The Kamala Harris ‘Opportunity Agenda for Black Men’ Might Be Good Politics, But History Reveals It Has Flaws

Throughout her presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has presented voters with her vision for an “Opportunity Economy” to create jobs and expand the middle class. On Oct. 14, she announced a new element of this agenda: a set of economic proposals aimed specifically at African-American men. 

Her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” intends to unleash the “untapped ambition” of African-American men by “removing historic barriers to wealth creation” and providing the “tools to achieve financial freedom.” The program’s specific policy proposals, which Harris has been highlighting in the last weeks of the presidential race, include extending loans to Black entrepreneurs, creating training and mentorship programs for jobs in “high-demand” fields, and supporting Black investment in cryptocurrencies and the cannabis industry.  

Some critics have dismissed the move as a calculated ploy to secure African-American votes amid concerns that up to one in four Black men under the age of 50 might support former President Donald Trump. But while electoral considerations undoubtedly shape all policy proposals during a campaign, Harris’s “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” also reflects a long history within American liberalism of efforts to mold Black masculinity and to redirect Black economic behavior.

This history, however, contains a cautionary note for Harris: these efforts have largely failed to mitigate racial wealth and income gaps. Promoting opportunity, individual self-empowerment, and access to the marketplace hasn’t addressed the structural inequalities that have historically generated barriers to African-American economic security. Harris’ policy proposals targeting Black men might help her win on Tuesday. But if she does, she’d be wise to revisit the historical limitations of policies that focus solely on providing economic opportunity rather than enacting structural reform.

Some of the earliest historical antecedents of Harris’s “Opportunity Agenda” lie at the turn of the 20th century, when some Black elites and their white allies — most famously Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute — insisted that vocational training and entrepreneurship, rather than social equality or political power, were the key to resolving racial and economic inequalities. “The value and manhood of the American Negro,” Washington argued to a mostly white audience in Atlanta in 1895, would best be served by “starting a dairy farm or truck garden” and investing in “real estate or industrial skill” rather than “agitation of questions of social equality.”

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Many Black intellectuals and activists — most notably W.E.B. DuBois — charged that Washington’s accommodationist approach would reinforce, rather than challenge, entrenched economic and social disparities both in and beyond the South. Over time, events proved them correct, and legal and de facto segregation and disenfranchisement would remain in effect for decades to come. 

Just like Washington’s efforts failed to significantly alter the economic condition of African Americans, so too did Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. While programs such as the Works Progress Administration provided a crucial source of employment, most Black workers remained largely shut out of the Social Security system and unprotected by wage and hour regulations.   

During and after World War II, millions of African Americans migrated out of the Jim Crow South and into urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest. Facing continued racism and discrimination in Northern cities as whites flocked to the suburbs, they struggled to overcome poverty, which increasingly became racialized in the American imagination. 

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, policymakers came to see eradicating poverty as essential to optimizing the American economy and winning the Cold War. Given its racialized connotations, that meant paying particular attention to poverty and underemployment among African Americans. Influential manpower theorists, such as economist Eli Ginzberg, argued that racism and disenfranchisement suppressed the immense latent creative potential of African Americans, who were "the single most underdeveloped human resource in the country.”

This line of thinking produced a bevy of new laws, including the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, which invested federal funding into vocational training and “reskilling” programs. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy created a Task Force on Manpower Conservation, which concluded that a major reason for poverty was the lack of education, training, and job opportunities among urban African Americans. 

This finding shaped the “War on Poverty” that Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson launched in 1964. The newly created federal Office of Economic Opportunity spearheaded a plethora of programs designed to foster vocational training in urban African-American communities, with a particular focus on the employment of younger Black men.

Yet, even as some parts of the Johnson Administration zeroed in on training as the key to solving African American poverty, other influential figures — including ones within the administration — blamed what they believed to be cultural deficiencies within African-American communities. In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan released The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. The report infamously insisted that the roots of racialized poverty could be located in the “pathologies” of the purportedly matriarchal structure of the Black family unit. Moynihan argued that many Black boys often lacked strong masculine presences in their families, which damaged their self-esteem and the productivity of their adult economic lives.

Moynihan’s work was instrumental in focusing many of the Johnson Administration’s antipoverty programs on “rehabilitating” the labor power of young African-American urban male workers. The hope was to eliminate the “pathology” at the root of Black poverty by using programs such as the Jobs Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and the Concentrated Employment Program to integrate Black men into the dominant white ideal of the male breadwinner at the head of a nuclear family household.

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These War on Poverty efforts to reconfigure Black masculinity had a darker side. “Project 100,000,” a 1966 Defense Department initiative explicitly designed as a part of the War on Poverty, targeted thousands of young, predominantly Black and Latino men for enlistment in the military. The program was purportedly designed to give disadvantaged young men specialized vocational training in a masculinized military environment. In practice, however, few Project 100,000 troops received the promised training; rather, they were disproportionately assigned combat roles in Vietnam, where over 5,000 died (three times the rate of other troops). 

Yet, the more fundamental limitation of the War on Poverty programs was the assumption that poverty could be eliminated if individuals had access to the right skills, work ethic, and opportunities. This thinking ignored the true roots of poverty: employment discrimination, educational disparities, segregated housing, and systemic biases in the criminal justice system. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, progressives argued in vain that these structural issues could not be fully solved by reskilling or “opportunities” in the marketplace, but only by redistributive taxation, direct job creation, criminal justice reform, and fair housing policies. 

It was no surprise then that during the 1970s, the government gradually phased out many of the struggling and underfunded War on Poverty programs; by 1981, most of the functions of the Office of Economic Opportunity had been dissolved or folded into other federal agencies. 

The failures of the paternalistic War on Poverty led to more punitive forms of disciplining Black men. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, policymakers in both parties came to see underemployed African-American men less as an object of economic reform and more as a danger to public safety to be controlled through militarized policing and mass imprisonment. 

Policymakers continued to eschew any effort to address structural forces driving Black poverty. In 1996, the “welfare reform” enacted by Bill Clinton reinforced the view that the solution to poverty was not redistributive policies but rather forced market participation. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, touted a form of “respectability politics” that decried the ways that “equality of opportunity” was too often “drowned out by the language of recrimination” and a “desire for government support.”

Yet, none of these policies ever fully confronted the structural roots of poverty and economic disparities among African-American men.

The underpinning of Harris’ “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” is the same flawed but largely well-intentioned liberalism that drove these earlier efforts. It has, in many cases, inspired policies that have improved the lives of marginalized segments of the population. Yet, by focusing on individual uplift, opportunity, and “unleashing” entrepreneurial initiative, it has never fully addressed the issues of institutional racism and structural inequalities.

While Harris’ program might do much good for Black-owned businesses and for economic mobility in African-American communities, it threatens to repeat the mistakes of the past. If she wins, Harris would better address the lingering crisis of racialized poverty and income inequality by confronting the root of institutional racism and structural inequalities — expanding the child tax credit, increasing the supply of affordable housing, and closing the racial wealth gap through progressive taxation. These policies would more effectively mitigate the systemic economic challenges that have long disproportionately afflicted African-American men.

Ben Zdencanovic is a postdoctoral associate at the Luskin Center for History and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author Island of Enterprise: The United States in a World of Welfare (under contract, Princeton University Press) and he is working on a new book on manpower, race, and the War on Poverty.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.