Kwame Kilpatrick is straightforward about supporting Donald Trump’s return to the White House and why it isn’t terrifying as a Black man in America.
“White people being racist is not a big issue for me,” he said. “My life doesn’t change because somebody white said something racist.”
Kilpatrick was known as America’s hip-hop mayor after being elected in 2001 as Detroit’s youngest leader at age 31. He was a charismatic star who quoted rap lyrics on the trail and sported a diamond-studded earring while challenging his party to be bold, speaking on stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
That was until various scandals plagued his administration, forced his resignation and landed him in prison on public corruption crimes.
The 54-year-old Kilpatrick, released 20 years early when Trump commuted his sentence in 2021, has a quick barbershop delivery that hasn’t rusted.
But today his message is aimed at peeling away disaffected Black voters from President Joe Biden in the critical swing state of Michigan.
“It’s a difference between a white guy (Trump) who says something and a white guy (Biden) who does something,” Kilpatrick told USA Today in an interview Monday, referring to then Sen. Biden’s support for the controversial 1994 crime bill that led to a mass incarceration of Black men.
While running in 2019, Biden apologized for his role in the crime bill, and a USA Today/Suffolk poll released earlier this month shows the vast majority of Black men and women in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan still favor the president far more than Trump.
Yet Republicans have been relentlessly chipping at the Black vote with messages of discontent about the economy, illegal immigration and culture war issues, as Trump’s team deploys high-profile surrogates at fast food restaurants, churches and barbershops in predominately African American communities.
Experts say this reveals a key part of the Trump campaign political strategy: Leveraging a growing pessimism among a segment of Black voters ‒ chiefly working-class men living in urban centers ‒ disenchanted with American systems as a whole.
“Many people are saying we might have to live with this idea that we will have a broken America,” said Terrence Johnson, a professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School.
In a 2022 Pew Research Center poll, 64% said the increased focus on issues of race and racial inequality has not led to improvement in the lives of Black people. Last year another 51% said they believe racism will worsen over their lifetimes, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos survey.
“People, particularly Black men, are having deep frustration,” Johnson said. “And so if that is the case, if we cannot change systemically the lives of most African American folk who are working class, then it turns into, ‘what can I do for my individual clan?'”
“So what’s happening is a deeper reckoning, and I think the easy way (for them) is ‘we vote for Trump,'” he added.
Other scholars say the numbers simply reflect a return to voting patterns that predated Barack Obama’s presidency and that always showed a certain percentage of Black support for Republicans.
But conservative activists and thought leaders insist these margins represent a realignment that better reflects the diversity of the Black community’s values.
“Black folks care about the same things that every other community cares about,” former Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron, who Trump endorsed, told USA Todaay.
“They care about the economy, they care about making sure that there’s a better future for their kids and they want communities that are not bogged down by crime. And so I’m delighted to see that there’s an uptick in the numbers.”
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