Black MAGA: How, Why, and What is to be Done?

Image by Jon Tyson.

“What, there’s such a thing as Black MAGA? That’s insane. Trump hates Black people. No way! It can’t be anything more than Astroturf.”

So exclaimed a liberal Democratic white friend of mine, aghast when I told him about a recent confrontation violent and self-described Black MAGAts and about recent polling data suggesting that Trump has support from at least 16% of Black men.

Yes, Donald “The Blacks Like Me” Trump is a white supremacist with a long record of hating on Black people. But, no, there’s a way – a number of ways, really, that go deeper than right-wing Astroturf.

Like any other racial group, the Black community has always contained conservatives attached to the social and political status quo. When I worked in a Black Chicago civil rights research and advocacy office early in the century, I received pushback from pro-policing and pro-prison Black bourgeois reactionaries when I rolled out a study on savage racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Some of my professional class Black colleagues spoke about poor South and West Side Chicago Blacks’ character and conduct in words and tones as contemptuous as what you could hear from a racist white ethnic who had fled “them” to the suburbs. Some of this conservatism reflected the residential segregation that placed professional and business class Black people in direct proximity to Black “underclass” crime and gang violence.

Another thing fueling Black conservatism in my experience was some Black folks’ belief that their own real, imagined, or potential success in America proved that personal responsibility and hard work were sufficient to overcome systemic societal racism as barriers to advancement. Bourgeois and American exceptionalist ideology’s claim that “anything is possible in America if you work hard and well” ran strong with some of the Black professionals and businessmen I heard from. The rise of the deeply conservative Barack Obama, himself a lecturer of poor Black people on “respectable” behavior, was seen as drop-dead violence in support of this claim.

The conclusion drawn from this conviction was that bad behavior and weak character – not the numerous steep societal and institutional racism that I uncovered in study after study – explained why Black people suffered the most poverty, illness, and criminalization of any racial group in Chicago and the nation.

Religion, including fundamentalist Christianity and Black nationalist Islam also fueled some of this Black victim-blaming Black conservatism.

But that was two decades ago. Nothing on the scale of Black MAGA was imaginable then. Now we have this supposedly surprising phenomenon of a small but significant Black move towards a white-supremacist ReplubliNazi who is the demented figurehead and political tool of a broad fascist movement for the full white nationalist takeover and makeover of American government and society.

What gives? What has changed?

It’ reflects the confluence of twelve factors.

First, there is of course reactionary Astroturf money out there trying to stir up Black reactionary sentiments and to suppress the Black vote for the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who the Republifascists call a “communist.” Black MAGA speakers, activists, and literature are getting dark right-wing resources.

Second, the MAGA message has received some Black support well beyond the community’s more reactionary elements on the critical issue of immigration. Republi-fascists’ border-obsessive nativism strikes some real chords in urban Black neighborhoods that have recently seen an influx of Venezuelan immigrants bused in for divide-and-rule political purposes from red states like Texas and Florida. Impoverished Black communities feel unjustly put-upon as already scarce resources are granted to the housing and perceived special job placement of the newcomers. Black MAGA activists and groups grossly exaggerate how much “favor” has been “given to these newcomers who aren’t even Americans” (forget that Venezuelans, Mexicans, and Central Americans are all Americans — Latin Americans). The effect is to stir up conflict between nonwhite groups over access to the crumbs of a capitalist and imperialist system that has destroyed life prospects for masses/millions of people – especially non-white masses – across all the Americas.

Third, Black MAGA anger at the Democrats’ mythical “open borders” policy and the new immigrants finds no real pushback from any kind of seriously and organized Left arguing for solidarity and historical understanding. An actual sizeable and functioning Left would: (a) go out and tell Blacks folks about how the Black population once fled the racial terrorism of the Jim Crow South only to meet vicious racist hostility, harsh segregation, super-exploitation, and violence in northern cities and then (b)talk about the parallels between that Great Black Migration for freedom and the struggle of millions upon millions of Latin Americans to escape the misery imposed on their home countries by the same capitalist-imperialist system that oppressed Black Americans in US cotton fields and ghettoes.

