Clash over race pushes issue to forefront
ATLANTA — Democratic presidential candidates put race at the forefront of their primary scramble Thursday, punctuated by a tense exchange between Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris after the white mayor connected his experiences as a gay man to black Americans’ long struggle against racism.
Harris, one of three black candidates seeking the nomination, criticized Buttigieg in a postdebate event in Atlanta, calling him “naive” and criticizing him for comparing the struggles of the black and LGBTQ communities. A Democrat who wants a winning coalition “should not be in position of saying one group’s pain is equal than or greater to another,” said Harris, a California senator.
Buttigieg, the white mayor of South Bend, Ind., who wed his husband, Chasten, last year, countered that he was not comparing the travails of the LGBTQ community and black America, but instead speaking up for one discriminated class based on his experiences in another.
The exchange highlights the importance of the black vote in the Democratic nomination process and both candidates’ struggles to win them over. It also threatens to expose an uneasy relationship in the party’s civil rights coalition, as the party increasingly recognizes LGBTQ rights as a priority alongside its decades long alignment with the civil rights movement for African Americans.
Harris and Buttigieg are among several Democratic candidates trying to dent former Vice President Joe Biden’s advantage among black Democrats. Biden was meeting Thursday with a group of prominent black Southern mayors, including Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms, who has emerged as one of his top campaign surrogates.
Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts were holding dueling rallies on Atlanta’s historically black college campuses, pitching their progressive policy slates to a younger African American audience that is viewed as up for grabs.
Buttigieg has surged to an apparent lead in overwhelmingly white Iowa, which holds the nation’s first caucus Feb. 3, but he and his aides acknowledge that he needs to improve on his negligible support in the black community in other states. Harris is still trying to crack the top tier in Iowa and beyond, and she used the Atlanta debate Wednesday to make a direct appeal to black women while pitching herself as the ideal nominee to rebuild the multiracial coalition that twice sent Barack Obama to the Oval Office.
The Buttigieg-Harris flap spun off the mayor saying Wednesday night during a discussion of race that he’s often “felt like a stranger” in his own country — a version of a point he makes frequently on the campaign trail when he says he understands what it’s like to watch politicians argue over his civil rights.
He clarified his intent Thursday but pushed back on Harris’ characterization of his remarks.
“There’s no equating those two experiences — and some people, by the way, live at the intersection of those experiences,” he told reporters. “What I do think is important is for each of us to reveal who we are and what motivates us.”
