1Black People Love Me, and Other Things You Should Not Assume About Black Voters
A Look at the Prevailing Myths About the Black Vote and Black Media
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Listen, you got to come see us when you come to New York, VP Biden.
PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I will.
CHARLAMAGNE: Because it’s a long way until November. We got more questions.
BIDEN: You got more questions, but I tell ya, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: It don’t have nothing to do with Trump. It has to do with the fact I want something for my community. I would love to see—
BIDEN: Take a look at my record, man. I extended the Voting Rights Act twenty-five years. I have a record that is second to none. The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run. I mean, come on, take a look at the record.
BIDEN’S HANDLER (TO CHARLAMAGNE): All right. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Ever have one of those moments when you feel like you’re watching an agonizingly slow car wreck play out in front of you? And you just keep saying “oh no, oh no,” while the driver sluggishly spins out of control? If you have, then you have a sense of how I felt watching this clip of former vice-president-turned-presidential-candidate Joe Biden’s interview with Charlamagne tha God on The Breakfast Club morning show.
And it wasn’t just me. In the last week of May 2020, this clip became instantly infamous as Biden’s “You ain’t Black” gaffe. The cringeworthy joke had been an attempt to deflect from serious questions about engaging younger Black voters who, unlike their grandparents, hadn’t yet gone all in for Uncle Joe. And it revealed, with painful clarity, just how deeply Biden assumed support from Black voters was a done deal.
The stakes were high. The Breakfast Club is heard by eight million listeners each month. More than half of those listeners are Black, and many of them are in the 18–34 age group, a prime voting demographic. Their YouTube channel has around five million subscribers. But the number of ears and eyes their content reaches is harder to quantify, given the virality of the juicy sound bites they’re adept at getting. Over the years, they have become the go-to place for politicians like then-senator Hillary Clinton, then-senator Kamala Harris, and Senator Elizabeth Warren to speak to young Black voters. It hasn’t always gone well. In 2019, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders found himself in hot water when, during his interview, he declined to support reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans in America.
Biden’s interview had been tense from the word go. Charlamagne jumped into a series of questions about Biden’s disappearance from the public stage as other political leaders, like state governors, became more vocal about COVID-19. Biden didn’t react well. He was defiant and immediately on the defensive, spouting his record with the NAACP and referencing polling data he said showed Black people were universally in favor of him. He used the predictable—and at this point, clichéd—“But I have Black friends” excuse when asked about the 1994 crime bill, which is now widely regarded as having had a devastating impact on the Black community. In lieu of acknowledging the bill’s failures, he began to rattle off a list of the Black leaders who’d supported it back then.
Perhaps seeing their jobs flash before their eyes, Biden’s handlers tried desperately to cut the interview short. But Biden was off and running, delivering sound bite after sound bite that all seemed to reaffirm how out of touch he was with younger Black voters and their concerns with the Democratic Party.
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: I don’t know if you saw a couple of weeks ago … [Sean “Diddy” Combs] said what I believe a lot of Black voters, including myself, feel, and that’s that Democrats take Black voters for granted. Votes are quid pro quo, right? It’s not like I don’t want to vote. I just want to know what candidates will do for us.… Do you feel like Black people are owed that from the Democratic Party?
JOE BIDEN: Absolutely. What would I say? Remember when they said Biden can’t win the primaries.
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Yes.
JOE BIDEN: I won overwhelming [sic]. I told you when I got to South Carolina, I won every single county. I won a larger share of the Black vote than anybody has, including Barack.
Responding to the question of what will you do for the Black community? with Black people love me even more than Barack … wasn’t chill, to put it mildly. Beyond just alienating listeners, the interview raised serious questions about the Democratic Party as a whole. Was the Democratic Party taking Black votes for granted? Was it time to rethink what many considered unwavering loyalty to the party? And did anyone [Black] actually prep him for this interview?
In my mind, more than anything else, the interview revealed a set of assumptions about Black voters—assumptions that are widely held and perpetuated not only in white media but within Black social spaces. Namely, that being a Democrat is part of what it means to be Black. This raises the question: What are the implications when Black cultural identity is tethered to one political party?
Mainstream discourse and media narratives are often produced by a socially ingrained need to distill Blackness and Black people into standardized patterns and data points that can be read, interpreted, and ultimately controlled. Flattening Black political thought into one cohesive narrative is an effective way to do this while also stifling political expression that may pose a threat to institutions and industries that prop up clearly defined partisan politics. As long as Black votes are predictable, they don’t really have to be negotiated.
From an electoral standpoint, we’re not allowed the same political nuance as others. We have two jobs as Democrats: turn up, and vote for the party. Failure to do those two jobs well enough dooms us to a hell of having to read an onslaught of articles by white people talking to other white “experts,” one Black politician from the South or New York City, and maybe one Black voter they found at a bus stop or the grocery store about why Black people didn’t do their jobs. From a Republican party-line perspective, because Black voters are assumed to be Democrats, it’s better to put energy into delegitimizing our votes than trying to convert our votes. Ultimately, it’s tied to an inability by partisan institutions and their gatekeepers to really grapple with how racial and economic caste systems have required Black people to organize outside of individual ideologies.