The only group in Chicago trying to make this case in the city’s Black community is the Revolutionary Communist Party and they have been physically attacked by Black MAGAts for their outreach efforts. As the Revcoms point out, “the United States doesn’t have an immigration problem, it has an imperialism problem.” The US bears responsibility for the misery that is pushing so many people to get out of Mexico, Venezuela and other Latin American and “global south” nations. To target the latest desperate newcomers instead of the US capitalist and imperialist system is to surrender to ruling class “divide and rule,” the revolutionary communists point out, contrary to the interracial and inter-ethnic solidarity required for a movement to emancipate humanity from oppression.

Fourth, the sorry and chaotic state of under-funded and poorly equipped urban public education provides little in the way of the basic historical and social studies pedagogy required to properly inoculate young Black people against being played like this.

Fifth, American entertainment, sports, and political culture is now full of symbolic representations of Black attainment, acceptance, and star status, including by now a two-term first Black president, a Black female candidate atop the Democratic presidential ticket this fall, two Supreme Court justices, numerous elected officials, and the Secretary of Defense. All these “Black faces in high places” helps many Black US-Americans identify as “real US-Americans,” with interests apart from and even opposed to brown-skinned “aliens” from the Americas south of the US-Mexico border.

Sixth, identification with the United States – as in “don’t call me Black, call me a Black American” (in the words of a young Black conservative and military veteran I recently met) is furthered by the disproportionate Black presence in the US military. Blacks currently make up 21% of the military but just 14% of the US population – a reflection not of any innate Black patriotism but of how the armed forces draw heavily on job-seekers from poor communities.

Seventh, despite all the illusions of “equal opportunity” fueled by the rise of the Obamas, Oprah, Clarence Thomas, Jay Z and Beyonce, Michael Jordan, Kamala Harris, etc. (name your Black American power player, celebrity, or multi-millionaire), the US Black community remains very disproportionately represented at the bottom of the nation’s savage hierarchies of race and class. This means that many Black Americans are in fact pitted against ever new wave newcomers for scarce social resources, something many Blacks folks resent given Blacks’ presence in North America since African slaves were first brought to the future United States in 1619.

To make matters worse, Black Americans have forever witnessed how “hating on us” is part of how new immigrants “become American.” This fuels both some Black US-Americans’ desire to claim US-Americanism as their own property and some exaggerated Black fears of what the newcomers are “getting that should be ours.”

Eighth, Trump’s unfiltered, gruff, bombastic, and violence-promoting “tough guy” and “plain spoken” image, his frankly mafia-like gangsta posture resonates with Black males who are “caught up in the (gang) life.” Trump’s faux-populist persona contrasts with the transparent multi-cultural elitism and condescension of an Obama, Oprah, and Kamala Harris. Trump’s felony record may be an asset for him among certain parts of Black America, something liberals might want to think about when they denounce him as “felon” instead of as fascist.

Ninth, the “late-capitalist,” largely post-industrial US occupational, educational and criminal justice systems have been especially vicious and repressive in relation to Black males, one in three of whom are marked for life by the crippling stigma of a felony record. This has helped damage those males’ perceived status in their own communities – something that unfortunately helps make Trump’s misogyny attractive to some of the nation’s very disproportionately male Black MAGAts. And just as disparaging Trump as a felon can have the opposite impact as intended on some people, so can criticizing his overt and violent male chauvinism attract some men of all races to Trump.

Tenth, Trump and his campaign have consciously cultivated Black right-wing support by placing handfuls of Black people at his hate/campaign rallies, by forming public alliances with reactionary Blacks like Kanye West and the Black Nazi (North Carolina) gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, and by accusing “criminal” Latin American immigrants of taking away “Black jobs” – as if the largely male-employing northern industrial jobs that were once the occupational magnet for the Great Black Migration of 1915-1970 weren’t technically displaced and exported abroad by multinational corporations and finance capital decades ago.

