Inside a barbershop in Atlanta’s affluent Buckhead neighborhood, eight Black men gathered to talk politics on the day before the presidential debate. Most were business owners around town, social media stars and notable conservatives.
All but one.
Mark Boyd, whose personal politics might best be described as insubordinate, somehow found himself next to two Republican representative, taking a phone call from Donald Trump.
“When I came in and saw the doggone sign ‘Blacks for Trump’ or whatever, I’m like: ‘Well, that’s the okey-doke. But I’m going to get their ass,” Boyd said.
In the race between Herschel Walker and the Rev Raphael Warnock for a Georgia senate seat two years ago, Boyd cast a blank ballot. He expects to do the same thing in the presidential race this year.
Trump called in to the barbershop the day before the debate, talking about ending taxes on tips and rolling back regulations. Boyd got to ask him a question.
“In the Black community, it’s been made a big deal about how you have been kind of railroaded here, as far as your court cases go,” Boyd asked Trump. “If you can acknowledge that you’re getting support from Black people because of this, then we can kind of acknowledge that we have been getting railroaded. So, my question is … what can we do about those Fani Willises and Alvin Braggs that are right now sending some poor Black person to jail for a crime?”
It’s an interesting, nuanced question – better, perhaps, than many of the questions put to Trump by debate moderators a day later. Does Trump’s legal ordeal change the way he looks at how the criminal justice system treats common Black defendants?
Trump dodged the question. “It’s weaponization, and it comes out of the White House,” Trump said, “even when it’s city and state, it comes out of the White House in order to attack a political opponent. But since that happened, the Black support I think, my representatives will tell you this, the Black support has gone through the roof. And I guess they equated to problems that they’ve had.”
He then went on to talk about how his mugshot was more popular than Frank Sinatra’s or Elvis Presley’s.
‘If these were white girls, it would be different’
Boyd, a Marine Corps veteran who built airplanes for Lockheed, is a second amendment partisan who rejects any candidate advocating for gun control. But he’s also deeply concerned about racial justice, and can’t make common cause with politicians who aren’t. Boyd founded Helping Empower Youth to address a cultural phenomenon in Atlanta and one of the city’s most contentious problems: Black teens risking their safety by hawking water on street corners and at events. His question to Trump goes to the heart of his work, he said.
“He pulled that Trump okey-doke on me,” Boyd said. “I learned about the Trump okey-doke firsthand.”
Boyd’s work with kids focuses on training, professionalism and ultimately harnessing their entrepreneurial energy into a legitimate business. It’s a fundamentally conservative answer to a Black social problem, and one that conservatives would do well to listen to, Boyd said. “They’re always telling us we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” Boyd said. “I believe in that basic idea of capitalism.”
The sight of Black boys risking conflict on the street, arrest or their very bodies just to make a buck has caused Atlanta’s predominantly liberal, Black political class to call the city’s moral and economic priorities into question. But conservatives – particularly white conservatives – have been unwilling to acknowledge that race and gender are central to the problems of Black empowerment, Boyd said. Young Black men don’t tend to have equal access to opportunity, and those with arrest records are nigh unemployable in traditional jobs.
“If these were little blue-eyed blond white girls with lemonade stands, it would be seen as something totally different,” Boyd said.
Even as Boyd was talking through this in the barbershop, two teenagers in 100-degree heat were selling water to drivers across the street. One of the cops working the event wandered over to shoo them away. The kids weren’t happy.
They were expecting a $150 day. On a good day, they’ll clear $400 or $500, they said. “I would rather not have to ask my momma for nothing. I’d rather give her money,” one 17-year-old said. He’s been locked up a couple of times in the process of selling water, but there are no better options, he said: “I’ll make more money out here than a real job.”
#BlackJob goes viral
Debate moderator Dana Bash asked Biden and Trump about their approach to Black economic issues during the debate Thursday.
Biden said he doesn’t blame Black voters for being disappointed, noting the effects of inflation. But he cited low unemployment figures for Black workers and a reduction in costs for childcare, and he touched on a topic that has been roiling Atlanta and other cities: the encroachment of corporate landlords on single-family neighborhoods and increasing consolidation in the housing market. “The fact of the matter is more small Black businesses have been started in any time in history,” Biden answered.
