Meg Kinnard/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks during a Supermajority event in Columbia, South Carolina. September 2019 as activists Alicia Garza, center and Cecile Richards, right, look on.
Plagued by low polling numbers within a key Democratic constituency, Pete Buttigieg has said that black voters need to see him in action “for a longer period of time.” That’s the approach that the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has taken to South Carolina, the first state where a significant number of black voters will weigh in on the Democratic candidates for president and where he is currently polling zero with those voters. But what Buttigieg and his supporters fail to realize is that black voters in South Carolina and elsewhere have heard the comments of—and read the news reports featuring—African Americans in South Bend.
No further introductions are necessary when your reputation precedes you.
Just last week, Oliver Davis, of South Bend’s Common Council, an African American lawmaker with one of the longest tenures on the city’s legislative body, talked to Politico about Buttigieg. The mayor did not meet with Davis or ask for his support before hitting the campaign trail. Nor did he speak with the three other black lawmakers on the council.
Davis said he plans to support Joe Biden for president.
The biggest red herring that the national commentariat has slapped on the table about Buttigieg’s inability to connect with African Americans is that blacks are homophobic and won’t vote for a married gay man for president. As Trip Gabriel of The New York Times and others have pointed out, Buttigieg’s sexual orientation and marital status is a deal-breaker for some older, conservative black churchgoers. (It’s also a deal-breaker for many older, conservative white churchgoers.) It’s a strange shade of denial to pretend that his sexual orientation won’t also be a problem for other African Americans who may be younger and less religious.
Yet about half of African Americans support same-sex marriage. Homophobia does not define African American voters as a group, no more than any other take-your-pick stereotype does, no matter how many insinuations some reporters make. And homophobia does not explain the refusal of African American voters to join the swooning converts in predominantly white Iowa and New Hampshire. Proclaiming Buttigieg the front-runner before any votes have been cast demonstrates the media’s unhealthy preference for horse-race journalism and its persistent inability to probe beneath the surface of American race relations.
The main problem for black voters is not that Pete Buttigieg is married to Chasten Glezman, it is that his tenure as mayor has already showcased his lack of experience for the presidency. What has Pete Buttigieg accomplished in South Bend, the fourth-largest city in a conservative state, that illustrates his capacity to lead the world’s largest economy, and a land beset by the worst (presidentially stoked) racial strife this side of the Civil War?
Buttigieg has indeed presided over the resurrection of a midsize Rust Belt city. But black and Latino residents panned the aggressive blight eradication project that put local homeowners at the mercy of inflexible bureaucrats, did not incorporate community voices and concerns as much as it should have, and cast the pall of gentrification on those neighborhoods.
Davis, the city councilor, delivered the ultimate indictment of Buttigieg’s “Douglass Plan” to confront the institutional racism that African Americans face in criminal justice, health care, education, and housing: “It’s very difficult and very frustrating to talk about a Douglass Plan when he did not perform that while he was the mayor here in town,” Davis said. “A Douglass Plan should’ve been implemented in South Bend, Indiana. He should’ve run on that in the 2011 or at least 2015 campaign—run on it, had success with it, shared it with Indiana, run nationally.”
Buttigieg’s executive inexperience, magnified by his tone-deafness on law enforcement and police brutality, does not inspire confidence. Those missteps have been duly catalogued, beginning with his 2012 firing of the first African American police chief in the city’s history.
When a white police officer on the city’s predominantly white force, one deeply distrusted by black residents, killed Eric Logan, a middle-aged black man, up late one night this past summer trying to pull together a cookout for kids, the mayor displayed a callousness and lack of empathy now preserved in a notorious exchange: “You’re running for president, and you want black people to vote for you?” one woman said at his poorly choreographed attempt to connect with a group of black residents after the shooting. “That’s not going to happen.” “I’m not asking for your vote,” Buttigieg famously responded. Another woman quickly retorted, “And you ain’t gonna get it either.”
Any public official should know that in a crisis—especially if you are a presidential candidate trying to appeal to black voters in an era of senseless shootings of black people by white officers—it is imperative to show compassion unless you want the encounter to become a defining feature of your legacy. The day before the November debate in Atlanta, Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and a Bernie Sanders campaign national co-chair, recalled that episode: Turner castigated the mayor for being “unable to take care of the needs of the black people in his own city,” adding, “I don’t think you are in any position to be the president of the United States of America.”
During the Atlanta debate, when asked how his experience was suited to the presidency, Buttigieg said, “I have the experience of bringing people together to get something done,” an opening for an example he did not provide. Yet a far bigger misstep occurred after Kamala Harris criticized his campaign’s use of a photo of a Kenyan woman and child to illustrate his Douglass Plan to end institutional racism in America. “While I do not have the experience of ever having been discriminated against because of the color of my skin,” the mayor said, “I do have the experience of sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country, turning on the news and seeing my own rights come up for debate …”
White Americans may be comforted to hear that a gay white man has experienced discrimination. But African Americans know that the lived experience of a gay white man is vastly different from theirs: Regardless of his sexual orientation, Buttigieg benefits from white privilege. Harris took him to task for being “a bit naive,” warning that comparing struggles is counterproductive.
Then there are the avoidable errors that continue to multiply on the campaign trail. At an August event in Bronzeville, a black Chicago neighborhood, Buttigieg ostensibly had come to fundraise and talk about the Douglass Plan. A reporter for The Chicago Crusader, a black news and lifestyle weekly newspaper, counted 14 black people in a predominantly white, standing-room-only crowd in a 1,000-seat arena. Neither the Crusader nor the Chicago Defender, one of the country’s oldest and most influential black newspapers, received information about the event. (The Crusader reporter found out about the fundraiser in the Chicago Sun-Times.) Even more remarkable was the South Carolina endorsement snafu, in which his campaign literature listed the support of prominent local black leaders who in fact did not support him.
In Atlanta, Buttigieg made a point to reach out to the Rev. Al Sharpton to speak at his regional National Action Network event, as have other Democratic candidates who’ve failed to get traction with black voters: Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer, and Andrew Yang. Sharpton decided to make it clear that “he called me—we didn’t call him.” In an era with Black Lives Matter ascendant, Buttigieg’s continued genuflecting to Al Sharpton as a “black community” lifeline speaks volumes about his lack of knowledge of today’s black communities and his weaknesses on the issues of policing and police brutality.
In his quest for points of entry into faith-based black communities, Buttigieg continues his repentance tour this Sunday at a morning service at the Rev. Dr. William Barber II’s Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. According to a statement from the church: “Buttigieg will be asked to share his vision for addressing poverty and low wealth and its interlocking injustices of systemic racism, ecological devastation, the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.” The invitation—and challenge—from Barber, one of the founders of the Poor People’s Campaign, will be another major test for the candidate.
As Robin DiAngelo, a white racial- and social-justice consultant and trainer, notes in White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, “White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions … Stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing.”
Buttigieg’s efforts to extricate America from the racism it’s mired in remain unconvincing. Yet despite the unmitigated disaster of Donald Trump, whose racial attitudes would warm the heart of Woodrow Wilson, the warning signs about Buttigieg’s candidacy are apparently ones that only black people can see. He has not distinguished himself from the well-meaning white politicians who come calling at election time. African Americans have seen his kind before, and it’s highly unlikely that the mayor will get the black votes he needs to secure the Democratic nomination for president. Contemporary problems cannot be willed away with an earnest demeanor, good intentions, and a plan named for a fabled abolitionist by someone who has shown himself completely unqualified to sweep away the detritus of the country’s original sin.
This post has been updated.
