What Do Black Black Americans Tell Us About Politics? Towards a New Understanding of Problems Equality, Abilities, and Affordable Health Care
But is it successful in winning people over? Here’s what four young Black voters told us mattered to them and how they were thinking about politics in the year ahead.
Student debt, college affordability, abortion access, and affordable health care were themes that kept coming up. Workers’ Rights were a top priority for union members.
VP Harris held an event at a historically Black college just before the primary, where she promoted her wins for voters, such as lowering the price of diabetes testing and college debt forgiveness.
Growing up in Columbia, S.C., Tarmon-Dre Robinson’s family didn’t talk a lot about politics. He’s from a military family, and the few political conversations he remembers involved health care and the military’s insurance system.
Robinson joined the South Carolina National Guard to fund his education, then enrolled at a technical college with plans to transfer to a four-year institution.
South Carolina’s Vice President, Annette Pickens, and the HBCU Women’s Causal Rights Movement: How Voting Matters to Black Americans and Black Lives
“I think people should be able to wake up and say, ‘Hey, I want to be educated,'” he said. It is impossible for many people to have the financial means to attend college due to the high price tag.
Robinson didn’t vote in 2020 because he stayed away from politics as much as possible. He said he doesn’t care for the negativity, and while he planned to vote this year, he hadn’t decided who he was going to support in South Carolina’s primaries.
“This is one of the first times ever in my life that I’m in the middle,” he said, adding that he had not decided whether he would participate in the Democratic or the Republican primary.
“When you come to the Black community and you speak to us and you say, ‘Hey, it’s our vote that you want,’ you should come with things that are going to impact and change our lives,” he said. “I think the problem is saying you’re going to do a thing for us and then nothing changes.”
The vice president spoke the day before South Carolina’s primary at South Carolina State University — the state’s only public HBCU — and detailed her connections to the HBCU community in a way that seemed to resonate with the students.
“Having the vice president come from an HBCU herself, she knows the stories and the challenges we go through,” Pickens said, adding that she planned to support Biden in the primary.
She is a member of the Union of Southern Service Workers and is particularly focused on workers’ rights. She said that the current and former governors of South Carolina were “bad and ill” on unions.
“If you’re running for presidency or, like, governor or something, you should be uplifting the people that you need your vote from, instead of down-talking all of them. I don’t respect that,” she said.
She said that she’s happy that she’s running because her campaign focuses on putting the power back in the hands of the working class.
“I don’t know anybody in my circle who wants to vote. People feel like if these are the options, they don’t want no parts,” she said, adding that she felt that was a mistake.
“Our votes count, whether people want to say it or not, our votes actually matter. You shouldn’t go vote for someone you don’t like, because we don’t want that person in office.
Brandon Upson, the executive director of the South Carolina Progressive Network, emphasized the importance of connecting with young voters in a way that makes sense to them.
Taleeya Jones was not old enough to participate when voters sent Trump to the White House in 2016. Now, she says she’s enthusiastic to vote for the first time, and she’s supporting Biden.
I was shaking in my boots when Donald Trump was elected. Jones said that at his age, he couldn’t do anything about it. I’m happy that I can do something because I’m old enough.
Jones, a student at South Carolina State University, described herself as “comfortable” with the Biden administration’s record, particularly on the issue of college affordability.
The Supreme Court struck down Biden’s plan to forgive student debt. Then the administration developed a repayment plan that has been popular with many borrowers.
“Now that they’ve paved the way for us to possibly have loan forgiveness, it can help us get through school knowing that whenever we graduate, we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to do this and do that,” she said. It makes me feel a bit better.