Transcription
So, the question stands before us, those who presume to [music] summon and stir and organize the vast varied souls of black America, knocking doors, drafting field operations, shaping legislation, crafting messages. What exactly will you be offering? Because if we get it just right, >> [music] >> if we understand our people, we can offer a chance to [music] rebuild deliberately, intelligently, unapologetically, the formidable, undeniable, and once unstoppable [music] power of black America.
THANK YOU. >> [applause] [applause] [applause] >> ALL RIGHT. ALL RIGHT. HOW'S everybody doing today? It's good? [applause] Good? All right. >> [laughter] >> Let's um let's start with some data, shall we? Sound good? Let's see if my slides work. Cool. Hit Strategies, that's the research firm I work at. Um there's a Hit Strategies study that came out that found that 57% of black women in America believe that their vote is being {quote} taken for granted by the Democratic Party. Somewhere around 64% of black Americans in the country believe that the Republican president of the United States is a racist. According to Republican polling. >> [laughter] >> Oh, we got a active crowd. Oh, yeah. Yes. Right now, young black boys are spending more time indoors than people who are incarcerated in America. Black Americans generate about six times more economic value than the wealth that they hold.
I was asked to speak about this current political moment here. It's strange, isn't it? Isn't it? This thing we're living through. I feel like it it it's it's okay to admit it. If you're talking to somebody, you know, you're not crazy. I see it, too. I think the instinct, especially for people like me who who work in politics, is to analyze this political moment strictly through the language of danger, right? To describe this political moment as corrosive and and unfair, animated by racialized rhetoric that hearkens back to some of the ugliest chapters of our past, coming from leaders who feel vile, yes, pernicious, yes, but but mainly the those leaders feel historically familiar. That's my instinct, to kind of make those analyses and just leave it there. And to be clear, this political moment is all of those things, but it's also profoundly strange, right? Like it's really absurd, you know? When you when you talk to somebody at the grocery store and they don't see what what you think you're seeing and it makes you wonder, are you seeing the thing that you that you think that you're seeing? Are you crazy? Are you unnecessarily anxious? Unnecessarily angry? It's enough to make you feel like you're going crazy.
But when I sit with the strangeness long enough, I'm met with a likely more salient reality of America, maybe even a more honest reality of America. It's always been quite absurd to be black here. The whole thing kind of feels like a conspiracy you accidentally figured out that you were living inside of. I say This is one of my favorite metaphors. I say, being black in America is kind of like being Truman in The Truman Show. If you guys have seen it, Truman Burbank, he's ruthlessly surveilled, non-consensually monetized, surrounded by institutions that insist that their arrangements are agnostic to his existence, or even neutral in how they deliver successes and failures. And even when he asks people around him if they if they see anything, if they feel anything strange, they they smile and they say, "Whatever do you mean, Truman? What are you What are you talking about?"
As I turn on the television and I watch white women making a practice of public objection to affirmative action employment opportunities, as I sift through the survey data and I find in the cross-tabulation documents that those individual opinions that I heard are statistically representative, 66% of them opposed. As I sit behind the two-way glass of focus groups all across the country and I listen to them dripping with delusion and discontent, "Why don't black people just want to work as hard as we did to get here, Truman?" I'm dumbfounded. What do I do with the knowledge that no group in the history of America has benefited more from affirmative action than the very white women that are insisting we must vote it away. It eats at me like a parasite. Poisons my ability to perform normalcy. I find myself whispering to white strangers, "This This doesn't make any sense, right?" This is kind of crazy, right? They smile back at me, "Whatever do you mean, Truman?"
Americans watch in horror as Renisha McBride and Alex lay lifeless at the feet of state-sanctioned violence. Before their bodies were even cold, the state hijacks the airwaves, telling fabricated stories depicting them as systematized combatants, dangerous, menacing, and what's more, deserving of their execution on the grounds of their non-compliance. Then Americans come to me and turn and say, "Joshua, can you believe? Can you believe the state came into our community and killed a person in broad daylight? Can they do that?" >> [laughter] >> Yes. >> [clears throat] >> "No, Joshua, you don't understand. You don't get it. Then they told the world that these people were were dangerous when they weren't. And they lied to everybody. Does this happen?" Yes. I try my damndest to remind you of when the state killed me without cause in 2016, and then again in 2013, and two times before that in 2011, and over and over again east and west of the Mississippi, north and south of the Mason-Dixon, and all you ever said to me in response was, "Whatever do you mean, Truman?"
