Diving into the Black Manosphere AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Code Switch

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Episode: Diving into the Black Manosphere

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:41:27

Episode Shownotes

The manosphere is a sprawling online ecosystem aimed at disgruntled men. Now a subset of the manosphere aimed at Black men is exposing cracks in Black voters' steadfast support of Democrats. On this episode, we take a look at how the Black manosphere came to be and wonder: could this

loose community of aggrieved dudes swing the election?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summary

In "Diving into the Black Manosphere," NPR's Code Switch explores the complex online ecosystem where Black men engage with masculinity, political views, and identity. The episode highlights the rise of the Black Manosphere, emphasizing its impact on voting behavior, particularly the increasing support for the Republican Party among Black men. It also discusses the historical and social narratives influencing these shifts, including the Moynihan Report's effects on perceptions of Black family structures. Overall, it raises critical questions about race, empowerment, and political realignment within the Black community.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Diving into the Black Manosphere) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_12
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00:00:49 Speaker_14
What's good? It's Gene Dunby. And real quick before the show, we know it's been a wild, exciting, exhausting election season.

00:00:57 Speaker_14
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00:01:31 Speaker_14
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00:01:47 Speaker_14
All right? All right. Thank you for listening. Here's Code Switch. Just a heads up, y'all. This episode contains some salty language by which I mean, it's finna be some cousin. What's good? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby.

00:02:02 Speaker_02
And I'm Bea Parker.

00:02:04 Speaker_14
Alright Parker, so this week I want to talk about a pandemic Zoom date that I heard about that went kinda sideways.

00:02:13 Speaker_02
Alright, let's get messy.

00:02:18 Speaker_03
For anybody who was doing it, you know, God, may the force be with you. It was really rough during the dark times. Who's that?

00:02:25 Speaker_14
So that's Nicole Young. She's a writer. She lives in South Philly.

00:02:29 Speaker_04
I was visiting a friend in D.C. and I've been on the apps. You know how you just kind of do a doom scroll when you're in another place.

00:02:35 Speaker_14
Anyways, I was doing that. So that's how she met this dude that she dubbed King.

00:02:41 Speaker_02
King?

00:02:42 Speaker_14
Yeah, King.

00:02:44 Speaker_04
I mean, who doesn't love a King?

00:02:46 Speaker_14
I'm sure he'd love that.

00:02:47 Speaker_04
So we matched, but we lived in different cities. And so he and I jumped on Zoom and it started good. It was actually a great date to begin with. We were vibing. There was a good banter and then things got weird.

00:03:03 Speaker_14
Do you remember exactly the moment when your antenna started to twitch? Like, all right, what is going on?

00:03:09 Speaker_04
I do think it was the moment when he said that I had been kind of masculine by asking him out. I think that was the moment where I was like, what?

00:03:19 Speaker_02
Oh no. Either she was going to have to make the first move or he was just never going to hear from her or vice versa. Right?

00:03:27 Speaker_14
And he's on a date. Like, why are you complaining, bro? I don't understand. Anyway, anyway, another thing she said was that King had all this jargon, like all these terms that she had never heard before.

00:03:37 Speaker_04
So hypergamous in particular was one of the words that like caught my brain because it's just not a normal word, you know, so I it's my brain snagged on that word in particular.

00:03:47 Speaker_14
And since Nicole was literally on her laptop, she Googled it as he was talking. I was like, what is hypergamy?

00:03:53 Speaker_14
Real quick, just to save you a Google, hypergamy is this idea that people are more attracted to folks who are more economically or socially successful than they are, or more sexually desirable than they are.

00:04:07 Speaker_14
And so when she Googled it, she saw lots of these graphs and charts that illustrated this thing called the 80-20 rule.

00:04:17 Speaker_04
And he was like, well, there are 20% of men that get all the women and they get all the acclaim.

00:04:23 Speaker_14
Which then means that men are in competition with each other for women as mates.

00:04:28 Speaker_02
So we're dealing with some kind of misogynistic Darwinism?

00:04:33 Speaker_14
Yes, exactly.

00:04:35 Speaker_04
All right, who doesn't love a chart? A chart and a graph, something about our minds. We're like, this must be reputable.

00:04:46 Speaker_03
There's a point in which it like turned over and I was like, you know what? We're in it, we're here for the story. And so I was asking him questions, you know, like I was like, what is this? What are we talking about?

00:05:00 Speaker_14
After that date, Nicole went into reporter mode because she wanted to understand where this verbiage, where these ideas were coming from. And she discovered it wasn't just King.

00:05:12 Speaker_14
So listen, a bunch of my female friends told me stories just like this one that Nicole was telling. They were on a date with some guy and things were going really well and then the dude said something just wild out of pocket.

00:05:25 Speaker_14
A friend of mine was talking to this dude who she'd gone on a few dates with and then she made some joke and then he cut her off and was like, don't talk over me, I'm a high value man.

