Column: For Black Americans, prioritizing Black candidates is historically sound

For the mass of the electorate, Kamala Harris is a tough-on-crime career woman with a record of appealing to bipartisan political bigwigs, but to Black voters, she’s all of these and, endearingly, Big Sister General. For Black voters, Black candidates are symbolic, revolutionary markers of societal progress — proof of the Black face’s integration into the visible fabric of American identity. Through them, we see ourselves, and in their lived experiences, we find pockets of similarity that remind us of the shared, bittersweet nature of Black identity. When reduced to an identity forged by America’s historical inequities, Blackness becomes a landscape of barriers and exclusions, fenced in by widespread misunderstandings of intention, experience and motivation.  Politically, Black identity is shaped by the collective experience of being misunderstood, misrepresented and marginalized by politicians. This shared experience transforms Black identity into a political common ground among Black Americans, making the prioritization of Black candidates a natural response to America’s political climate. Although the U.S. has a two-party system, neither fundamentally centers its platform around Black Americans, which is understandable as political parties are formed and sustained through broad shared interests, rather than a key focus on any one group. The party assumed...