A bit ago, I made a statement about how methodological individualism gets in the way of us understanding racial inequalities in in economics. Pretty straightforward. You guys go to Harvard, you get what I just said. >> [laughter] >> Americans, you know, have a have a history of looking at economic outcomes for racial groups solely as the the sum total of individual decisions made by the members of those groups, right? So, for example, white workers consistently hold on to more wealth at the median than black workers. And even some of our, you know, our brightest economists begin to think that there must be something particularly efficient about how white households are holding onto their wealth or managing their their household, um and it must be something particularly inefficient about how black households are managing their finances, and I called this intellectually lazy. Called it a dis- a disingenuous or just a disregard, a dangerous disregard of the external systems and structures that serve as a dual wage penalty for the black worker. I was told by a popular television host to {quote} get over my obsession with my melanin. It's strange, right? And for a second there, I had to consider whether her worldview had any credence. Was I the one to obsess with my melanin? What would I have done if I didn't know that there have never been a group of people in the history of America, in [snorts] the history of this world more obsessed with my melanin than people that look like her? What would I have done if I didn't know that her ancestors, of course, beat, raped, murdered, pillaged other human beings for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years as a consequence of what I can only describe as a generational fixation on melanin? And that today, in the year of our Lord 2026, she still asymmetrically benefits from melanin-conscious policies. And every time I try to vote them away, she gathers as much influence as her as her platform will allow to keep them in place, to protect them. Am I the only one who's seeing this? Black America says as we grab and shake the collars of the white working class, "Whatever do you mean, Truman?" I don't know, maybe I'm tripping.
Anyway, uh my name is Joshua Doss. I'm a pollster, I'm a data scientist. I have no business up here talking to you all about my delusions, but, you know, here we are. I'm going to do it. Um >> [laughter] >> Um I was also asked to speak about what is required of emerging leaders around narrative framing to build {quote} political power. Fascinated by this concept of political power and black people's decades-long search for it. There's deity in it. Sometimes it reminds me of our search for God. The research I've conducted over the years has been centered around listening to and understanding the very nuanced opinions of the black voters we need to persuade and the black non-voters that we need to ignite. I'm here to relay a message on their behalf. And I want to be as clear as possible. As far as these voters are concerned, there is no such thing as political power, only power. I'm going to repeat that cuz it's [clears throat] it's just consequential to everything I'm going to say next. As far as these voters are concerned, there is no such thing as political power, just power. What does that mean? That means that no matter how hard you try, you cannot offer them this thing called political power. You can't help them build it. You can't convince them to want it because in their worldviews, it simply does not exist. What's more, if you try to offer them political power, you'll lose them. In their worldviews, political outcomes are not a consequence of political power. Rather, political power is a consequence of power. Political power to them, if it is anything at all, is just footprints in the fresh snow. A signal that something bigger, heavier was here. Power was here. As far as these groups are concerned, power is top-down, not bottom-up. Donald Trump didn't need political power to become powerful. J.B. Pritzker didn't need political power to become powerful. J.B. Pritzker was powerful. Then he decided to use that power in politics. And so when you stand before them and say, "You can build political power from the ground up." When you tell them that voting is a way to do that, while they watch the systems being bought, sold, lobbied, and litigated into submission, crifted into adult disaster. When they watch the system grab representatives that look like them and sound like them and fail to make their lives better. When they watch the system adopt their likeness as it mutates into a palatable mask for the very inequalities it was designed to preserve, in that moment, you cease to be a messenger. You become an actor in their Truman Show, smiling, insisting that the sky is real. Just vote, Truman. It'll give you all the political power you need, Truman. And are they so wrong? As far as this emerging group of black voters are concerned, our quest for political power starts on the yellow brick road. And for 130 years, we've been off to see the wizard. As far as these voters are concerned, political power may as well be Richard Pryor in a room with no microphone. If you cannot understand the appeal in this worldview of black Americans and many other Americans, if you can't see why the very people you intend to mobilize have made a companion of cynicism, then you have not even begun to reckon with the immediacy of relief, the depth of betrayal, the titanic scores of economic pain, and the boom-bust cycle of hope our communities have been going through. However bad you think it is, I am here to tell you it is far, far worse. And it is far more than enough to drive a man mad. >> [clears throat] >> So then, what shall we do? >> [laughter] >> We are Hit Strategies. Hit Strategies is the is the research firm I work for. Um we have some ideas.