00:05:39 Speaker_02
This reminds me, I went on a date with a guy when I was still a college professor, and then I told him I was a college professor. And he said, oh, so you think you're smart, huh? And I was like, well, I have a master's degree, so a little bit.

00:05:52 Speaker_02
I don't, I just don't get the desire to neg. Like, why can't you be nice to me?

00:05:58 Speaker_14
Presumably he wants you to like him. I don't, I don't know what the logic is there. But yeah, this friction that you felt, Parker, and that my friends were telling me about in their dating stories, Nicole was saying the same thing.

00:06:08 Speaker_04
when you start looking up these terms that they're using, it takes you, it's the portal to the rabbit hole of the manosphere.

00:06:20 Speaker_14
The Manisphere, this whole sprawling universe of media, podcasts, and books, and YouTube channels. I guess those are all media. Subreddits that are made by and consumed by men.

00:06:33 Speaker_14
And men who are deeply suspicious of, if not hostile towards, feminism, and who also champion all sorts of other kinds of patriarchal ideas around sex and gender.

00:06:43 Speaker_14
There are men's rights groups, you got incels, you got pickup artists, you got alpha men. It's... like Andrew Tate, who was really popular among a lot of young boys and men.

00:06:55 Speaker_05
Life for a man is harder than life for a woman. We need to have a lot of shit to be an important man. To be a woman, you need makeup.

00:07:01 Speaker_14
There's the whiter manosphere, and then there's the black manosphere, which has its own ecosystem and argo and celebrities, right? And the people who hang out in these spaces have their own fascinations, their own anxieties about how they feel.

00:07:16 Speaker_14
Black men and black women relate or I guess, don't relate to each other. And in these spaces, terms like high value, man, they take on a different shading, no pun intended.

00:07:28 Speaker_14
The reason I wanted to talk to Nicole about what she learned by going down the rabbit hole of the Manosphere was because this stuff isn't just showing up.

00:07:36 Speaker_14
on people's weirdly antagonistic dates, there are potentially electoral ramifications for it too.

00:07:42 Speaker_14
I mean, these spaces in the Black Manisphere are a cauldron of idiosyncratic conservatisms, lots of unapologetic male bluster, a lot of flexing, and all this together means that the Black Manisphere is full of Black men who are

00:08:02 Speaker_14
pretty amenable to political figures like I think I know where this is going.

00:08:08 Speaker_02
Black men. I love black men.

00:08:10 Speaker_13
I love them. I love them. I have gone through the roof with black men. Black men. I don't do quite as well with black women, I must say.

00:08:26 Speaker_14
Trump's campaign has been trying to woo black men, especially young black men, and it looks like it's working. One in four black men under the age of 50 support Donald Trump. That's according to a recent NAACP poll.

00:08:39 Speaker_14
And while, you know, hearing, okay, 25% of black men are going for Trump may not sound like a big number, consider that over the last 60 years, Republicans' best showing in an election with Black folks was a whopping 13%.

00:08:52 Speaker_14
Black folks have been the most dogged supporters of Democrats for a long time, but Black men's support for Democrats, in particular, has been steadily ebbing over the last few presidential cycles.

00:09:04 Speaker_14
We know that everybody's voting behavior is influenced by what the people around you are doing. You should check out our episode on Black Republicans for more on that.

00:09:12 Speaker_14
But it's important here because these men who would usually feel immense social pressure, IRL, to vote for Democrats, now they have community with each other on the internet.

00:09:25 Speaker_14
And so on this episode of Parker and Listener, we're talking about high value men the black male crisis, and what all this has to do with who could take the White House.

00:09:35 Speaker_01
Take it from here, Gene. This message comes from Discover, weighing in on what's accepted and what's not as accepted. First, did you know Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide? But showing up to a party empty-handed?

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00:10:49 Speaker_09
I'm Jesse Thorne. On Bullseye, Connie Chung, the legend of TV news, tells us about her incredible career and marvels at the convenience of standing desks.

00:10:59 Speaker_02
They have these desks here in New York that move up and down.

00:11:04 Speaker_09
That's on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

00:11:12 Speaker_14
That disaster of a date we just heard about with King, that was Nicole Young's introduction to the Black Manisphere, and it became the basis for a feature article she wrote for Elle magazine.

00:11:23 Speaker_04
I will say that the two months that I researched this piece was like one of the most emotionally exhausting research experiences I've ever had.

00:11:32 Speaker_04
Because I've never had to consume, yeah, I've just never had to consume so much content of people who hate me.

00:11:42 Speaker_14
Nicole's piece is kind of a survey of the Black Manisphere. And Nicole laid out the history for me. So she said that for a long time, there was one big, roiling online manisphere that really kind of came into being in the early aughts.

00:11:56 Speaker_14
You know, message boards, live journals. Y'all remember blogs? That was the time. And they were all kind of concerned with and anxious about the state of masculinity.

