Sam Smith - There's one group Harris is not doing well with, namely white guys. Like too many other liberal politicians, she views white males as a problem more than another potential constituency. Which is easy to accept given that her current support from white men is below 40%.
But I learned early in my life that there could be a different story. It began in my twenties in DC when I took part in an all day bus and trolley boycott led by SNCC to protest a planned fare increase. I drove 71mostly black people to their destinations that day, part of an effort that kept 100,000 off the buses and streetcars.
When I arrived at SNCC headquarters on that morning in 1965, a young black organizer told me, "We've got to live together, man. You're white and you can't help it. I'm Negro and I can't help it. But we still can get along. That's the way I feel about it." I agreed.
When it was over I wrote an article about the protest and the organizer of the movement called me because he was seeking media help in his activism. Which is how I met and became friends with Marion Barry, the fare protest leader and latter DC mayor.
If such tales seem a little odd - even irrelevant - in today's environment it's because our discussions of ethnicity these days have little room for complexity, indeed even for interesting accounts of progress. We prefer to stick to traditional views and grim prognostications.
Marion several times described me to others as "one of the first whites who'd have anything to do with me." The thing that brought Marion and me together was a common view of various problems.
And the different local history of ethnic relations helped. Part of the story of DC is that blacks and whites - even under segregation - lived close enough physically to learn each other's real sins and virtues. One small symbol of this was Odessa Madre - the closest DC ever had for a mob boss, a black woman who controlled drugs, prostitution and numbers. Part of her success was that she had grown up near Irish kids some of whom became the city's cops.
A white police detective, Robert Lee, said "She was known as a counselor in the mob. She mediated disputes between blacks and whites, a referee. She kept a lot of people from getting hurt."
If we want to get along better with others, it would also help if we celebrated multicultural achievements more than we lecture or scold others about ethnic conflict.
In my book The Great Political Repair Manual I tried to deal with this:
I'm a native Washingtonian and have lived in DC most of my life. DC is two-thirds black. When someone asks me where I live and I tell them, they sometimes look at my fifty-something white face and say, "You mean in the city?" What they mean is: with all those blacks? I don't live in DC out of any moral imperative. I'm not doing anybody except myself a favor. I live here because I enjoy it. Beside, I'd rather be in the minority in DC than in the majority in a lot of places.
The Washington story has been almost completely ignored in our discussions of ethnicity yet it has been very helpful for this white guy to have lived happily in a majority black city for four decades.
My tip for Kamilia Harris is this: examine the good non-ethnic and non-gender issues on the minds of white men and offer to do something about it. Those important issues are there. For example, Brian Kassenstein, who's white, recently wrote online about multiple reasons he couldn't vote for Trump. Among them:
I refuse to vote for a man whose businesses were convicted for fraud.
I refuse to vote for a man who had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars after a court found he committed fraud.
I refuse to vote for a man who left office with the worst GDP growth in nearly 80 years.
I refuse to vote for a man whose mishandling of COVID-19 led to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
I refuse to vote for a man who saw GDP shrink by 3.5% in 2020, the worst annual performance in over 70 years.
I refuse to vote for a man whose tax cuts for the wealthy ballooned the national debt to unprecedented levels.
I refuse to vote for a man who added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt, with much of it benefiting corporations and the wealthy.
I refuse to vote for a man who oversaw the highest U.S. trade deficit in 12 years by 2020, despite promises to reduce it.
I refuse to vote for a man who implemented a trade war with China that hurt American farmers, leading to a record level of farm bankruptcies.
I refuse to vote for a man whose tariffs raised costs for American businesses and consumers, impacting everything from electronics to groceries.
I refuse to vote for a man who promised to bring back manufacturing but saw the sector shed jobs by the end of his term.
I refuse to vote for a man who left office with record levels of inequality, as wealthier Americans benefited from his policies more than average citizens.
I refuse to vote for a man who presided over a net loss of jobs, ending his term with fewer Americans employed than when he began.
In short, find issues in common and you can get along with others regardless of skin color or gender. And those issues are out there, just waiting to be dealt with.
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