In confronting a moment not unlike our own, the American novelist Richard Wright reflected on the failures of those who sought to organize the masses. He said, "The communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experiences of those they sought to lead. In their efforts to recruit the masses, they had missed the meanings of the lives of the masses. They had conceived of people in too abstract a manner." We should be wise not to repeat that mistake. Often you hear people say, "Black folk are not a monolith." Black folk are not a monolith. Less often, I assume, you hear the very non-monolithic research that doing that that people are doing to ideologically segment black Americans. At Hit Strategies, our work is is rooted in a deeper inquiry. We apply the same rigor and curiosity used to segment and investigate and understand white workers to the black communities that we say we love. Treating them as not as abstractions, but as complex, differentiated publics. If the goal is to move black people, we must first be willing to know them. Through a series of qualitative and quantitative research, we have we have segmented black voters by something deeper than demographics, something deeper than geographics. We have segmented black voters by psychographics. Bringing a new, richer understanding of how our electorate group themselves by way of how they think, by way of how they feel, and how they compartmentalize similar and dissimilar experiences. Each one of these groups I'm going to go through with you has different needs, different messaging needs for all the messaging folks in the room. They're motivated differently. When we try to talk to all black folk the same way because this group is from the south or that group is over the age of X, Y, and Z or that group has a has a master's degree, we leave points on the board. I said something earlier. We cannot offer them political power, but if we do it just right, we can offer them power. Each segment holds its own relationship to power and I'm going to touch on each one. How what it means to have power, what it means to engage with it, and from those differences emerge a wide range of perspectives that require thoughtful, tailored engagement, tailored messaging. Let's meet our people.
All right. 41% of black Americans fall into the ideological segment we call the legacy civil rights voter. This group is largely defined by the phrase, "My ancestors died for my right to vote." They're high high in religiosity. 47% of them pray multiple times a day. They oftentimes connect politics to a a yesteryear of events that many of them have been alive long enough to remember. As a as a reminder, this is an ideological segment, right? So it kind of by happenstance, a decent amount of them are older, but they don't have to be old. Many, not all, uh are boomer age. And to them, their power is inside of their vote. Now, that's important because that's not true for all of our segments, but that's how we talk to all of our segments, right? >> [clears throat] >> So for this group, voting then is a process by which a person attains more power. With that mindset, as you can imagine, this group has a very, very high voter turnout. >> [snorts] >> Very high likelihood, needs very little motivation to show up to the polls year after year, election after election. Let's skip through some of that. I'm going to send the deck around. All those words in We going to skip through them. All right. Oh, I got a screen right there. Why y'all ain't tell me I had a screen right there? >> [laughter] >> Y'all got me looking back. Okay.
12% of black Americans fall into a segment we call secular progressives. This group is largely defined by the phrase, "Black votes can only matter if black after Black Lives Matter." Slight switch in thinking here. This group sees race and racist structures as massive inhibitance to power, uh the power of the black community. Nearly 60% of this cluster are black women. Many of which believe that their vote is being taken for granted. They're the most educated cluster. Many, not all, but many of them went to four-year universities. Terrance Woodbury, uh the the president and founder of of Hit Strategies, has a phrase that I like. He says, "Just because black folk are voting don't mean the black folk are voting enthusiastically." This group votes frequently, reliably, and are dangerously unenthusiastic about it. This group, through their repeated disappointments with their return on investment in their vote, is nearing a disillusionment cliff, perfectly perfectly morphed uh positioned to morph into disengagement. They used to protest. They protest less now. They're significantly more likely to say things in focus groups and surveys like they're protecting their peace. >> [laughter] >> You know Anna didn't say that about three times already. That's crazy. >> [laughter] >> Why is that important though? Why is that important? Our research also identifies 13 very distinct um resistance activities, we call them. Right? It's It's including, but not limited to, boycotting, posting on social media, signing petitions, volunteering with grassroots organizations, participating in peaceful protests. Engagement in in even a single one of these activities outside of a traditional electoral cycle increases somebody's likelihood to vote by 6x. Engaging in two of these activities increases somebody's likelihood to to vote by 11x. And as many of the black women in this in this cluster and the other people in this cluster begin hemorrhaging these auxiliary forms of engagement, so too increases their likelihood to disengage with politics as a whole. What did I say before? We can't offer no black folk political power, but if we do it right, we can offer them power. So when it comes to matters of power, this group does not understand power as a force that advances them through the world. They're composed largely of black women. They carry a lived recognition that there are no external structures that will assume the role of advancing their interest. As a result, this group receives This group perceives power as something that must shield them, must protect them as they advance themselves. It is a very particular messaging approach that you have to take to market power to them. So when we talk to them about power, when we market power to them, we must market it in the form that they understand it to be. The institution that offers them refuge offers them power. The institution that offers them power mobilizes them to vote. All right. Amen. It makes sense? Okay.
