In his failed 2020 presidential campaign, “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg famously scored 0 percent with black voters in multiple polls.
Abdul El-Sayed, in his bid to be senator for Michigan, is not doing quite so badly. But the evidence suggests he does have an issue with African-American voters, who make up around 12-13 percent of his state’s electorate. In the Democratic primary, his opponent Haley Stevens carried the black vote by large margins, and a Fox News poll suggested he enjoys only about 75 percent support among black voters, which is weak compared to, say, the 87 percent of black Michiganders who voted for Kamala Harris. In a very tight race against Mike Rogers across the state, these numbers could make all the difference.
The El-Sayed campaign is only too aware of the problem, which is why it put El-Sayed and Harris together for a roundtable discussion on black maternal health at a “Birth Detroit” health center.
But El-Sayed’s solo efforts to make himself more appealing to African-American voters do seem a little, er, clumsy, to put it mildly. He recently gave an interview in a gas station in Detroit, buying Gatorade and a large packet of Better Made “red hot cheese” popcorn.
In case nobody got the point, he has since sat down with the Root’s Ashley Allison for a podcast, in which he sought to speak frankly about what he regards as the racial elephant in the room, namely his sense that black people might not like him because he is a brown-skinned man with an Arabic name. It’s worth quoting in full.
“Because for too many black Detroiters in particular, their experience with somebody who looks like me is not a good one,” says El-Sayed, who Cockburn is at pains to note eats a plate of fried chicken during the interview. “You go into a gas station, you go to a party store, you’re being talked at from behind bulletproof glass. If you’re a woman, you’re being catcalled. If you’re a kid, you’re being sold a loosie out the back, being denied a bathroom. I’ve always tried to be on the right side of that. But I also understand that, like, if that’s your experience with someone whose name is like mine, that leaves a terrible taste in your mouth.”
Cockburn had to use Urban Dictionary to look up “loosie,” which apparently means a single, or loose, cigarette sold individually out of a pack. And he can’t help asking why that must necessarily be a negative experience? What’s extraordinary is not just that El-Sayed should think it wise to stereotype black Detroit voters as the sort of people who hang out late in gas stations, buying illegal tobacco and trying to use the lavatorial facilities. It’s that he should also characterize all Arabic Michiganders as mean-minded shopworkers, casting racist or sexist aspersions from behind bulletproof glass windows. That’s the thing about the “Woke 2.0” generation which El-Sayed represents. It’s not necessarily as crazy as its antecedent. But it does seem a lot more bigoted.
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