Eleventh, having bourgeois Democrats in the White House, including an actual Black president for eight years, has done nothing to repair the nation’s severe racial disparities of wealth, health, income, criminalization, and more. The rich symbolic power of a first Black president wore off in much of Black America well before the end of Obama’s stay in the White House, which included Obama siding with the forces of murderous white supremacist law and order on more than one occasion. Trump might not well have won in 2016 but for Black disillusionment with the dismal Dems under the arch-neoliberal and objective white supremacist Obama – a trumpeter as well of symbol of mythical “post-racial” and “equal opportunity” and himself a bourgeois lecturer of lower- and working-class people on how to “respectably” behave in ways that whites approve. Along with the neoliberal white elitism of the racist mass incarceration-backer Hillary “Bring Black Super-Predators to Heel” Clinton, that disillusionment helped suppressed the Black vote in contested state cities like Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Charlotte.

Twelfth, Black MAGAt-ism channels key ideological elements that the Democrats and liberals themselves embody and transmit: identity politics (“I’m Black MAGA”), nationalism/national identification (“don’t call me a Black person, call me a Black American”), economistic me-first-ism, individualism, and competitiveness (“what’s in it for me?…these non-Americans are taking my jobs), and nativism (“this is my country”). The comments I just put inside parentheses are all real-life quotes from Black MAGAts I have encountered this year.

Speaking of Black nativism, the wannabe first Black female president Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris went to the southern border earlier this year to boldly warn Latin American immigrants against trying to escape from their Hellish, US-maimed home countries to the US. Along with promising to keep the American Empire “the most lethal fighting force on the planet,” effectively backing the US-backed genocide in Gaza, promising to sustain the reckless imperialist proxy war against Russia, and selling the false claim of the US as the land of exceptional and unbounded post-racial opportunity “where anything is possible,” Harris used her time at last month’s Democratic National Convention to boast about her and Joe Biden’s attempt to pass a reactionary “border security” to coldly close off asylum rights earlier this year.

In the vast progressive and left vacuum that has swept much of the USA, including much of Black America, there’s no reason that a Black version of what the great Black leader W.E.B. DuBois once called “the psychological wage of racism” shouldn’t emerge. DuBois asked this question back in the mass production era: why hasn’t the U.S. working class risen up to destroy the capitalist system and the pitiless masters who have treated the laboring masses with murderous contempt? Part of the answer lay, he found, in how American racial capitalism had encouraged the white majority of workers to, in historian David Roediger’s words, “define and accept their class position by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not blacks.’” By DuBois’ account in 1935, anti-black racism grants lower and working-class whites a “public and psychological wage” – a false and dysfunctional measure of status used to compensate for alienating and exploitative class relationships. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1968, racialized capitalism has given its Caucasian proletarian prey the “satisfaction of…thinking you are somebody big because you are white.”

The satisfaction has always been a terrible lie. It has helped cloak white workers’ subordinate and expendable status, which never disappeared despite the advantages white skin privilege has conferred relative to non-whites. It has injured those workers’ material status by undermining their capacity to enhance their economic and political power by joining in solidarity with nonwhite workers. It has joined them in spirit and political allegiance to rich fellow whites who couldn’t care less about working class people of any color. It has focused white workers’ ire on the wrong enemies – those with the least power (non-white workers and the poor) instead of the moneyed elite, which wields its wealth and power to cripple and destroy lives and the common good. And it has (along with numerous other the related reactionary messages in the reigning American ideology) encouraged white workers to blame themselves for their own difficult circumstances under the remorseless reign of capital. “Privileged” people are supposed to be doing well, after all. If they’re not, it must be their own fault.

There are other and related compensatory “psychological wages” that can deceptively seem to make up for one’s position at or near the bottom of America’s deep wells of race and class: the “psychological wage” of Empire, under whose influence a person low down in the social structure garners perceived status from living in the world’s most powerful nation and perhaps even from having “served” in that nation’s military. There’s the “psychological wage” of patriarchy, whereby a low status male garners a measure of power from lording it over the woman/women and children in his life.