Now I want to talk to you about a a very interesting group. This might be my favorite group, to be honest with you. This is one of the most interesting ideological clusters we have in the black America. 18% of our electorate are what are called next generation traditionalists. They're defined by the phrase, "I think voting matters, but I'm more focused on what's happening in my community." They're high in religiosity, low in income, low in traditional academic education. A majority of them are under the age of 40. The necessary conjunction of this group, their binding principle, is inside of their value for order. Within this group, both men and women overwhelmingly affirm traditional gender roles. That women are natural nurturers of family, that men bear responsibility as financial providers. In this worldview, in their worldview, there's order in that. They typically find themselves suspended between two poles. On one side, a political coalition that they perceive as harboring racial hostility. That would be the right. On the other side, they feel like there's a political coalition where they fear that their cultural and gendered beliefs render them political lepers. They are, in effect, often politically homeless. Unable to fully locate themselves inside of either camp without sacrificing some core aspect of what they believe to be their identity. Therein lies their demoti- their demotivation to participate in politics. They have a very very low turnout. Our research shows us that much of the prevailing strategy to engage this group begins from a flawed premise. That because they're high in religiosity, they primarily are motivated by appeals to faith. And that the group that performs religiosity will win them over. This is false. They do not and will not admire faith in abstraction. The qualitative and quantitative research we've conducted tells us that they instead admire the order that faith produces, the clarity, the hierarchy, the predictability, even. The political actor that offers them order offers them power. The political actor that offers them power mobilizes them to vote. What's more, power in their worldview is something that emerges when their world or the world is properly ordered. And so, even when they reject the substantive positions of the political right, they often recognize and even at times respect its ability to project a clear and uncompromising vision of social order. One that offers legibility through fixed categories, defined roles, and intelligible structure of expectations. A man is a man, a woman is a woman, men marry men and women, women marry men. They tell us in focus groups and in surveys all across the country, this feels orderly to them. To be clear, this is not an endorsement of those positions. Rather, we should think of this as a call to action to the for the for the analytical understanding of the form through which these positions are communicated. For the political left, your mobilization barrier with this this particular cluster is actually less of an ideological barrier and more of a communications barrier. This presents a communicative challenge for the left. If progressive ideals are perceived as fluid, unstable, and overly contingent, they fail to register with this group's framework. But if those same ideals can be communicated as coherent, structured, ordered, articulated as systems that produce stability, protection, and clarity, they can become legible. And therefore they they can become motivated. Equally important is how this group understands the nature of power itself. Messaging that suggests that power can be taken away actually produces the opposite of its intended effect. Within their worldview, power is not something that's granted or stripped stripped away by political institutions. It's understood as enduring and as you would imagine, rooted in a higher moral authority. To suggest that it can be casually removed is unconvincing and misaligned with their understanding of how the world works. What does resonate, rather, is the perception of power misuse. They're not mobilized by the idea that power can be taken from them. They are mobilized by the recognition that power is being used improperly, producing disorder. Destabilizing families, undermining communities, eroding the structure that give lives cohe- life coherence. You move them by demonstrating that power in its current implication is making the world less orderly, and that they should have a role in setting that right. The political actor that offers them order offers them power. The political actor that offers them power mobilizes them to vote.
