‘I’m all about the straight talk’: Kamala Harris trades barbershop campaign stops for a blitz of Black media

Five years ago, with an eye toward South Carolina's 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Kamala Harris dropped by a barbershop in the state capital for a roundtable with a group of Black men led by 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, of Me So Horny fame. Pitted against some skeptical voters, Harris won the room over with her personal stories and willingness to let her hair down some. "I'm all about straight talk, and there's no better place to do that than in the barbershop," she said. In that 20-minute discussion, which largely focused on entrepreneurship, Harris introduced many of the points that form the core of the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men unveiled this week.

The Black barbershop ranks among the most enduring tropes in American politics - the go-to place for office-seekers looking to win the Black male vote without getting into specifics. Democrats in particular have used the setting as their official co-sign, submitting to naturalistic photo-ops in hydraulic chairs with the fellas when they aren't directly addressing Black church congregations or glad-handing at fish fries. Even Donald Trump has leveraged the barbershop trope for his own ends, dropping by a Maga-friendly location in the Bronx on Thursday for a private meet-and-greet.

A product of segregation, the Black barbershop is as much a symbol of Black entrepreneurship as it is a safe space for Black men to socialize and strategize - at no point more so than during the civil rights movement. Harris could have easily gone back to the barbershop for this presidential campaign. Instead, she built from that foundation while huddling with Black male leaders away from the cameras and doing interviews with Charlamagne tha God, two former NBA players and other Black media tastemakers who cultivate a barbershop vibe with audiences.

Popular narratives of Harris are at pains to characterize her as unpopular with Black men. Some polling data has detected a slight rightward drift among young Black men. But that's only part of the picture, the pollster Henry Fernandez argues. His firm, the African American Research Collaborative, has tracked voter attitudes over the past decade and found that young Black men, more so than young women, are more willing to consider a Republican candidate initially than older Black voters but eventually come home to the Democrats - which sets them apart from other young voters in other racial and cultural groups, who start out more open to considering progressives.

"It reflects the fact that Black men are making a choice," says Fernandez before raising three polls he took in the run-up to the 2020 election. "In July, Black men were at 43% support for Joe Biden. In September, it was 78%. In November, it was 86%. Black men's support for Democratic candidates doesn't start out at 100%. It consolidates."

Which is to say: Harris still enjoys widespread backing from Black voters in the aggregate. But her campaign has made a mission of addressing dubious Black male voters regardless. This week, while thanking Harris volunteers at a campaign field office in Pittsburgh, Barack Obama openly wondered whether Black male voters might be holding out on supporting Harris because they "just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president".

Harris, though, isn't deterred. Through her dogged outreach to Black male voters, she has underscored the value of their vote while demonstrating how the idea of the Black barbershop as a catch-all forum has evolved. "First of all, my barber comes to me," says Roland Martin, the former CNN contributor turned Black digital media maven. "The reason why I'm saying this is because Democrats are still trying to figure out where Black men are congregating."