What 2020 Presidential Candidates Don't Understand About The Black Student Vote

By Kenya Hunter


As more candidates enter the field for the 2020 presidential election's Democratic bid, Black student voters have engaged ourselves in the election process more than ever, and we understand the necessary for policy change that is radical and addresses our future directly.


While the Black voter turnout rate hit a 20-year low in 2016, it increased for voters between ages 18-29 by 1.1 percent. These two facts put young Black voters like myself at a crossroads, and lay bare both our aspire to be involved with political change, and overwhelming skepticism that any one candidate will put the needs of young Black voters first.


Pundits talk a lot about the “Black vote,” as if we are a monolith or a singular task to undertake to be won. We’re not, nor are the myriad injustices affecting us that are embedded in this country’s framework. As time goes on, the candidate who will excite Black student voters the most is one that is going to center us in their various policy proposals, and mean it.


Once I had the possibility to ask Bernie Sanders about reparations at the CNN Town Hall on Monday, April 22, knew I required to; it was a question that young people my age deserve to know. Senator Sanders often brings up his presence at the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1963, especially while he speaks with Black voters. Take the “She the People Forum,” as an example, where young voters of color audibly booed the senator for once again mentioning his presence at the march. While Senator Sanders often points out his past work in the space, his 2020 platforms have however to center solutions for injustices faced by Black people specifically.


So any time While I asked, “If reparations are not segment of your plan to end the wealth gap for Black people, what is?”


He discussed of the 10-20-30 formula, which was introduced by Representative James Clyburn and Senator Cory Booker, himself a presidential hopeful. (It’s worth pointing out that Senator Sanders did not say Booker in his response to me.) The plan targets low-income communities, nevertheless does not specifically address communities of color or Black people. As one individual on Twitter put it: “Wow. Bernie Sanders just all lives mattered reparations.” It’s also not surprising: The sentiment that the conversation of reparative justice can never give attention to Black people specifically regularly disappoints voters my age, and caused general apathy in the 2016 election.


The issues go deeper than just the wealth gap, though. It’s also about who in the nation deserves to be involved in the country’s political process. At the continuous town hall, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was asked if he considered prisoners should have the ability to vote; the student specifically singled out rapists and the perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombings as her focus. Buttigieg confidently mentioned, “No, I don’t think so.” (For his part, Senator Sanders expressed his belief that the correct to vote is meant to be extended to even “terrible people.”) The CNN cameras actually caught my shock as soon as the audience around me clapped, a lone Black girl who was surprised that a room full of young people could believe the correct to vote could be off-limits for prisoners.


According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, about 45 percent of people in prison are serving time for drug-related offenses; they are not the Boston Marathon bomber, and many are not rapists, either. So who comprises of the current carceral population? Disproportionately, it’s minorities: 37.7 percent of the prison population is Black, despite the fact that Black people only make up 12 percent of the country’s in general population.


In February, Senator Booker reintroduced the Pot Justice Act, which would legalize the substance at the federal level; Black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for marijuana-related crimes. While the bill was not introduced as piece of Senator Booker’s presidential campaign, it does serve as a critical symptom of where his future policy proposals may be headed — and potential voters are watching.


group in attempt to earn Black voters’s confidence, it’s essential that candidates of all parties adamantly outline the disenfranchisement of Black people, and then allocate a solution that potentially transforms the future of Black students and Black people at large. It is no secret where the likely Republican candidate stands on such issues. Despite this, not all Black people will automatically vote for a Democratic candidate, and the 2016 election showed that if we are dissatisfied enough, we’ll simply sit out on election day. While 94 percent of Black girls who voted in the 2016 election cast their vote for Hillary Clinton, more Black people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 stayed residence from the election four years later.


We are living in an age where women’s rights and criminal justice reform have become top priority conversations for Black students. Throughout the 2016 election, the infamous 1994 Crime Bill proved to be a generational shadow for Hillary Clinton; she might not avoid being questioned by young Black voters for her support of the crime bill, and for the dark speech in which she coined the term “super-predators.” If she appeared at Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college in Atlanta, to discuss her criminal justice reform plan, she was disrupted by AUC Shut It Down, a student grassroots organizing order based at the Atlanta University Consortium. She had intended to further her agenda with Black students; as an alternative, she was confronted with the ways in which she and her spouse, former President Bill Clinton, ultimately expanded the prison industrial complex.


Joe Biden will also face these questions; he authored that crime bill, one which he right now regrets/a>, given how it has substantially raised prison populations. It incentivized states to remain “tough on crime” with the promise of additional federal funding, at the expense of Black and Brown people. Couple that with Biden’s treatment of Anita Hill throughout the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, and it’s easy to understand why the former vice president will have a hard time getting Black students in particular to trust him, without consideration of his status as President Obama’s BFF. Biden should not be blind to his impact in the field, either: A Democratic primary where Joe Biden leads could result in another drop in voter turnout for young Black students, mirroring the trend set in 2016.


Young voters’ wishes for accountability for a politician’s past actions shouldn’t be mischaracterized. While pundits and lawmakers alike undermine us by claiming we “don’t know enough” about realistic issues and just want a “perfect” candidate, it is understood that politicians are human and make mistakes. We also understand that these politicians were grown once they made these “mistakes,” which can some days lead us to question if their “evolution” from those mistakes is proper. We don’t want pandering. We want strong, intricate policy that speaks to us, not over us.


So as soon as it comes to candidates like Senator Kamala Harris, I want answers about her shifty history on policy issues and how she moved to the left side of the Democratic Party as a “progressive prosecutor.” In 2017, she co-sponsored a bill that urged states to eliminate money bail, naming it a provide that disproportionately disenfranchises communities of color and reduce revenue people. Although, it’s easy to find quotes from her past that supported the entire opposite. In 2004, the then-San Francisco district attorney supported increasing money bail in California, saying that it was “cheaper” for criminals to commit crimes because of the state’s low money bail. At the CNN Town Hall, I was surprised to hear her talk about opposing the criminalization of sex work since, in her days as attorney general, she challenged a sex workers’ rights organization’s fight to legalize sex work. If she's had a change of heart, that’s fine — but I’m still waiting for the policy proposal to back that up.


In contrast, Senator Elizabeth Warren has released nine policy proposals, the most of any Democratic hopeful; two of those specifically center on Black people and young Black people. Her plan to incentivize hospitals for closing the death toll gap for Black maternal mortality shows she is paying attention and intentionally centering the effects of racism and disenfranchisement In the
U.S., And her student debt plan includes cancelling up to $50,000 in student debt for people who make under $100,000. Economists posit that this plan would totally cancel the student cash advances of close to 95 percent of borrowers, and according to information supplied by the United States Department of Education, nearly half of Black student cash advance borrowers who began school in 2003-04 school year defaulted on student cash advances 12 years immediately after entering college. In her Medium post, Warren states that her plan will “substantially increase wealth for Black and Latinx families.” This is the group kind of centering we are asking for; Warren's intention is clear.


At the end of it all, Black student voters have a desire for conversations to be completed. We want proper candidates who are ready to admit their wrongs, and show us what they'll do to create them right and regain whichever trust has been lost. We want policy, not pandering. We want plans, not conversations. We hope to be centered, and we want our politicians to be truthful about it.