Moving on. Our qualitative and quantitative, uh, ideological, uh, research brings us to a cluster that we call the rightfully cynical. They're perfectly defined by the phrase, "My hood ain't get no better under Obama and it ain't get no worse under Donald Trump." They're majority men. They hate both parties. 51% say they purposefully do not follow what's going on with politics. You can't reach them in pulpits. You can't reach them with billboards. You can't reach them with ads on television. They're the cluster that's the most likely to have a negative encounter with the police. Those other clusters think about it, vote on it, talk about it. This cluster experiences often. Earlier I said something that I truly hope everybody remembers. You guys asked me about political power. I said there's no such thing as political power, just power. I said that political power is just a a yellow brick road that leads to an underwhelming wizard. That worldview oozes out of every ounce and inch of this ideological group. That is why, as far as this group is concerned, we can't Jesus our way into political power. If we could, we would have already. All the eyes closing, the ruby slipper click- clicking, the "There's no place like home" professing that's wasted energy. As far as this group is concerned, we can't protest, break, or bite our way into political power. If we could, we would have already. All the teeth, the fear, the fright of the mean old lion, it amounts to nothing. Whether we, the black political elites, want to want to admit it or not, our mean old lion is a paper tiger. As far as this group is concerned, we can't black capitalism our way into political power, either. All the mesmerics staring at the the skyscrapers in Emerald City in the distance are a purposeless waste of wonder. And yes, as far as this group is considered, we can't vote our way into political power, either. Oh, we can put a man in the chair to run the mic and operate the illusion. Govern the performance and the people will dance. But we'll be no closer to power than when we started. Because as far as this group is concerned, there is no such thing as political power. All roads lead you back to the wiz. So how does this group see power in its most realized form? And how do we market it to them in our messaging, in our communications? To this group, all the power we want is inside of the rules that we've been unwilling to break. The leaders of old mobilized the masses by saying, "The system is broken and we need to fix it." The system The The The leader of new will mobilize this group by saying, "The system is working exactly as it's intended. And we need to break it." This group sees power in the sledgehammers. If you're not telling them what you're willing to break on their behalf, then you're not offering them power. And are they so crazy to be mobilized not by the builders, but the breakers of the legislative, judicial, and executive systems that if we're being honest, have functioned as machineries of containment far more than instruments of justice in their everyday lives? It was through legislative acted action that we codified the war the war on drugs. It was through judicial acquiescence that we administered mass incarceration. It was through executive compliance, quiet, procedural, bureaucratic obedience that we've watched policies be enforced, be expanded, be normalized long after their moral bankruptcy has been widely exposed. So, I ask, what precisely would make this group believe that these systems can be fixed? And what's more, if the systems could be fixed, what evidence would exist that it would be fixed for them? If anything what history teaches us is that and what their lived experience teaches us is that these systems have off often operated as shields of plausible deniability. A series of checks and balances that in practice become a master class of deflection where no one actor is responsible, but entire communities get tormented. And so when they see someone, anyone, willing to stand in defiance of those systems, when they see an actor say, "I will do this." And the system says, "You can't do this." And that actor says, "Watch me do this." They recognize something. They recognize power. Even in figures like Donald Trump. Not because they agree with every one of his positions, but because they're not blind to the contradiction that at all. But they recognize that and they're attracted to that because somebody's finally not pretending that the rules aren't just man-made barriers that can be bended and broken. They like that. They want that. The political institution that offers them a rule breaker offers them power. The political institution that offers them power mobilizes them to vote.
Now, here's where uh this thing becomes more instructive because this instinct that I just talked about, this longing for a rule breaker and power is instructive is is not just among the rightfully cynical. It actually hums beneath the surface of every single one of the ideological clusters that we talked about. Sometimes it's loud, sometimes it's a little quiet, but it's always there. In all the focus groups, in all the surveys, in all the cross tabulation data, we see it. The legacy civil rights voter, they may profess deep and abiding faith in the sanctity of their vote, but embedded in that faith is a historical memory. They're the descendants of rule breakers, of marchers who violated ordinances, of organizers who defied courts and and exhausted the criminal justice system, of citizens that were told wait and responded, "No." Our secular progressive, composed largely of black women, may see power mainly as a shield of safety, but that is in fact born from a life in defiance. To exist as a black woman in this country is to break rules every day. Every day. Black women in this country are consistently breaking the rules about who gets to lead, about who gets to speak, about who gets rest, about who gets to be protected. They've never had the luxury of believing in systems that would carry them. They've [clears throat] always had to move through them. In spite of them. They don't theorize about bending and breaking these systems, they break them just to survive. And the next generation traditionalist, so often misunderstood. Yes, they seek order, but let's be clear, the whitewashers of history would love for us to believe that order is the opposite of disruption. But history, true history teaches us that order order is often a product of disruption. The world they long for, the stability they articulate has never emerged from passive maintenance. And so across every single one of these clusters that we got introduced to, across the age, across the ideology, across the experiences, there exists a shared unspoken realization, all of the power we want is inside of the rules we're unwilling to break.
And so the question stands before us, those who presume to to summon and stir and organize the vast varied souls of black America, be you all the black intelligentsia, the talented tenth, the grandsons and granddaughters of the Harlem Renaissance, and any other creed you proclaim yourself to be, as you go forth in the world knocking doors, drafting field operations, donating to grassroots organizations, shaping legislation, crafting messages, convening the people in the halls of both grand and humble, what exactly will you be offering? Because if we get it just right, if we understand our people, we can offer a chance to rebuild deliberately, intelligently, unapologetically, the formidable and undeniable and once unstoppable power of black America.
Thank you. >> [applause] [applause] >> Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. >> [applause] >> Appreciate you all. Appreciate that. >> [applause] >> He was talking data. I think I