00:12:05 Speaker_14
And we should say that people, mostly dudes, but people have been fretting over the condition of men forever.

00:12:11 Speaker_14
But in the early 21st century, there was a raft of headlines and tread lines that sparked a new wave of tut-tutting about the state of manhood.

00:12:21 Speaker_14
So men had become less likely to go to college than women and less likely to graduate from college than women once they got there. When men were surveyed, they reported having fewer friends than they did a generation ago.

00:12:34 Speaker_14
Many dudes say they had no close friends at all. And the economic prospects were not the same. Gone were the days when a young man fresh out of high school could get a solid, stable job in the factory or the auto plant. Those jobs mostly went away.

00:12:49 Speaker_14
And those post-GI Bill days of the mid-20th century, where the government subsidized the creation of the white middle class with grants and home loans, Those days are obviously all gone. So just imagine you're a 24-year-old dude today.

00:13:05 Speaker_14
You might very well be working in the gig economy, you know, driving an Uber, doing DoorDash, whatever. You're isolated. You don't have colleagues or mentors in the workplace to show you the ropes. You're not in a union.

00:13:15 Speaker_14
You can barely swing rent, let alone a down payment for a house. If you were attracted to women, they are more likely to have gone to college and then moved on to have more options than you, so your dating prospects might feel limited to you.

00:13:28 Speaker_14
Combine that with the isolation that might come with having very few, if any, close friends. And you, too, might gravitate toward podcasts and YouTube channels and streamers that validate your sense of grievance.

00:13:41 Speaker_14
You know, this idea that you got done dirty by the current state of affairs. So for about two decades, the man-focused interwebs have been a place where you could find all manner of people offering solutions to this stuff.

00:13:52 Speaker_14
You would find dudes giving each other advice on how to dress and how to pick up women.

00:13:57 Speaker_05
It doesn't matter what you wear if you haven't got the correct swag. And if you do have the right body language, it doesn't really matter what you wear either. how to be more assertive.

00:14:06 Speaker_05
If you are big and strong and well-trained and you walk through life with confidence, you're not gonna need any gain. The girls are gonna sense it and you're gonna have girls. I don't have to go out of my way to get laid, ever.

00:14:18 Speaker_14
And all that next to men lamenting over the fact that they could not find women to have sex with them.

00:14:23 Speaker_00
That the rate of sexlessness among young men has tripled in the decade leading up to 2018. What in the hell is going on?

00:14:32 Speaker_14
Or men lamenting that the women who did have sex with them wanted too much money and child support.

00:14:38 Speaker_05
You want that kid in Gucci, you in Gucci, you in a nice car going on dates with another dude with my money.

00:14:45 Speaker_14
In this wider manosphere, it overlaps with white supremacists and far-right ideologies. Lots of men, of all different races we should say, have been getting activated and red-pilled and radicalized by these online manosphere spaces.

00:14:59 Speaker_04
But in 2016, there was a break.

00:15:02 Speaker_14
And I think you can guess what happened there.

00:15:04 Speaker_04
So Trump's rise to power unearths a lot of racial tension in the manosphere space too, right? And then a kind of a black manosphere space like carves itself out.

00:15:18 Speaker_04
And I think the unifying thing at first in the manosphere is like, we're all men, we men, you know, we are together, we are this block against the, you know, the invading feminist horde.

00:15:29 Speaker_04
But then when you start, those white men start using the language of Trump in those spaces, black men were like, oh, I gotta, we gotta make our own, we gotta make our own misogyny spot, so.

00:15:42 Speaker_14
That's so funny. We gotta make our own. The white man's ice is not cold enough.

00:15:46 Speaker_04
Yeah. We don't need the white man's misogyny. We got our own. Yeah, we got our own.

00:15:53 Speaker_14
It's interesting, then, that while these Black Manosphere spaces came into full flower in response to Trump's rise, now many of the people in these spaces are more fully embracing of Trump the politician.

00:16:06 Speaker_14
A few of the people I spoke to mentioned Trump's particular appeal to certain kinds of dudes, right? He's branding himself as a flashy, unapologetic, business-savvy real estate mogul. It's the same reason he's been embraced by so many rappers, right?

00:16:19 Speaker_14
Like 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Waka Flocka, yay? Trump is aspirational. And these growing, blacker, manosphere spaces, they have been, like, marinating in this kind of rhetoric that Nicole's date King was using on their Zoom call.

00:16:36 Speaker_14
Those ideas are kind of spread out across the wider internet landscape now, and some of the players in that space gained some notoriety when that happened, too.

00:16:43 Speaker_14
But no Black man in his fair personality garnered more attention, both inside and outside of those spaces, than Kevin Samuels.

00:16:52 Speaker_13
A woman in high demand has a mindset that's cooperative, smart, and agreeable.

00:16:58 Speaker_04
He had a very popular podcast and radio show.

