The day before a consequential 2008 election, the Democratic presidential nominee had time to scold young Black men for wearing sagging pants. “Brothers should pull up their pants,” said a 47-year-old Barack Obama, imploring them to have respect for others. “You are walking by your mother, your grandmother — your underwear is showing. People might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them.” Earlier that summer, Obama had spent Father’s Day admonishing fathers at a Black Chicago church with a membership of 20,000 to stop sitting around the house “watching SportsCenter” and to pursue an education beyond the eighth grade. “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception,” he said.

It’s not just Obama who has invoked anti-Black misandry and peddled dangerous tropes to politically grandstand. The entire Democratic Party apparatus has a lengthy track record of reprimanding, blaming, and criminalizing Black men. In 2020, Joe Biden insisted “you ain’t Black” if you didn’t vote for him. In a 1996 campaign speech championing the 1994 crime bill that fed the mass incarceration of Black men, Hillary Clinton issued her infamous dog whistle, calling for the nation to “take back our streets” from “super predators” who have “no conscience, no empathy.” Now, as the 2024 presidential election races to a finish, an opportunity to demean, rather than uplift, Black men rises again.

Lecturing Black men at a recent Pennsylvania campaign stop for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, Obama accused them of sexism for not showing more support for her: “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” Polls show Black male Democratic support has declined since 2020, 2016, and 2008 by numbers that could make or break Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, or other swing states. A vast majority of Black men still support Harris over Trump, however, especially when compared with white male voters.

Harris seems resistant to critiquing Black men herself. In an interview a few days after Obama’s Pennsylvania appearance, she pushed back on journalists’ questions about expectations of Black men’s support: “Your underlying premise is an assumption that I’m supposed to have Black men in my back pocket in terms of their vote. And that I should be taking that for granted — because I don’t. Black men are no different from anybody else — you have to earn their vote.” She repeated the sentiment later, stating, “I intend to earn the vote of everyone, including Black men.”

To do this, Harris announced an Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, a last-minute effort to bolster flagging support among a demographic drawing increasing attention. But the way she is explicitly courting the Black male vote — including campaign ads showing nonvoting Black men being shunned by women — mimics the offensive stereotyping of her Democratic predecessors. Harris pledges to invest in “mentorship and leadership development” programs like Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, reinforcing a long and troubling history of singling out Black men for their supposed cultural shortcomings. Noticeably, no proposals for other demographics — Harris’s agenda for women or rural Americans, for example — calls for federal investment in their social skills. This paternalistic and condescending logic misleadingly implies that if Black boys and men simply had mentors, role models, and connections to established leaders in their communities, they could succeed — and avoid getting shot by police or spending a night in jail. They could integrate into the American upper class by being more upstanding, somehow assuaging what’s held them back: their Blackness. Such an approach perpetuates deep-rooted problems instead of solving them — as if a lack of leadership qualities and soft skills, rather than centuries of structural racism, is what has relegated them to an economic underclass. Black men don’t need mentorship — we need abolition: the tearing down of all violent, oppressive systems and the construction of new reparative systems that advance us all. A genuinely transformative agenda for Black men would uplift from the bottom, not reprimand from the top.

What Obama, Harris, and other Democratic Party leaders communicate with their condescending rhetoric is much deeper and more troubling than an ostensibly righteous attempt to root out misogynoir on the national stage. In the eyes of establishment Democrats, Black people owe the party their vote, so long as the threat of a Republican victory persists. Facing the clear and present danger of a second Trump administration, Black folks must stomach any sins and abominations the Democrats have committed or else pay a more expensive price in November.

Feeling entitled to Black votes, Democrats never ask why Black male support has waned. Do sexist Black male voters exist? Of course. As in other families — white, Asian, Latino — patriarchy has reared its ugly head in Black households. And yet the idea that sexism is the main factor driving a minority of Black men away from the party is overblown. In 2022, the news abounded with similar narratives doubting Black men’s willingness to vote for Georgia’s Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams, who would have been the nation’s first Black woman governor. Then 84 percent of Black men cast their ballot for Stacey Abrams, just a hair shy of the 85 percent of Black men who voted for Senator Raphael Warnock.

Polls show the economy is the top issue for Black voters, especially men. With record-high inflation, low wages, and skyrocketing household debt, it’s no wonder some Black men are considering skipping out on an election or two or crossing party lines (though Black men are hardly alone here). One Democratic pollster who segmented Black voters by key characteristics introduced Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau to the “rightful cynic” Black voter, who misses elections “not because they forgot,” but because they hate Democrats, Republicans, and the entire system: “They hate all of the institutions that have failed them.”

And let’s not forget Palestine. When more than 1,000 Black pastors, representing hundreds of thousands of Black congregants, called on the Biden-Harris administration to push Israel to end its military offensive on Gaza, their brave pastoral calls went unanswered by Democratic Party leaders.

