Why We Should Leave That Lie About Black Men Not Voting in 2025

There is something we need to leave in 2025. The myth that Black men don’t vote.

Video will return here when scrolled back into view

Here’s 100 years of the Best Black Dandyism Heading Into Met Gala 2025

view video

Here’s 100 years of the Best Black Dandyism Heading Into Met Gala 2025

This false narrative has been around for years, but it came to the forefront in 2024. Just ahead of that year’s presidential election, Barack Obama gave ill-advised and condescending comments to a room full of Black men  where he said a lack of enthusiasm for Harris’s campaign “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers” and implied that Black men may not vote at all instead of voting for her.

Those comments started a national conversation about the voting habits of Black men. This resulted in  several articles and social media posts where people asked if Black men would support Kamala Harris as she ran for president.

Well, we know what happened. Trump won in convincing fashion. (I still blame Biden for that.) But it was not because Black men voted for him en masse.

Ultimately, 78% of Black men voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. This is down from 2020, but only slightly. In that year, Biden got 80% of the Black male vote. But let’s go deeper because there is an unspoken supposition in the way Black men are talked about politically.

The assumption is that Black men do not vote. Or that they must be compelled to vote because they otherwise would not participate in the democratic process…and that is simply false.

While it is true that Black women vote at higher rates than Black men (they accounted for 7% of the total electorate last year), we represented 5% of the electorate. And you must account for the staggering number of Black men who cannot vote because of criminal records or because they are in prison. Victims of what Ava Du Vernay documented in her film 13^th or what Michele Alexander calls The New Jim Crow. It cannot be overstated how America’s the criminal justice system impacts the Black male vote.

So let me be very clear and break it down so it will forever and consistently be broke.  Anyone who says Black men don’t vote is a lie and the truth ain’t in them.

Now, like any other constituency, we need to be catered to. Gone are the days where folks from our community voted Democratic just because we are Black. Previous generations may have went for that, but we don’t think that way anymore.

But the idea that Black men don’t vote needs to go the way of the Jheri curl. In other words, it needs to die.