00:17:02 Speaker_14
Samuels initially was branding himself as an image consultant. He was offering up sartorial and style advice for dudes.

00:17:10 Speaker_04
He had a section where he would have female callers call. and they would tell him about their dating life, and he would basically insult and berate them.

00:17:19 Speaker_13
Listen, listen, listen. Overall, does that make you below average, average, or above average? Factor all those things in together. Average. So why should you get anything over, then why should you get above average? You should get what you are.

00:17:40 Speaker_14
He called women over 35 leftovers. He mocked them for seeking careers. He told men not to date women who weren't submissive. And then in 2020, one of his videos went viral and he rocketed to notoriety or infamy.

00:17:57 Speaker_14
And as time went on, his content became more, well, like in that lane. And that gained him a lot of detractors, but also a really big audience.

00:18:07 Speaker_04
I talked to so many Black men in my life about Kevin Samuels, and so many of them have admitted to me that they liked his content a lot. And they liked it because he was talking about empowerment.

00:18:17 Speaker_04
They were like, well, he was talking about Black man empowerment. It wasn't all negative. It wasn't all whatever.

00:18:22 Speaker_04
And that is also a claim of other creators in the manosphere, that actually this is a space for them to like, you know, to strengthen each other.

00:18:31 Speaker_13
You go ahead and become the man you need to be. You go ahead and get up to the top, the top of the top, top, top, the tippy, tippy, top. You get your name up on Mount Rushmore.

00:18:38 Speaker_13
You climb Everest, you make as much, you go as high, you go as far as you can, and let the haters stand outside and call you whatever outside the gates.

00:18:48 Speaker_14
Nicole did not get a chance to talk to Kevin Samuels for her story. Kevin Samuels died in 2022 at the age of 53. But she did interview another player in the space, player-like character, not player-like. I'm playing in front of him a layers.

00:19:04 Speaker_14
Anyway, it's a dude named Mumia Obsidian Ali, who describes himself as one of the three kings of the Black Manisphere. And he also described himself as a semi-professional pest.

00:19:16 Speaker_04
So the interview with Mumia Obsidian Ali was particularly odd.

00:19:23 Speaker_14
For starters, she said he would not agree to do an interview with her unless she read his very long, self-published book.

00:19:32 Speaker_04
So he sends me the PDF of his book. It's 42 chapters.

00:19:35 Speaker_14
But she read it, and then she got on a Zoom with him. And from the jump, it was a mean-spirited conversation.

00:19:41 Speaker_04
And I had my camera on, and he didn't the entire time. And when we get on the call, he doesn't say hi. He doesn't even say, I say, hello. No one answers. I say, hello. He's off camera. And then all of a sudden an advertisement starts playing, right?

00:19:58 Speaker_04
And the advertisement, I'm saying in quotes, is Wookiee Weave.

00:20:04 Speaker_06
Call 1-800-WOOKIEE and get yours today. Call right now and we'll throw in a free bottle of Elmer's glue so you can be sure that your Wookiee Weave hair hat stays on all damn day or order online.

00:20:20 Speaker_04
So it's like an advertisement. And then there's Chewbacca. Chewbacca is braying in the background of this advertisement. And it is clearly meant to insult me, because at the time I had box braids in, and they were purple.

00:20:40 Speaker_04
And I am shaking, actually, afterwards, because I was like, what is this? And I was like, so it stops. And I was like, what was that? And he was like, what do you mean? And I was like, what was that, that you just played?

00:20:53 Speaker_04
And he was, I think he did a thing that this space does, that misogyny does in general, like men who are misogynists also do. It's like, it's just a joke. What's the big deal?

00:21:06 Speaker_14
Nicole said that a lot of the dudes she spoke to did this whole, like, it was just jokes thing, you know what I mean? After they said or did something really offensive, kind of throwing rocks and then hiding their hands.

00:21:16 Speaker_14
Anyway, she said, Obsidian Ali started getting into the tropes of the Black Manisphere, which, by this point in the conversation, we are familiar with. Like, the 80-20 thing.

00:21:25 Speaker_07
80% of the guys get looked over while 20% of the guys get the ladies who then screw the ladies over and the ladies, you know, complain and talk about black men and shit.

00:21:35 Speaker_04
And he keeps saying that. Black women have had their chance. They've had, the reason why he created his part of the manosphere is because Black women have always had the mic. They always get to say what they want to say.

00:21:48 Speaker_04
All of the TV shows, all of the movies, all of the things that are in big, you know, regular Black culture are Black women's perspectives. And Black men haven't had a chance to say what they really need to say.

00:21:58 Speaker_04
And so that's why he started doing the Black Manosphere work.

00:22:02 Speaker_14
But he also situated his work in a larger political context.

00:22:05 Speaker_04
We talked about the Moynihan Report, which was interesting, and he had said to me that this was really present in the space, that the Moynihan Report was really present.