Despite what even Biden has acknowledged was a poor debate performance, Trump’s response struck a chord with Black voters for all the wrong reasons.
“As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border,” Trump said. “They’re taking Black jobs now and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”
The term #BlackJob began to go viral on Twitter even before the debate ended, as incredulous watchers derided the idea of a racially coded job and considered what Trump must think of Black workers if they can easily be replaced by an undocumented laborer.
“The ‘Black job’ has actually not been defined in America, which is why DEI initiatives which are now being rolled back were put into place to begin with,” said Bem Joiner, an Atlanta cultural critic and creative consultant who expected the debate to generate memes. “#BlackJobs is the cultural moment that came from the debate.”
Losing Georgia
Much has been made of the purported gains Trump has made with Black voters in polls. Those polls are questionable: a collapse in response rates has been coupled with tiny sample sizes and statistically illiterate reporting to present the impression of a meaningful shift.
But small gains will matter in a state like Georgia, where about 30% of the electorate is Black. Black men have long been more likely to vote for Republican candidates than Black women are. They are also far less likely to vote, noted Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director for the New Georgia Project.
In Georgia, 584,228 Black men who are currently registered voted in the 2020 presidential election, Ali said. For Black women, the figure is 931,232. Nationally, Biden overall won 48% of men and 55% of women, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Biden won 87% of Black men and 95% of Black women.
Conservatives tend to overperform that mark a bit in Georgia, because the Black electorate here is somewhat more conservative than it is nationwide. But all else being equal, if Trump were to win one in five Black men in Georgia instead of one in six – even if figures for Black women remained in the same low single digits of support – that would represent a gain of about 25,000 votes, more than twice the margin of his 2020 defeat.
Losing Georgia because Black voters underperform is a nightmare scenario for progressives here. The New Georgia Project’s political action committee hosted a debate watch party Thursday at the Prime Cigar bar on Peachtree Street in Atlanta as part of a campaign of deliberate outreach to Black men. The room filled with smoke, political candidates and party officials, mostly Democrats, mostly there to cheer for president Joe Biden.
Then Biden began to speak, and bit by bit people started to pay less attention to the giant screen above the bar and more to what they were drinking.
“I don’t think [Trump] did anything special. He kind of showed up,” said Domonic Brown, a progressive voter who watched the debate at the bar. “Joe Biden, in my opinion, made it easier for him. … I think that’s one of the scarier things about Joe Biden or Donald Trump as our only options. I definitely see why the Democratic party is in kind of disarray right now. But it’s kind of like, how could you guys just not see this coming?”
Javarius Gay is the swing voter both Joe Biden and Donald Trump wanted to reach Thursday night. Gay owns Prime Cigar and several other bars in town – a Black business owner in a city that presents itself as a land of opportunity for Black entrepreneurs.
Since the night of the debate, Rocky Jones, owner of Rocky’s Barbershop where Trump called in, says he was misled into hosting the event, which he thought would be a forum for Black businesses.
“I thought it was going to be something real private,” Jones said to the local news station 11Alive. “I’m thinking about Black businesses in Atlanta, small Black businesses in Atlanta. And I’m like: ‘OK, so when are we gonna start talking about this?’”
Jones has seen backlash from angry members of the community, and customers to his shop have dwindled. But he hopes the controversy will pass, emphasizing that the barbershop is not a place for politics.
“I have no involvement in politics. We don’t even talk politics in my barbershop. It’s all sports. The World Cup, soccer, baseball, basketball – politics is not what I do. I commend everybody to vote, but that’s your business. You know, I don’t tell you what to do,” Jones added.
Though Gay’s cigar bar hosted a debate watch party for a progressive political action committee that night, Gay himself was undecided.
“I’m open. I didn’t have my mind already made up,” he said a few minutes after the debate ended. Gay generally votes for Democrats. But after the debate, he’s still thinking about it. Gay was looking for substance on issues close to his interests: support for Black businesses, small business in general and homelessness.
“I was looking for Biden to be more natural with his arguments and his key points. He was all over the place a few times,” Gay said. “I don’t feel like his team prepared enough to fully win this debate. I honestly think he should have waited, should have never taken the stage, and come back later.”
