The Black Vote as Progressives Imagine It

In the years that followed the 2012 elections, you could have been forgiven for thinking America’s political class believed that Hispanic voters cared about one thing and one thing only: immigration reform. The need to establish a legal pathway to residency or citizenship for the country’s illegal population dominated every discussion of what Latino voters wanted from policymakers. This idea persisted right up until the 2016 election, when Donald Trump implausibly won more Hispanic votes than Mitt Romney.

The statistical evidence that Hispanic voters did not think and behave as a bloc was apparent well before the president bet his electoral fortunes on the prospect, but it took the shock of 2016 for that complexity to become apparent to federal officeholders. Today, everyone has gotten the message save the most pandering social-justice activists, who continue to refer to Hispanic-Americans collectively as “Latinx,” a word that non-Hispanics use to demonstrate how in-touch they are with Hispanics, but which is rejected by those it is supposed to describe.

Could today’s progressive social reformers be making a similar mistake with how they approach black voters? Probably not, insofar as African-American voters are more reliably Democratic than the varied array of ethnicities and cultures that make up the “Hispanic vote” in the United States. And yet, after listening to the 2020 candidates discuss race in America, you might come away with the idea that black voters are of one mind on that issue, and that mind is racially hyper-consciousness and oriented toward reparative justice.