A pre-election dispatch from an Atlanta barbershop

🫰 Hello from me and my new favorite emoji, the finger heart (it means love, but cuter)
Issue #196: six days until you know what
By Harris Sockel

“Man, what do you think of Kamala Harris?” Luc Olinga asked his barber a few weeks ago.

Olinga is a French-American investigative journalist born and raised in Cameroon. He’s in the midst of touring swing states across the U.S. to interview Black men about how they’re planning to vote, and he’s sharing his observations on Medium. “Early this year,” he told me over email, “I sensed that Black male voters, especially young Black men (I have a 19-year old son), were becoming more skeptical about supporting the Democratic party.”

A New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month found that Trump’s support was growing amongst Black and Hispanic voters. In response, Harris wrote an “opportunity agenda” for Black men — a nine-page single-spaced document promising, basically, money (in the form of forgivable loans to entrepreneurs and aspiring homeowners).

A few weeks ago, Barack Obama stopped at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh to speak bluntly with Black men about what he viewed as their lack of enthusiasm for Harris: “Part of it makes me think you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” he said.

Olinga asked his barber: “Did you see that clip? What did you think?”

His barber, Byron, replied: “Man, why are you lecturing me? Stop, man… When he was President, he didn’t do much for us man, for Black people. You know what I mean.”

Byron went on:

— “Man, we will look weak with her. Other countries will laugh at us, you know what I mean,” he said.

A moment of silence.

He seemed to be struggling with his own prejudices and his stereotypes.

— “Man, she’s the lesser of two evils. She’s not going to take away rights and things that already exist,” he told me. “Trump wants to take away rights, man.”

Some may write this off as misogyny, but as Olinga argues in another story: “I think it is simplistic to call [men who aren’t enthusiastic about Harris] misogynistic. It’s our way to refuse to look beneath the surface […] These young men feel that their voice does not count. They want equality between men and women, but they feel that it is expressed today at the expense of men.”

There’s a lot more to explore on Olinga’s Medium profile. And I’m curious: What is one thing you’re thinking or feeling about this election that you haven’t seen reflected anywhere else (yet)? What are the deeper issues at play in this election that people seem hesitant to discuss?

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