‘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."

Obama has done more than any candidate to stress the importance of the Black barbershop, including campaign stops in 2008 and 2012 - by which point Coming to America, Barbershop and other films had entrenched the Black barbershop in the mainstream imagination. Before the 2020 election, Obama appeared on The Shop, LeBron James's barbershop-inspired TV showcase for freeform conversations with luminaries from disparate arenas, to make a last-ditch pitch for Joe Biden.

For Obama, the barbershop was a platform to relate the broad strokes of his cultural identity to Black men who remained wary - his obsession with sports, his pride in his Black family; at a 2012 barbershop stop in South Carolina, he traded the dozens with waiting customers before grabbing a quick shape-up.

Harris, though, is more intentional about using the barbershop trope to relate her personal biography. In an April interview with BuzzFeed, she shared her "hair story", an allusion that hints at the fraught politics of Black hair care. At the barber shop in South Carolina in 2019, she made sure to let the brothers know she grew up celebrating Kwanzaa, a weeklong winter celebration of African American culture that was invented by a Black male PhD.

As much as this stretch-run media tour might look like a last-minute plan for Harris, it's worth remembering: a) she's only been in the race for two months; and b) chopping it up with Black men is not a new look for her. Those who have only just tuned in might not fully appreciate that Harris is a Howard University-educated member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority - bona fides that have kept her connected to a cultural network that includes leadership-minded Black men, a number of whom have signed on to organizing efforts like the Win With Black Men Pac. "She's been meeting with Black men for years," says Martin, a graduate of a historically Black college who is prominently active in the Pac. "I was part of a dinner that she did with a group of Black men in November of last year. She was at the 100 Black Men conference in Atlanta earlier this year. At the Howard-Hampton football game in DC at the beginning of the year. Folks just had no idea because the vice-president is not covered like the president. The issue is the national media."

Even as Harris met with mainstream media outlets over the past two weeks, she was careful to signal to the Black men who might also be paying attention. On 60 Minutes, she sat down with Bill Whitaker, the program's lone Black correspondent. On Howard Stern, she came out as an F1 fan who cheers for Lewis Hamilton, the series' only Black driver. On Fox News she pushed back against the host Bret Baier's attempts to cast her as incompetent and in over her head - and, of course, was labeled an "angry Black woman" by Trump supporters for standing her ground. "Went to @FoxNews with 787 million reasons not to, and looked presidential, held her own and portrayed poise," wrote Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative turned Harris surrogate.

Elsewhere, Harris took the extra step of appearing on digital platforms with robust Black male followings. On All the Smoke, a sports podcast hosted by the NBA retirees Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, she stated a desire to promote on-ramps for Black men into the cannabis industry while coming out in favor of decriminalizing marijuana. On Monday, Harris appeared on Martin's daily digital show and stressed the importance of creating more Black homeowners and uplifting Black-owned businesses. Both ideas are central tenets of her opportunity agenda - her plan to give Black men more economic opportunities through forgivable business loans, decriminalizing marijuana and protecting cryptocurrency investments.

In a Tuesday digital town hall with Charlamagne tha God, co-host of The Breakfast Club, Harris reinterpreted Obama's rebuke of Black male voters as a call to arms. ("What is happening here is we are all working on reminding everyone of what is at stake," Harris said.) She popped up again later that night at the Hip Hop awards on BET - the same network that sounded the alarm on Project 2025 at another awards show back in July. On Tuesday's show, Harris was interviewed by the rapper Fat Joe - who met with the Democratic nominee and the Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, a rumored VP pick, in March to discuss marijuana reform. "When the vice-president calls me," Joe said at the White House summit, "I drop everything."

For the past six weeks, the actor Wendell Pierce, a prominent Harris surrogate, has hosted talks at Black barbershops in key districts around the country with special guests and film screenings to drum up voter enthusiasm. This week, he pushed back against Obama's rebuke, urging Democrats to "stop scapegoating Black men" in an X post. In a Thursday CNN appearance, the Wire star revealed that Obama had called him in response to his post - and he further explained to the former president that Black men just wanted to be heard and taken seriously.

With each appearance she makes, Harris proves that there is no such thing as a Black male monolith, or field offices where those brothers can be reliably reached any more. By meeting Black men where they are and taking in their straight talk, she doesn't just make clear that she isn't pandering for a photo op; she shows that she's willing to go farther than any presidential candidate in history to earn the Black male vote.