’s that they are stung by what they see as a betrayal by the Biden-Harris administration.

But how could Black men not support a Black woman? Or more disturbingly, even with misgivings about Harris, how could they support Trump? — who years ago submitted to an agreement with the Justice Department that his company wouldn’t discriminate against prospective minority tenants and who has a history of racist statements and actions, from his promotion of birtherism to his Muslim ban.

For a long time, antiracism and compassionate safety-net policies were the glue that held nearly all Black voters together with Democrats, but the patriarchy speaks to men in a particular way and more Black men may simply be drifting in that direction.

For some Black men, Trump’s words and deeds may not be the barrier that they once might have been or that liberals like me think they should be.

Consider that a century ago, the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey met secretly with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey once said, “I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.” One way to interpret this is that some Black men have shown a willingness to downplay a racist track record as a political consideration.

And when it comes to the Black men who can’t be wooed, Trump is content for them to be dispirited.

There is a danger that many Black men, especially younger ones, are disengaging from the political process. Yes, in the end, nonparticipation is self-silencing and self-destructive, but sadly, for some, opting out feels like revolutionary resistance or dispensing with an illusion. This frustration has long attended the journey of Black people in this country and is not hard to summon.

As James Baldwin wrote in his essay “Journey to Atlanta,” “This fatalistic indifference is something that drives the optimistic American liberal quite mad.”

It drives me mad, too, but there is a shift among a portion of Black men that I fear no one has been able to stanch.

There is a feeling that liberalism in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, has moved away from the party of hard hats to the party of safe spaces, that it has been feminized and that Trump’s bravado and rampant sexism, no matter how toxic, are at least forms of masculinity.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.