00:22:14 Speaker_14
Yeah, the Moynihan Report. So we talk about the Moynihan Report a lot on Code Switch. I guess we should pause for a little explanatory comment here. All right, somebody got to queue up some music here, maybe something a little pensive. Thank you, ex.

00:22:31 Speaker_14
Okay, here we go. The Moynihan Report. It's actually called The Negro Family, The Case for National Action. And it was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a member of Lyndon Johnson's cabinet back in 1965.

00:22:43 Speaker_14
And in this report, which originally wasn't even supposed to be made public, Moynihan says that the number of black households headed by single mothers was a driver of black social dysfunction.

00:22:55 Speaker_14
And he said that that social dysfunction was a major contributor to these huge socioeconomic disparities between black folks and white folks. Nicole said the Moynihan report gets cited a lot by people in the black corners of the hemisphere.

00:23:11 Speaker_14
You know, these are people who feel that black families have fallen apart as people have strayed from supposedly traditional gender roles with two heterosexual parents and men as heads of the household.

00:23:22 Speaker_04
I think that the Moynihan Report gave a really particular type of touchpoint in the 20th century that has its language has pervaded so much of black life. Like it was seen as this like desire to actually correct a wrong within us.

00:23:38 Speaker_04
And I think whether or not we want to admit it or not, like centuries at this point of conditioning that tell us that we are less. makes us think that the reason that we hold this place in society is because of something innately wrong with us.

00:23:53 Speaker_14
And this is the kind of thinking that plays really well with church sermons or the many, many mentorship programs for black boys that teach them how to be good black men. I'm doing air quotes, good black men.

00:24:07 Speaker_14
Programs like Barack Obama's My Brother's Keeper. I mean, these ideas don't sound that out of place in Obama's speeches to and about black men. I mean, hell, the idealized upwardly mobile, heteronormative black family.

00:24:20 Speaker_14
That's not a small part of the Obama's appeal to a lot of people. They're the huckstables for the 21st century. I mentioned to Nicole a caricature that Obama kept name-checking during his first presidential run in 2008.

00:24:32 Speaker_14
It actually turns out that she was working for Obama around that time. You were talking about Kooky. I don't remember this.

00:24:37 Speaker_04
It was on the campaign trail. Yes, Kooky. Oh, this was a thing? Yeah, this was a thing.

00:24:42 Speaker_14
Obama gave the speech at a black church, and you know, he did his finger-wagging thing at this hypothetical trifling-ass Cousin Pookie. You know, the kind of brother who, among other things, you know, don't come out to vote.

00:24:53 Speaker_14
You know, the antithesis, in a lot of ways, of the good black man.

00:24:56 Speaker_11
But I tell you what, I also know that if Cousin Pookie would vote... If Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

00:25:15 Speaker_04
Like, he got a lot of mmms. And it's, I think, about this feeling of pathology, this feeling that we need to be corrected. We need to be told the right way.

00:25:25 Speaker_14
So you got the Moynihan Report and you got Obama's pookie, you got a bunch of other examples too, but they're pulling from the same well of anxieties over this idea of black familial dysfunction, you know, this idea that black uplift is being thwarted by a lack of personal responsibility for our choices.

00:25:45 Speaker_14
And if this is what so much of the discourse about black folks sounds like outside of the manosphere,

00:25:51 Speaker_14
Should it be any surprise that the Notions champion in the Manosphere strikes so many of the audience, so many of the denizens of that space as common sense?

00:26:00 Speaker_14
Nicole talked to a lot of dudes in the space for her reporting, and she felt like a lot of them were actually really struggling in some way. They were doubling down on the patriarchy, but the spoils of the patriarchy were not redounded to them.

00:26:12 Speaker_14
Like, their lives weren't going the way they wanted, and they were angry about it. And she said that a lot of these guys venerated

00:26:19 Speaker_14
these very specific ideals about masculinity and Black masculinity, while also kind of beating themselves up about the fact that they were falling short of those same ideals.

00:26:29 Speaker_14
But Nicole says some of the people who read her piece bristled at her observation that those dudes were hurting.

00:26:37 Speaker_04
It felt like I was too sympathetic to them, which I, you know, I don't know. But my point in saying that they're in pain is that that is what it is. That's how I experienced it, right?

00:26:50 Speaker_04
is that you can only be talking like this if you feel like you don't have any value in a society, if you feel like you don't have anything, any power. And their only ability to acquire power is by subjugating someone else.

00:27:06 Speaker_14
Ask Nicole if she thought there was a way to really reach these cats.

00:27:11 Speaker_04
I don't know how you unradicalize these men. I don't know how you deprogram them, but I have to believe it's possible in part because I believe our survival as black people is contingent on each other.

00:27:25 Speaker_04
The only way we get out of this is by realizing that we are valuable and we are important and we lack nothing and that together we could do all the things. And so I got to believe that these people can be turned in some way.