Perhaps these same Black voters, men in particular, saw how quickly Obama stepped in to quell dissent when NBA players began a strike for racial justice in 2020 — a liberal version of Fox News host Laura Ingraham telling Lebron James to “shut up and dribble.”

After Democrats’ failure to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a low bar for reform by any justice-minded standard, Black men watched Biden pivot to calling for 100,000 more cops nationwide, racing to defame the movement to defund the police faster than Republicans. They saw Biden’s border patrol agents on horseback appear to whip Haitian migrants at the U.S. southern border, evoking centuries of racial subjugation. Maybe Black men were stunned to see Biden’s promise to cancel all federal student loan debt for graduates of any HBCU, public or private, fail to come to fruition while he resumed student loan payments that had been paused for nearly five years. Perhaps Black men watched Obama, Harris, and other elected leaders remain quiet as the State of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, a Black man with evidence pointing to his innocence and widespread support for his clemency.

In reality, the problems Black men face represent the pinnacle of the failures of our economic and criminal legal system and the absence of a care or solidarity economy. Black men hold no unique or innate character flaws that must be chided, punished, or incentivized to vote with hollow promises that fail to address the structural issues they face — especially when some of those promises will actually intensify the problems plaguing Black men by using them as pawns to carry out a deeply problematic capitalist agenda.

Take the commitment to invest in cryptocurrency in the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men. Harris professes support for a “regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected.” Black investors lost disproportionately more in crypto’s crash than white investors, but that’s a reason for her to be cracking down on this faux promise of financial liberation, not democratizing its faults and failures.

Two of the most prominent crypto ad campaigns, starring Steph Curry and Spike Lee, targeted Black men with lofty promises of safety and “new money” for Black people. The advertised firms, FTX and Coin Cloud, have since gone bankrupt, ending in financial catastrophe for those who bought in. Bitcoin ATMs, which charge fees as high as 22 percent per transaction, are often located in majority-Black neighborhoods. For Black neighborhoods in Texas, the state’s embrace of crypto mining has created an environmental crisis as it drains the electrical grid and puts residents’ health at risk.

Crypto is dominated by white men who appear committed to halting racial progress. Brian Armstrong, CEO of crypto platform Coinbase, banned the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and any discussion of “social activism” at the company. Even after catching heat for anti-Black hiring practices and hostile work environments, Coinbase removed a ban on hate speech and racism from its terms of service in August 2021.

By doubling down on crypto’s liabilities, Harris enacts what sociologist Louise Seamster calls predatory inclusion. Marginalized groups are given access to goods and services they have been historically excluded from, but at a steep price that means they will never reap the full benefits, while the people really being enriched are the white CEOs shilling the products in the first place. One of Harris’s central accomplishments as California’s attorney general was winning a large consumer settlement on mortgage fraud. Crypto functions as today’s subprime mortgage, and this time Harris is cheerleading the fraud.

Harris’s agenda is nowhere near bold enough to meet the demands of people today, but it isn’t all bad. Efforts to tackle sickle cell disease and prostate cancer, which Black men experience at far higher rates than other groups, are indeed worth more time and resources. Canceling medical debt, which is disproportionately held by Black residents in the Deep South, will do wonders for working people trying to get by. Former President Trump may not have published an agenda for Black men, but the disaster of his first term shows what he intends: immunity for police, slashes to the Affordable Health Care Act, deeply racist rhetoric, and the greenlighting of Supreme Court justices and other judicial actors to tear down critical legal protections like the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action.

But the unspoken appeal of Harris’s agenda for Black men — that she won’t be putting cash directly in the pockets of Black folks, but rather giving them the “tools” to create wealth if they’re savvy enough to maneuver systemic barriers — is exactly what’s wrong with what she calls an “opportunity economy.” Black men — all Black folks — need results, not opportunities. An agenda to help Black people must help poor Black people, not just the “middle class.” A real agenda for Black men would feature a federal job guarantee or a livable universal basic income, not paltry and risk-laden financial support to be “entrepreneurial.” It would gut the school-to-prison pipeline; abolish the prison industrial complex and use clemency powers to liberate masses of Black men from incarceration; cancel student debt, medical debt, and criminal legal fines and fees holding down Black communities; cut a reparations check to Black families and provide baby bonds to their children; raise wages and strengthen worker rights; and implement Medicare for All and make college free.

A quick search of Harris’s plan for Black men reveals which words are absent: “gun” or “gun violence,” “climate” or “environment,” “union” or “labor,” “veteran,” even “democracy.” A plan for Black men must do more than appeal to those who aspire to be upwardly mobile and win according to the flawed logic of our hyper-competitive society. Black men — who encompass queer Black men, disabled Black men, working-class Black men and young Black men — need abolition, solidarity, love, justice, and liberation.