Some Black MAGAts seem invested in the nativist psychological “wage” of being more truly “American” and thus entitled than recent arrivals from Mexico, Central, and South America. The notion that they could or should be specially inoculated against this negative “me/us-before-them” mindset because of their own historical experience presupposes the existence of things that are not widely or adequately present in Black America or the US in general: a serious and revolutionary Left worthy of the name and an educational system that reaches down into the oppressed to empower masses with revolutionary knowledge and truth regarding the intimate and mutually reinforcing relationships between capitalism, imperialism, racism, nativism, nationalism, environmental destruction, and ruling class divide and rule.

Those were two deficits the Black Panthers were heroically trying to address in Chicago and other cities when the Cook County States’s Attorney’s Office, the Chicago Police, and the FBI collaborated to carry the extrajudicial police state executions of the great young Marxist-Leninist Panther leader Fred Hampton and his associate Mark Clark on the west Side of Chicago in the predawn hours of December 4, 1969. I applaud the revolutionary communists for trying to address those two terrible deficits in Chicago.

A shorter version of this essay appeared on The Paul Street Report.

Postscript

A reader who thinks that “Trump could well be the lesser of two evils for people of color as well as the US” responded to an earlier version of this essay by accusing me of “dismiss(ing) the disadvantaged Americans whose communities have been inundated with cheap, mass imported/ immigrated and tax subsidized labor ( that’s celebrated by the owner and managerial classes as good for the economy) Faced by increased demand for housing and elevated rents is it any wonder the working class is angry about being forgotten, neglected and replaced by the profit mongers who pretend that Black Lives Matter etc. Then have the gall to suggest they are just being self-centered and racist in their objections. It’s even worse when communist thinkers pile on them too.”

This is a poor criticism. There is no denial of the economic exploitation of “the working class” in this essay. This commentary is an effort at explanation and a case for people’s solidarity against the capitalist-imperialist system at the taproot of intolerable living conditions in the US, Latin America and around the world. It makes a case against capitalist divide and rule. As a different reader eloquently observed:

“the point isn’t that the white(?) working class has no grounds for complaint, but is it immigrants who are driving down wages and raising rents? Or aren’t those direct outcomes of the workings of the relentless drive for profit and domination under competition, i.e. capitalism imperialism? Paul breaks down some of the many ways people are misled to blame anyone and anything other than the system that is the source of this misery. And struggling with people to dig deeper and understand that and the solution – revolution – is not ‘piling on them’ but a mark of respect for their ability to rise up and free themselves as part of freeing all of humanity.”

Yes. I of course do NOT remotely suggest that Black US-Americans are especially self-centered or racist. At the same time, I do not pretend that Black US-America has magically achieved some special situational and complete inoculation from the chauvinist, nativist, racist, sexist, exclusionary, xenophobic, selfish, economistic, victim-blaming, and identitarian beliefs that are so sadly widespread across the USA. Arguing with any people on behalf of a radical sharpening of their comprehension towards the goals of the radical reconstruction of society is yes a show of respect for those people.

As for Donald “Execute the Central Park Five” Trump being perhaps “the lesser evil for people of color,” that’s quite a reach given the Donald’s longstanding white supremacism and neofascism, which I and many others have documented at book and essay length again and again and again some more. Tell it to the brown-skinned immigrants he rounds up for “mass deportation” if he gets back in the White House – and to the Black communities where he threatens to send in the military an “end inner city crime in one day.”’ Tell it to the coming nonwhite victims of police and paramilitary murder who a Trump47 applauds as “real American heroes.” But why even go who is the “lesser of two evils” at this point in history, when US-led capitalism-imperialism is tipping the planet past decent livability through environmental destruction, war, pandemics, and more? Here’s a chant I briefly led in the streets of Chicago during the recent Democratic National Convention in that city: Fascist Trump, No!, Killer Kamala No!, The Whole Damn System’s Got to Go!”