Ted Johnson on Trump’s Appeal to Black Men: “Hyper-Masculine and Untouchable”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Just today, Kamala Harris unveiled a new economic plan to provide more opportunities for black men. Part of the Democrats broader effort to secure the black vote. Theodore R. Johnson is an expert on this issue. His new book, “If We Are Brave: Essays from Black Americana,” tackles race and democracy. And he joins Michel Martin to take us through those firsthand accounts.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Theodore Johnson, thank you so much for joining us once again.

THEODORE R. JOHNSON, AUTHOR, “IF WE ARE BRAVE”: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.

MARTIN: You’re kind of a different animal when it comes to, you know, sort of punditry per se. I mean, you know, 20-year Navy veteran, you are a columnist for major news outlets and you’re an author. So, it’s kind of hard to pigeonhole you, just like it’s kind of hard to pigeonhole this book. Like, how do you describe it? What do you think this book does?

JOHNSON: The book is an essay collection and sort of the traditional sense of the term for black writers in particular. I mean, it’s probably too much praise, but I think of it in the same vein of writing as, like, the Harlem renaissance and the essayists of the civil rights movement that were very rigorous in their journalism and their research, but had a common touch and how they relayed very complicated and complex issues to a general public. So, I sort of think of my career as providing the perfect background or set of life experiences that allow me to tackle big topics in essay form while also incorporating the very rigorously researched insights that I hope to bring forward in the writing.

MARTIN: I see it as reflections on what it means to be an American. It’s reflections on democracy, but from a very distinctly African American, you know, perspective. Why did you feel we need to have these conversations right now?

JOHNSON: Yes. So, most of it is because there seems to be a fight over the identity of this country and the people that belong here. Some folks want to take us back hundreds of years and others say we’ve actually not realized the potential of the country. And so, maybe we should be doing the work to get us to that place, which will require, you know, an engagement with the idea, the identity, our history and sort of meditate on what does it mean to belong in this country. So, it tries to take big ideas, democracy, affirmative action, police brutality, racism, and instead of talking about structural racism or the need for criminal justice reform, I wanted to talk about the experience of people in this system, the experience of Americans, white, black, all races, ethnicities, all of us are living in the same system that’s underperforming what it could be.

MARTIN: One of the interesting things you do, though, in the book is you kind of compare the experience of understanding your Americanness and you compare that in the — your experience with being a person of faith, and then you kind of draw that as an analogy to how we kind of fall in and out of, in and out of love, if I can put it that way, with the Democratic experiment with the American idea. Do you want to talk more about that?

JOHNSON: Yes. And so, you’re absolutely right. The first essay, the lead essay is essentially Ted Johnson’s sermon on democracy as delivered by this black boy from North Carolina who grew up going to church three or four times a week. And so, it’s almost like this is my conversion story for why I believe democracy is the way forward in America. And the reason that’s important is because democracy is legitimacy as a system, writ large, is an article of faith on every person who participates in that democracy. If you don’t believe that the outcomes on democracy are legitimate it results in catastrophe. We don’t have to guess that this week we’re all around for January 6. We saw what happened when the legitimacy of institutions and processes are questioned. People die, systems get — you know, sort of overturned or unraveled. And so, we have to believe the system is worth investing in if we’re going to commit to the work of making it more inclusive and to the work of reforming it. If you don’t believe that democracy is the answer, it’s very hard to get people to invest in voting, to invest in — you know, in the political system and its outcomes, to see those outcomes as legitimate. And that if we’re committed to the — both the country and the process for improving the country, then outcomes can be better than if we don’t believe in the country and believe that the system is no longer useful, then we’re at a different starting point, which could, you know, turn very ugly very quickly.

MARTIN: Well, I can make an argument that it’s already turned very ugly very quickly, if you consider that on January 6th, people died. You know, we’re really lucky that more people didn’t die. But a lot of people were hurt. A lot of people, particularly our first responders, lost their careers, if not their lives, because they were so badly injured, they couldn’t work again.

JOHNSON: It’s ugly. But in the 1960s, a president was assassinated, an attorney general and presidential candidate was assassinated. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X assassinated, Medgar Evers assassinated. Hundreds of protests — and in the summer of ’68, the Vietnam War protests were students at Kent State were killed. So, if we think January 6th was bad, our grandparents would say, children, you have seen nothing yet. And this book is both a meditation on democracy, but also a warning, that if we don’t heed history, if we don’t heed the life experiences of those who came before us, we — as the whole saying goes, we are doomed to repeat these things. And January 6th, then, instead of becoming this terrible day following a presidential election becomes the beginning of a terrible decade, like the ’60, like the 1860s. And we’ve got an opportunity to avoid that outcome, but only if we get ahead of the problem now.