But another major reason for the reductive narratives around Black political thought is more hidden and more insidious: the disappearance of Black-owned-and-controlled media spaces for diverse political discourse and organizing.
The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show
The tagline for The Breakfast Club is “The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show,” and it’s not called that ironically. It’s because careers and reputations have been murdered on the show. They know it, and anyone who goes on the show knows it. It’s called this for many reasons, but for Biden, the reason was not necessarily because of the character of the hosts or a “gotcha” mentality. For Biden (and Sanders, and other white politicians), it’s dangerous precisely because of how the complex constellation of Black political identity interacts with the media—and how often politicians underestimate that.
The Breakfast Club is a syndicated radio show based in New York City and hosted by DJ Envy, Angela Yee, and Charlamagne tha God. It currently airs in over ninety radio markets across the United States and is also televised every morning. Charlamagne got his start as a radio hitman for Wendy Williams, who would go on to host her own television talk show. They made their name by going after celebrities and took great pleasure in doing it. Charlamagne once made singer, author, and TV personality Kelly Rowland cry. Who does that? Who makes any member of Destiny’s Child cry anything but tears of joy? To be fair, he has expressed deep regret for that, made amends, and even offered to “suck a fart out of her butthole,” which is … charming.
In the last decade, Charlamagne has evolved into one of the biggest political interviewers in the game. While his interviews have shifted to become less about gotcha moments and more anchored in a Black political consciousness, he still pulls no punches.
This kind of radio personality is by no means unique, but what sets The Breakfast Club apart is its position as a prominent Black-controlled media outlet. In the book News for All the People, Joseph Torres and Juan González detail the history and ongoing fight for people of color to own and control emerging communications technology in America. It may be shocking for some people to hear this, but Black radio isn’t just good for quiet storm, baby-making jams and suspect car loan commercials. Black-owned and controlled radio stations have long been crucial hubs for Black political organizing.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, had an office in the same building as historic Black radio station WERD. Every time there was a boycott announcement, or Dr. King wanted to address Black communities, he would use a broom to tap on the ceiling and the DJ would announce breaking news. In the modern internet age, radio DJs with primarily Black audiences have continued this savvy tradition, intermixing politics and pop culture to draw listeners in while also informing them.
Beyond entertainment value, there’s another reason (well, many reasons) why Black listeners often prefer receiving information from outlets like The Breakfast Club, rather than from places like the New York Times (whose readership is only 4 percent Black and two-thirds white): and that’s the fundamental concern about whether mainstream media outlets can be trusted to accurately report Black news. They have consistently shown they cannot. Whitewashed newsrooms, blanket reporting on Black issues without layered context, and chronic underreporting of both Black trauma and success have left a major gap that’s made even more clear in times of crisis.
This disconnect has historically led to the off- and online development of alternative public spaces that many Black people see as much safer forums to hear about and explore the diversity of Black politics. Black-owned and controlled media outlets, yes, even the ones that play the music your parents hate, have long been core to building consciousness and consensus across Black political ideologies and covering the stories wiped from the pages of dominant local and national media outlets. And those Black newsrooms and media spaces have long been seen as a threat to people in power.
Media 2070, a project started by the organization Free Press, is an ambitious effort to radically transform who has the capital to tell their own stories by the year 2070. They documented story after story of how mainstream media has been weaponized against Black communities and how Black people are consistently blocked from maintaining our own media. For all the bullshit claims about bias in the media against conservatives, the record shows conservatives’ fear of Black power is the real story of what’s creating media bias.
I was an advisor for Media 2070, and I have to say, even though I knew the game was rigged, I was flat-out stunned by much of what the project leads were able to dig up. For the sake of time, I’ll share just one example.
In 1919, when white people were showing their asses and burning Black communities to the ground in at least twenty-five documented occurrences of white rage in cities across the country, guess what the United States Justice Department was doing? Well, let me start by saying what they weren’t doing. They weren’t investigating the destruction of Black Wall Streets in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Chicago’s Bronzeville, or Elaine, Arkansas. Instead, they were investigating the Black press. The Justice Department released a report called Radicalism and Sedition Among Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications, and then lobbied to block free speech protections out of fear that Black people were getting too uppity.
The Justice Department was salty because the Black media had the audacity to say, Um, hey, Government, y’all wanna do something about all the lynchings and inequities we gotta deal with? Will something happen to the people burning down our communities, or nah? And, oh, by the way, can you stop calling these massacres “riots” and making them seem like fair fights when they’re basically just white people carrying out terrorist attacks on Black communities? And the government was emphatically like Nah, we good … but since you brought it up, we wish y’all would shut the fuck up and just be happy we’re not formally enslaving you like we used to.
To stop paraphrasing, here’s a fun section from the Justice Department’s actual report:
Underlying these more salient viewpoints is the increasingly emphasized feeling of a race consciousness in many of these publications, always antagonistic to the white race, and openly, defiantly assertive of its own equality and even superiority.
