Former President Barack Obama is the gift that keeps on giving, at least when it comes to placing blame on Black folk for not being monolithically ecstatic about the Democratic Party. Citing some minor movement of Black men toward possibly not voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, Obama during a surprise campaign stop in Pittsburgh on Oct. 10 blasted away at what he saw as straight-up misogyny. Black men “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” and they are hiding behind “other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama said.

There has been too much of a tendency among Democratic politicians like Obama to suggest that Black Americans have not done enough. Most recent polls contradict Obama’s sternness about Black men; support for Harris among all Black voters is at the same level or higher than it was for President Joe Biden before he quit his race in July. If anything, the polls suggest that perhaps Obama should be speaking with Latino men, whose support for Harris is lukewarm at best.

At least when Ronald Reagan went to the South Bronx in 1980 to tell a crowd of beleaguered Black and Latinx folks that “the federal........

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