MARTIN: I want to read something from the book. You say — you’re talking about your plea, your desire that people engage in this reimagination, as you put it. You said, reimagination, however, is tricky business. It arises from the premise that who we are is no longer sufficient or is deeply flawed in some way. Ego, whether personal or national, does not like confronting the truth. It’s uncomfortable and invites an identity crisis. When a nation as large and diverse as the United States is overdue for a reimagination, those at the center of the national narrative are likely to feel threatened. I mean, you could understand why people who have been historically left out of the national narrative want in. But why should the people you’re talking about here, who see themselves as threatened, or being displaced, or not wanting to be dominated, why should they participate in this kind of reimagination that you talk about?

JOHNSON: Well, if they truly believe in the founding ideals of the country, not lip service stuff, but if they truly believe in it, they don’t have a choice. You know, I think Jill Lepore, the historian, has said that in the first presidential election in 1790, 6 percent of the people in this country were eligible to vote, and only half of them did. The story of our democracy is the story of excluded people seeking participation. And when they are denied that participation, they’re also Americans, and Americans don’t take likely to be told you’re less than, you don’t get to have freedom, it’s just for these other people, you don’t get to have liberty and rights or access to democracies for other people. So, if they do not make democracy a more inviting exercise, if they do not make the country more inclusive, they will have to contend with the people they’ve excluded outside of democracy. We’ve had a civil war to answer this question. We’ve had a civil rights movement to answer this question. People were lynched trying to get a better answer out of this question. Suffragists, you know, abused and beaten trying to get better answers out of this question. But what never stops is the sort of spirit of progress. The second part of this, which sort of follows from the first, because we’re a nation of 330, 40, 50 million people. And if you think that democracy is only for 70 percent of those 350 million people, you squander massive amounts of talent and capabilities of your populace. Countries do not thrive when they squander the thing that makes them special, unique, which is to say they’re people. So, not only will those people not stand idly by, but those at the top that want a prosperous America or want to sort of hog the benefits of this country for themselves will find that there’s less benefits, less resources, less good feelings to go around when you — when exclusion is your politics.

MARTIN: But what about people who just don’t see it that way and seem to believe, whether through force, through violence, through the ballot box, through domination some kind of way that they’re narrowing of the American story is going to continue to prevail. What do you say to that?

JOHNSON: Yes. So, the first thing is on January 7th, January 8th, January 9th, a lot of the people saying that 2020 was an undecided election or fraudulent election on January 7th, 8th, and 9th, they were saying, how dare Donald Trump? You know, this is beyond the pale. This is too far. And then, what they learned was you don’t get re-elected. You don’t have a chance in the Republican Party if you hold Donald Trump accountable for January 6th. And so, they changed the positions they held on January 7th out of political expedience. Now, this is the kind of character that our political system incentivizes. That’s a fault of both the system and those politicians, which leads to the second point and sort of the — one of the major arguments in the book. This is why black Americans have always insisted on a strong federal government enforcement of civil rights, because if you leave it to the goodwill of our representative or of our representatives or elected officials, you will be disappointed every time. When the folks who founded this country said, we don’t have to worry about a Republic or the Electoral College or all these things because the people that staff them are going to be patriots who are going to put justice and equality first and not put their partisan and faction leanings first, and they were wrong. They were wrong then and they’re wrong today.

MARTIN: So, let’s talk a little bit about the current sort of political moment. One of the things that’s interesting that we see and, you know, we’ll find out soon enough whether this sort of pattern holds, but you do see increasing numbers of African American men and Latino men seeming to be drawn to the Republican Party and to Donald Trump in particular. Why do you think that is?

JOHNSON: Yes, I’ve got a few reasons for this. The first one is between ’68 and 2004, Republicans averaged about 11 or 12 percent of the black vote in presidential elections. And then, Barack Obama came along. And in 2008, Republicans get 4 percent. In 2012, they get 6 percent, about the same 6, 7 percent in 2016, and then about 8 percent in 2020. So, in between 2008 and 2020, it’s gone from 4 percent of black voters, truth (ph) in Republican candidate to eight. So, it’s double. That makes it seem like, wow, Republicans are making inroads, when in actuality, Barack Obama has left the stage. So, that’s one reason why we’re seeing a little bit of an increase. Black Republicans who didn’t want to vote against the black guy have sort of returned back to their voting habits pre-Obama. Here’s a wrinkle that I think is new. It isn’t the same folks returning, it is younger folks coming. And I think it’s mostly younger black men. And the question is why. Some of that is because Trump presents is very hyper masculine, not in his sort of appearance or in his energy or vigor, but he presents as untouchable. The man has 34 felony convention convictions and may be president-elect in a month. There’s something very masculine about doing whatever you want and having no comeuppance, paying no penalty for it. And so, if you take young black men who have been told the police route to get you, the democracy is unfair, the system is unfair, this idea that you can do what it takes to get forward and not be held accountable or that no one’s coming to get you can be appealing. It’s hyper masculine and it’s untouchableness. And so, that’s some of it. The other part of it, and I think this is — we’re going to have to watch this. I’m Gen X. That means my parents were born during Jim Crow and my grandparents were also born during Jim Crow. That meant in my generation, your grandparent was probably in the deep south under Jim Crow. For a Gen Z, their grandparent may be in Harlem or in Los Angeles or in Chicago, and that is a generation removed both from the south and from the civil rights movement. And I bring this up because a lot of black political — sort of political science around black voting behavior talks about this idea of linked fate that we’re all in this together, and a lot of that stems from this very shared common experience that our grandparents or parents had. And now, that we’re a generation or two removed from that shared experience, the idea that that kind of solidarity will be enough to hold black people together in the same party at a 90-10 clip, I think is outdated.