00:27:39 Speaker_04
I'm not responsible for the turning. I have no desire, but somebody can do it.

00:27:46 Speaker_14
Nicole Young is a freelance writer and a ghostwriter. Her work has appeared in Skyler Wag and her feature article, My Brush with the Black Manisphere, appeared in Elle magazine in 2022. Thank you so much, Nicole.

00:27:58 Speaker_04
Thank you for having me, Gene.

00:28:00 Speaker_14
When we come back, a look at how the socially conservative views of Black men in the manosphere make them attractive to Republicans.

00:28:07 Speaker_15
— You don't need 50-60% of Black men to vote Trump. If you can just get 10%, 10% would be enough to skew a state like Georgia.

00:28:16 Speaker_14
— That's coming up. Stay with us.

00:28:23 Speaker_12
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00:29:36 Speaker_01
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00:29:55 Speaker_14
Gene, just Gene, code switch. In order to really understand how the mainstream works today, we need to look back at how some really old ideas continue to shape Black politics.

00:30:08 Speaker_14
Zahida Grundy is a sociologist at Boston University who researches how Black men think about and make and police masculinity.

00:30:16 Speaker_15
I am otherwise just a feminist malcontent, and I focus on feminist sociology of race.

00:30:25 Speaker_14
Saidia says we have to go back to the days after emancipation in the 1800s, after black folks were freed.

00:30:31 Speaker_14
Black men gained the right to vote, but black women obviously did not, which created this complex negotiation over gender and voting and party politics.

00:30:41 Speaker_15
Instead of black men seeing themselves as individual voters, they were instead delegates for the race, right? In fact, they were often delegates for their household.

00:30:50 Speaker_15
So black women were known to organize entire black communities around election day, right? So they would have, you know, the church would have a picnic for election day. There would be fundraisers.

00:31:00 Speaker_15
Black women would carry pistols on election day to make sure that no one was harassing black men going to polls and also to protect black communities because the most common time for lynching was the day before an election.

00:31:11 Speaker_15
There was this joke in politics that if there was a political convention in town, you better be prepared to do your own laundry and make your own lunch because all the Black women were going to be at the convention.

00:31:23 Speaker_14
This meant that official, institutional Black power lay in the hands of men, even if Black women were doing the organizing.

00:31:30 Speaker_14
It was also during this period, Saida said, that there were lots of Black folks who argued that in order to make the case for full citizenship and protection under the law, Black people needed to carry themselves properly, right, by performing masculinity and femininity the right way, both in public and at home.

00:31:48 Speaker_14
Today, we just call this stuff respectability politics. And, you know, it's a school of thought that has been remixed and sampled and chopped and screwed over and over ever since.

00:31:57 Speaker_14
Like, through the bloody period of spectacle lynchings in the early 20th century,

00:32:00 Speaker_14
to black workers striking and holding up signs that read, I am a man, in the 1960s, to when the Moynihan Report concluded that black families were broken and in disarray because of fatherless households.

00:32:12 Speaker_14
It's a brand of politics that not only calls for supposedly traditional family structures, but that also puts Black men's concerns front and center.

00:32:22 Speaker_14
But let's jump to the 1980s, when Saeeda said there was a clarion call about the state of Black manhood and it made it to the front page of Ebony magazine.

00:32:31 Speaker_15
Y'all need to understand that there were two Bibles. Before Black Twitter, there were two publications that were the Bible in Black households. Ebony and Jet. I learned how to read.

00:32:43 Speaker_14
reading my aunt's stack of Ebony and Jet magazines in the hallway.

00:32:48 Speaker_15
When a black woman dies in old age, the first thing you gotta go through is all her Jets. Like, that's the first thing you gotta go through in your auntie's house. So these publications were critical to sort of setting the black agenda, right?

00:33:02 Speaker_15
They told black people, what are we focused on right now? So that August 1983 cover, it says, bold, the crisis of the black male. The crisis of the black male. The cover is not of a black male who is downtrodden by Reagan's politics.

00:33:24 Speaker_15
It's not of a poor black man. It's not of a black man out of work. It's not of a black man on the street. The cover is a yellow taxi, and the door is open to a black man in a pinstripe suit, very cleanly dressed.

00:33:39 Speaker_15
He's carrying a briefcase, right, and he's sort of

00:33:42 Speaker_14
He got that shit on.

00:33:43 Speaker_15
Yeah, he's dripping, right? He is in corporate drip, corporate realness, as we might say in the ballroom culture, right?

00:33:51 Speaker_14
And this crisis of the black male was being called out in 1983. Like, this is a time when black poverty is on the rise. And a lot of people were very cynically blaming that poverty on so-called welfare queens.

00:34:04 Speaker_15
It says instead that this crisis is about brothers, you know, in the boardroom. This crisis is about black male elites, privileged black men, right?