In other words, Black people were getting too unified and that was scary for the government that had already walked back a number of promises made as part of the Reconstruction Era post–Civil War. People often say of voter suppression that if someone tries this hard to stop you from voting, that means your vote is powerful. I feel that way even more about media access and ownership. For decades, media consolidation has been the silent war waged on Black communities. When people try that hard to steal your voice, we all ought to be worried.
All of which is to say that spaces like The Breakfast Club, in all their pop-cultural and political glory, are vital for Black communities and power—especially since for decades, Black-owned, controlled, and created media has been dying. In a time when corporate juggernauts have devoured smaller, independently owned companies, Black people have been on the losing end, and Black information integrity has suffered.
Y’all, we don’t even really have Black Entertainment Television (BET) anymore. One of the few national Black-owned television stations, it was sold to Viacom in 2001, and within the next few years, Black-centric news and public affairs shows on the station were canceled. The quality of content has declined ever since. Honestly, I’m still salty they canceled Teen Summit and all of their various nightly news programs. They don’t even show football games from historically Black colleges anymore.
This slow crumbling has meant that spaces like The Breakfast Club are some of the last places where we can be heard in all of our complexity. Imagine if there had been no Ida B. Wells-Barnett to document lynchings in the South, or no Pittsburgh Courier calling for policy protections to address the racism veterans on the frontlines faced at work and home. Or no Black Enterprise to report on how Black-owned businesses, despite being the fastest-growing businesses in this country, can’t access capital and are further compromised by any move to eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency? Imagine if there were no counterpoint to the dangerous untruths told to us and about us. We’re getting closer and closer to that.
It is within this context that social media emerged as an alternative avenue for political discourse, and Black radio shows like The Breakfast Club only increased in their already-important role in offering a range of Black political thought and debate.
Fighting to Find Space
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Black people created their own digital safe spaces and technological innovations not just to fill the void left by traditional media, but also to build community resilience and speak to audiences directly—free from traditional gatekeepers. These blogs, message boards, and email lists offered the freedom to create and amplify important narratives about Black trauma and joy, fact-check inaccurate reporting, and provide authentic places to process conspiratorial framing. Even today, the ones that remain continue to deploy many adaptive content moderation standards and community practices to maintain the space’s integrity.
Black technoculture—or the experience of Black social joy and inventive creativity through technology—is the result of decades of hobbyists, engineers, activists, and entrepreneurs throughout the African diaspora operating at the cutting edge of internet and computing technology. Frequently, these actors leveraged and created innovative technologies and communication vehicles in service of civil rights, starting as early as the 1960s and picking up steam in the 1970s and 1980s. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bayard Rustin openly discussed the negative implications of “cybernation” and automated technologies. But they also saw technology as both inevitable and a space for opportunity when in Black people’s hands.
In the late 1990s, Barry Cooper—then a sportswriter at the Orlando Sentinel—knew connected computers would fundamentally change the news business. He also saw Black people were over-indexing in their use of AOL. Bringing these two ideas together, he launched Blackvoices.com, a Black message board and news website that would eventually gain over a million registered users. Shortly thereafter, in the early 2000s, Chris Rabb launched Afro-Netizen, one of the first successful internet news blogs. His circulation rate was so high, he became one of just forty blogs credentialed to cover the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
ColorOfChange.org (later Color Of Change), where I spent years as a senior campaign director, would launch in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, eventually building to a national circulation of millions. They sought to fill the void left by the decline of Black newspapers and the absence of Black voices at media outlets. By 2008, they would play a more significant role in political organizing and turnout for various elections, something they continue to do to this day.
As Dr. Charlton D. McIlwain notes in the book Black Software, Black movements built dense and diverse networks that stretched across affiliated activists, journalists, public officials, and even mass groups of anonymous strangers. This was used to “both hijack and resist media influence.” Doing that consisted of producing and distributing at scale compelling, consumable, and usable content to inform, persuade, and organize large audiences. Earlier in the chapter, I talked about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., using a broom to knock on the floor at WERD radio. Decades later, Black folks found a digital version of that on the early internet.
Today, Black millennials and Gen Zers spend more time on social networking sites than any other ethnic group of those generations. Additionally, Black people of all ages over-index in membership on several social media platforms and in ownership of gaming devices, and they are also more likely than other ethnic groups to be considered tech trailblazers by their friends and colleagues. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Historically, Black people have consistently been early adopters of new media sources such as newspapers, radio, and television.
Black radio and media spaces on- and offline have long allowed for the articulation and processing of divergent Black political thought. We have needed those spaces because predominantly white-owned media are neither able nor willing to platform more diverse Black political thought unless it serves their broader purpose or story.
We’ve lost a lot of Black media. And because of tech consolidation, we have lost a lot of Black-owned and controlled spaces online as well. What outlets are left, for better and for worse, are those that keep us anchored in a shared purpose and offer a loose outline of a Black political agenda. These are outlets that at least attempt to accommodate the unique constellation of Black political identity with all its points of division and union.
Copyright © 2022 by Brandi Collins-Dexter