MARTIN: The other thing that you hear is that some of younger voters just think that the Democrats haven’t delivered. They just haven’t delivered. And that they haven’t delivered on, you know, at least sort of Trump in his idiosyncratic, you know, sort of individualistic way has delivered or at least he likes to tell you that he’s delivered. Does the fact of the change at the top of the Democratic ticket help or hurt in any way? I mean, does Kamala Harris, as the nominee, even with this foreshortened election period, does that change that dynamic at all?

JOHNSON: Yes, a hundred percent it changes it. So, if — for black voters that are looking at the Democratic Party and saying what have you done for me lately? Like the old Janet Jackson song. They’re not asking that of Republicans. They’re looking at Trump and saying the promise of what they’re — what they want to do around the economy or immigration or whatever sounds good to me. So, I’m going to take them at their word over the evidence from say a Biden presidency or an Obama presidency. But now, you’re voting not for Trump against Biden, but for Trump against an, aka from Howard and Kamala Harris. And again, even with the sort of shifting a small realignment happening in black America, you are still black in America. And if you decide to vote against the candidate, a black candidate at the top of the ticket that probably 88 to 90 percent of black folks are going to vote for in the upcoming election, you’re not just making a political decision, you’re also making a social and cultural kind of choice. And there’s great work out there. My political scientist that shows there’s a kind of social constraint that happens when black people are running for office among black voters. And you don’t want to be the dude that walks into the barbershop to say, I voted against Kamala Harris for this dude who thinks Haitians in Ohio are eating cats and dogs.

MARTIN: Is part of the issue here, though, for black people who’ve been continually disappointed and disillusioned by the Democratic Party, is that the Democratic Party isn’t perceived as continuing to fight those fights. I mean, like, voting rights, for example, on issues like that? I just wonder if that’s part of, you think, the calculus here.

JOHNSON: So, my sense of it is actually a little bit different. The latest numbers I’ve seen is about one in five black folks identify as conservative, about 40, 45 percent identify as moderate, and then about one out of four identify as liberal. And I think for a number of black voters, and we saw this in the Democratic primary in 2020, they think, the Democratic Party has gone too far left and maybe be — maybe addressing concerns beyond race and feeling like they’ve been left behind despite the fact that they’re the party’s most loyal base. And so, if we look at the primaries in 2020, Biden loses in Iowa and New Hampshire, badly loses in Nevada and then shows up in South Carolina. Older black voters, a little bit more conservative and wins and they rescue his campaign. Same thing black voters in the south did for Bill Clinton in ’92. And so, if those are the folks that are putting these Democrats into the White House, if they think that that president is suddenly going to lurch far left and accomplish a number of some very, very progressive ideas that they didn’t sign up for in the primary, which is why they voted for the moderate or even establishment candidates in previous primaries, the party has misread black voters. And I think to some extent, maybe particularly in the rhetoric more than in their policy proposals, that has happened. So, I think you’re seeing more of a more pragmatic black electorate rejecting the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party in some circles and the rightward, you know, lurch of the Republican Party sort of as a party writ large and are kind of left to sort of make sense of politics given these two realities.

MARTIN: So, before we let you go, I am wondering of who you want to discover this book, who do you want to read it, and who do you want to take it to heart?

JOHNSON: So, that’s a great question. This is as much for black people to sort of — to say, this is the conversation we’ve had in a million places, let’s get it on paper and sort of reflect on what it means in this moment, as it is for white audiences who only hear about race on cable news, or in their echo chambers, or in their sort of preferred social media, you know, curated feeds on — you know, on these different out platforms, they should read this book, because this is how you understand racism in America. This is how you understand what black people say when they say the police are racist or that structural racism is the reason why there’s such disparity in the country and see it presented in a way that doesn’t demonize the country and doesn’t make black people’s victims in the nation’s story alone.

MARTIN: Ted Johnson, thank you so much for talking with us once again.

JOHNSON: Thank you. Thank you so much.