00:34:13 Speaker_14
The editor of Ebony at the time was this dude named Lerone Bennett, and it's probably worth noting here that he was a graduate of Morehouse College, an institution that famously or infamously has a very traditionalist look on masculinity.

00:34:26 Speaker_14
Anyway, this Ebony magazine cover article comes out and it posits that the black men who are supposed to be the leaders

00:34:32 Speaker_14
of black communities were having a hard time getting ahead, and that black America needed to focus their attention on that problem. Saeeda said that this was when the somewhat paradoxical stories about black men began to take root, right?

00:34:47 Speaker_14
So you've got the story that black men and boys are both uniquely dangerous, like, you know, the whole super predators thing.

00:34:53 Speaker_14
And also, the only people who could save troubled black communities and troubled black families were black men, provided, you know, they got their shit together and were supported and getting their shit together.

00:35:03 Speaker_15
We usurped crisis and turned them into, well, the real victim is men. What that has to do with the manosphere is even the Black manosphere is particularly a rhetoric about the victimization of Black men, right?

00:35:17 Speaker_15
All of that rhetoric of the 80s, all of LaRome Bennett talking about black men are not heads of household, black men are being out-earned by black women, black men are being out-educated by black women, all of that rhetoric, which LaRome Bennett didn't invent, he just really amplified it.

00:35:37 Speaker_15
All of that is in the manosphere as, and what we need, you know, that is not only the problem for the race, but the response to it should be to take women down a peg. right?

00:35:50 Speaker_15
That they've gotten too far and that that is emasculating Black men and that the real devastation to the race is that Black men don't feel valued traditionally.

00:36:02 Speaker_14
So this narrative held that Black men are the missing element to strong Black families and that upwardly mobile, or at least, you know, stable, middle-class Black men are exceedingly scarce and needed to be nurtured and cultivated.

00:36:14 Speaker_14
It's not really a huge conceptual leap from there to thinking of yourself as one of the rare good dudes, a high value man in the dating marketplace with a competitive advantage over other dudes for women and partners.

00:36:28 Speaker_15
What's interesting about that is that's not about women. It's what men don't want to admit is that that's an anxiety about comparing themselves to other men. And the manosphere doesn't like to admit it, but their obsession is with other men.

00:36:44 Speaker_15
They don't want to admit that because they know that sounds very homosocial and kind of genderqueer, but their obsession is with other men. And women are just a vessel for which they get compared to other men.

00:37:01 Speaker_15
Because patriarchy has never just been about the relationship between men and women. Patriarchy is also about the relationship between men and men.

00:37:09 Speaker_14
Saeeda said there are a lot of reasons young men today, and young black men, are particularly open to this way of thinking. A big one is that just a lot of the benchmarks for adulthood just don't really fit anymore.

00:37:21 Speaker_15
So, you have men of this generation are looking at their grandfathers, and really their grandfathers looking at them, and saying, what's the problem with you? When I was your age, I had a car, a wife, I was supporting my family.

00:37:34 Speaker_15
What's the problem with you? You're sleeping on a twin bed in your mother's basement, right?

00:37:38 Speaker_15
These are men who, instead of saying, oh, that generation was unfairly floated and really had no competition and were given all these handouts by the government, they're saying, well, the problem must be women.

00:37:51 Speaker_14
And that brings us to Kamala Harris. Democrats have seen a slow but very consistent ebbing of Black male support for a few election cycles now. The slip from Biden's numbers among Black men is striking.

00:38:06 Speaker_14
In a New York Times-Siena poll a month before the election, 70% of Black men said they plan to vote for Harris, which is down from Biden's 85% in 2020.

00:38:15 Speaker_14
To be clear, that still means the overwhelming majority of Black male voters are likely to vote for Kamala Harris.

00:38:20 Speaker_14
But it also means that Harris, the first Black woman to be at the top of a major party ticket, is on pace to see the worst showing among Black men in six decades. And this waning support for Democrats among Black men is a real thing.

00:38:33 Speaker_14
And the Harris campaign spent the last few weeks of the election really trying to stanch some of the bleeding.

00:38:37 Speaker_10
Vice President Kamala Harris is in Detroit tonight meeting with business owners and hitting the radio waves to make her case, especially to black male voters.

00:38:46 Speaker_08
Today, she's holding an event with black business leaders and even taping an interview with The Breakfast Club's Charlamagne Tha God. It's the latest stop on her multi-platform media blitz aimed at younger black voters. The VP, are you with me?

00:38:59 Speaker_14
Saeed has said that the manosphere is not incidental to all this.

00:39:03 Speaker_15
You don't need 50, 60% of black men to vote Trump. If you can just get 10%, 10% would be enough to skew a state like Georgia. 10% would probably be enough to do it in Pennsylvania.

00:39:15 Speaker_14
Zayda said that groups like Cambridge Analytica, which is this now defunct political consulting firm that caused a big scandal after it was caught targeting voters with disinformation on social media.

