Media entrepreneur Benjamin Dixon has a question that many Black voters share. Why does presidential candidate Joe Biden continue to insult Black people when he needs the Black vote?
“If the 2020 election was left up to white Americans, Donald Trump would be given a second term,” Dixon wrote in The Guardian.
According to a recent Hill-HarrisX poll, 50 percent of white voters would vote for Trump if the election were held today.
“So once again, it is up to Black voters to save America from itself,” wrote Dixon. The creator of the Progressive Army, Dixon used the online platform to “counter decades of right-wing propaganda,” according to the site. He co-founded the revitalized The North Star media site.
Dixon has spent his media career as a progressive activist. He hosts “The Benjamin Dixon Show” podcast, which offers news and commentary from a progressive perspective.
The Democratic party needs the Black vote to win. Biden will need a turnout rate of 65 percent of all Black Americans, according to some estimates. Of that group, nearly 90 percent of Black voters must vote for Democrats to secure the White House, Dixon wrote.
Yet Biden keeps making “problematic” statements about Black people, that Dixon says are “outright racist if you’re being honest.”
Remember Biden questioning the Blackness of Black voters who don’t vote for him during a Breakfast Club interview with Charlamagne Tha God? He told Charlamagne “you ain’t Black” if you are considering voting for Trump. Biden later apologized.
When Biden decided to call out Trump for racist remarks, some felt it hypocritical.
“No sitting president has ever done this…No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists and they’ve existed and they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has,” Biden said.
Others besides Charlamagne called out Biden for his remarks, given that some former presidents owned slaves and others openly supported the Ku Klux Klan, The Blaze reported.
“I really wish Joe Biden would shut the eff up forever and continue to act like he’s starring in the movie ‘A Quiet Place’ because as soon as he opens his mouth and makes noise, he gets us all killed, OK?” the radio host said. “There’s already so many people who are reluctantly only voting for Joe Biden because he’s the only option and because Donald J. Trump is that trash.”
Biden is going to have to repair his relationship with Black voters. The election isn’t a sure win for him. Even though America is seemingly in a mess right now, Trump’s supporters have stuck with him for the most part.
“White America has a commitment to Trump that is unmoved by the fact that 160,000+ Americans have died as a result of his absurd and criminally pathetic response to covid-19,” Dixon pointed out.
He added, “The economy has tanked, but 48 percent of Americans making over $75,000 a year still support Trump as opposed to 39 percent for Biden. Perhaps most disturbingly in that poll, Trump leads with independent voters – albeit within the margin of error.”
Others agree with Dixon, but seem to be giving Biden a pass.
“He’s making us all nervous,” said Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a media and political strategist, referring to Biden’s recent gaffes. “I think some of his responses are just plain sloppy.”
Ferriabough Bolling was Jesse Jackson’s New England press secretary when Jackson ran for president in 1984 and referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown,” The Boston Globe reported.
She says she knows “what’s in (Biden’s) heart,” no matter how awkwardly those feelings may be expressed. In contrast, she said, “Trump doesn’t make gaffes” — in other words, he’s as racist as he sounds.
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But, Dixon said, it’s Biden, not Trump, who needs the Black vote.
“Biden cannot win the general election solely with the Black super voters the likes of whom helped him carry South Carolina. To defeat Trump and his coalition of fraudulently-aggrieved white Americans, Biden will need the votes of Black people who, quite frankly, do not like him and have to convince ourselves anew every morning that we’re voting to remove Trump and not to support him,” Dixon wrote.
