As Democrats continue to snatch back the mantle of freedom, some younger Black voters feel that the message rings a little bit hollow.
Yes, they’re enthusiastic that Vice President Kamala Harris is at the top of a major political party’s ticket. But they’re also concerned that the party’s calls for freedom and a more inclusive democracy are too narrow — that they ignore the plight of Palestinians.
This friction contributes to a generational divide. One pollster, per The New York Times, observed an almost 30-point gap in support for Democrats between Black voters from the ages of 18 through 49 and Black voters 50 and over. Closing this gap will require Democrats to engage more intentionally and directly with frustrated voters, or else they might sit out the election altogether.
“Seeing a Black woman on the cusp of making history is so exciting, and it makes me excited to be a part of this work,” Briana Thomas, the development and operations manager at the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, a grassroots collective of Black, brown, LGBTQ, and working class students and their allies, told Capital B.
Still, Thomas continued, some younger Black voters “definitely want to see” Democrats adopt a more muscular approach to ending conflicts abroad, for instance by pushing to restrict arms sales to Israel.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began nearly a year ago, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. This devastation has displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population.
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The far-reaching human rights vision that’s especially common among younger Black voters was on full display at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference in Washington, D.C., this week.
In a jam-packed room at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Deyona Burton, the national programs director for the College Democrats of America, said that her mother often asks her why she cares so much about what’s going on elsewhere in the world — to communities that don’t involve her.
Her response?
“It’s mostly because I see [the violence] almost every single day,” Burton told an audience made up of younger and older Black voters alike. “I open up my feed, and even if I’m looking for a laugh or trying to find a meme or a reel, I always see something about what’s happening in Gaza.”
Her comments, delivered during a panel that focused on Black youth advocacy, were consistent with what Kenya Cummings, the executive director of the South Carolina Housing Justice Network, a Charleston-based tenants’ rights organization, told Capital B earlier this year.
Cummings explained that an entire generation of younger people has learned what mass death and complicity mean because of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. They added that “there’s a lot of Black and brown solidarity with Palestinians,” particularly when it comes to understanding the impact of being the target of state-sanctioned violence.
In fact, that kinship was the theme of a separate panel that featured U.S. Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, the scholar Marc Lamont Hill, and the journalist Mehdi Hasan.
“We need to be thinking globally,” Romman, the first Palestinian American elected to any office in Georgia, declared in a room that was so crowded that people had to stand in the hallway and crane their necks to view the stage.
Fueled by their abiding compassion for Palestinians, some younger Black voters have found it difficult to get fully on board with Democrats, who are reluctant to break the country’s long-standing alliance with Israel and jeopardize their ability to govern.
“We need to question people in power”
How might Democrats improve their relationship with younger Black voters? For starters, by talking about the issues that they actually want to talk about.
To an extent, Harris has done a better job of this than President Joe Biden. Recall how, ahead of a campaign stop in Detroit last month, she met briefly with Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed, two leaders of the “uncommitted” movement, who expressed their anger with Democrats over their refusal to impose an arms embargo on Israel and asked to meet to discuss U.S. foreign policy.
Alawieh and Elabed were hopeful that Democrats, with a new standard-bearer, would be more open to having tough conversations about the bombing of Gaza. They said to Mother Jones that Harris’ empathy toward them — and her comprehension of human suffering — “did feel genuine.”
But weeks later, a setback: No Palestinian American was granted a speaking slot at the four-day Democratic National Convention.
To party leaders, this was probably a way to avoid potentially squandering their newfound competitiveness in the presidential race or angering certain organizations, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC is an influential pro-Israel lobbying group that has demonstrated that it has the power to dash political ambitions.
Days after the DNC, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who often clashes with AIPAC, laid out the challenges of walking this tightrope: “It’s not enough to be right. We need to be right and WIN,” she noted on social media. “I believe that we have a moral obligation to be EFFECTIVE in addition to having a just stance, otherwise who are we doing this for?”
To others, the exclusion of a Palestinian American voice was an unforced error — one that exemplified the party’s tendency to evade grappling with the politically fraught topic.
“With the younger generation, there’s a lot more questioning — which is good,” Tristan St. John, a senior at Morehouse College who also works with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, told Capital B. “I feel as though we need to question people in power — these politicians — and make sure that our demands are being met.”
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And of course, location matters, too.
Burton, during her panel, emphasized the importance of Democrats seeking out areas where younger Black voters are likely to be, or sending trusted messengers on their behalf.
“It’s nothing for me to go into these barbershops or hair salons in my community and speak with people about the issues I care about because I am the people,” she said. “We’re even talking about doing voter registration in the club because you have to go where the people are.”
(After that remark, Niccara Campbell Wallace, the panel’s moderator and the executive director of the Rolling Sea Action Fund, a Black mobilization organization, quipped, “We can blow hookah smoke and register to vote. I know that’s right.”)
Burton’s broader point was a significant one: Possessing a desire to have a dialogue with younger Black voters about Gaza or any of the other issues animating them is meaningful only if Democrats know where they are, and can forge bonds with them there.
Or as she put it, “You can’t engage the community without knowing the community. And we have something to say.”
Staff writer Aallyah Wright contributed to this report.
The post ‘We Have Something to Say’: Younger Black Voters Want Attention on Gaza appeared first on Capital B News.
