Democrats need massive support from Black voters to win key races this fall. But that support is at risk if they keep letting the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) run on its ballot line and allow a group deeply misaligned with their community to increasingly define the party. Black Americans aren’t just the Democratic base.
We need to over perform for the party to win inevitably close elections. However, recent Democratic primaries in swing states have laid bare the glaring disconnect between the DSA and Black voters. Abdul El-Sayed, a DSA-aligned candidate for Senate, narrowly won in Michigan earlier this month, but without Black support.
He won because of younger, Whiter, farther-Left voters unrepresentative of the coalition ultimately needed to win the general election. On the flip side, in Wisconsin, David Crowley, the Black Milwaukee County Executive who won the gubernatorial primary against a DSA member, won exactly because of a swell in Black turnout. This contrast exists for a reason: the DSA is skeptical, if not outright hostile, to many of the pillars of Black advancement in this country and, as voters, we are sophisticated enough to understand that.
The DSA gives nothing and seeks only to use our communities as a launching pad for their political agenda and tries to use our painful struggles to maneuver their way into power. Over the past 100 years, Black America has advanced on our own terms. We have moved ahead by forging our own political power; owning homes and starting businesses, while sending our kids to the best schools and colleges.
But, despite claiming to fight for “working people” and minorities, there is nothing in the DSA agenda about Black generational wealth creation and entrepreneurship, likely because those ideas do not fit into the DSA worldview. In fact, their Housing Justice Commission describes its goal not as increasing minority homeownership, but as “the abolition of private ownership over land and shelter.” Many in the DSA also define the ownership of property as racist and engaging in a “White supremacist structure.” Try telling that to a Black family who can finally buy a home. That’s an achievement denied to us for generations through racist policies such as redlining, the denial of mortgages, loans, insurance to residents of certain neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity rather than individual creditworthiness.
Informing Black America that by buying a home, they are supporting White supremacy is ludicrous in its condescension. It’s also shocking in its deployment of dogmatic ideologies that they are arrogant enough to impose on us—when, by and large, the DSA isn’t even from Black and Brown communities. In fact, while they cannily run candidates of color, it’s not an organization of Black and Brown people or of working-class Americans.
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