00:39:27 Speaker_14
They had specifically singled out black men as being particularly open or vulnerable to their tactics. She said this group's strategy in 2016 didn't even mean flipping those dudes into Trump voters.

00:39:40 Speaker_14
They just wanted to pepper them with enough misinformation and disinformation to get those dudes to stay home from the voting booths.

00:39:46 Speaker_15
They called them lie hoes, which was low information, high opinion.

00:39:54 Speaker_14
Oh, wow.

00:39:55 Speaker_15
Lie hoes. You might know some of them, right? For the lie hoes and for, for young black men, Cambridge Analytica understood that You can sort of take this like surgical type of blade and cut into the Black demographic that you want to stay home.

00:40:18 Speaker_15
That was their thing is like getting Black people to say, you know, I don't like either of these candidates. which there are ways in which all of that is valid. I think it's valid to not like either candidate.

00:40:28 Speaker_15
Look, there are a million and one reasons to critique Kamala Harris, but the reasons to critique Kamala Harris don't need to be misogynistic, right?

00:40:37 Speaker_15
You know, does she have a record, you know, with criminal justice reform or lack thereof that is worthy of critique? Absolutely. Right?

00:40:48 Speaker_15
Do we need to frame that as some misogynistic thing, as she's a bed wench with a white husband who is, you know, siding with white supremacy against Black men? That's where the manosphere comes in, right?

00:41:05 Speaker_14
In our previous reporting on Black Republicans, we talked to some researchers who underline this very important point that I think about a lot. Voting behavior is fundamentally social behavior.

00:41:16 Speaker_14
So who you vote for, whether you vote at all, that's shaped by things like whether you grew up in a house where people voted, and who they voted for, and whether and who the people in your peer group vote.

00:41:28 Speaker_14
And Black folks voting for Democrats is that social behavior, plus intense residential segregation. It's been a minute, y'all, but housing segregation and everything. Regardless of people's personal ideological beliefs,

00:41:41 Speaker_14
Black folks live around and work with and go to church with Black Democrats. This just isn't true for other groups of voters in the same way.

00:41:50 Speaker_14
And so defecting from the expectation that you're supposed to vote for Democrats at the voting booth comes with real social consequences. It might make it harder to get dates, you might get clowned or whatever.

00:41:59 Speaker_14
There's a reason that Black Republican for a long time has been like a shorthand for being a swagless cornball.

00:42:06 Speaker_14
But now those dudes can get on the internet and gas each other up and affirm each other and skirt some of that social pressure that might otherwise keep them from pulling the lever for a Republican like Donald Trump.

00:42:18 Speaker_15
You know, 2016, Trump did better with black men than pollsters had anticipated. And I want to make this clear. The Republican strategy among black men is not just in getting them to vote, it's also in getting them not to vote at all, right?

00:42:35 Speaker_15
So it's not just who they can pick up, it's what votes they can depress. And misinformation is a well-tried and true tactic of voter depression. By depression, we mean before you ever get to the polls, just not participating.

00:42:52 Speaker_14
Okay, so we've been talking about a cohort of black men voting behavior, right? But we have to say, almost all of Trump's viability as a national political figure, it comes from his robust support from white voters.

00:43:06 Speaker_14
Like, white people are the only racial group that Trump is above water with. And those white voters know that they make up a smaller and smaller slice of the electoral pie every four years.

00:43:20 Speaker_14
Whatever you make of the manosphere and its tenets, even if Trump only, only, I'm doing air quotes, ends up wrangling the 20-25% of Black men that the polls suggest he might, that would be seismic.

00:43:33 Speaker_14
And that shift could reshape not only the way the parties talk to Black voters, but also the way that Black voters talk and engage with each other. But this is just about voting.

00:43:42 Speaker_14
I mean, I don't know what any of this means for y'all on the apps, but Godspeed. And that's our show. But wait, wait, wait, wait. With the election coming up next week, we need your help.

00:43:58 Speaker_14
So as votes are being counted, we want to hear from you about what you're feeling.

00:44:02 Speaker_14
So email us a voice memo and tell us who you voted for and what issue was most important to you and how you think the winner of the presidential election will impact you and your people. You can follow us on Instagram at nprcodeswitch.

00:44:16 Speaker_14
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00:44:29 Speaker_02
And just a reminder that signing up for Codeswitch Plus is a great way to support our show and public media. And you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash Codeswitch.

00:44:47 Speaker_14
This episode you're listening to was produced by Xavier Lopez and Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein and Allison McAdam. Our engineer was Josephine Neonat.

00:44:57 Speaker_02
And a big shout out to the rest of the Code Switch Massive. As for us, I'm Gene Demby. I'm B.A. Parker. Be easy, y'all. Hydrate.

00:45:14 Speaker_01
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00:46:19 Speaker_01
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