Working-class minorities are less concerned with identity politics than they are with the economy.
When Sen. Ted Kennedy ran for president in 1980, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. served as a campaign surrogate. According to “The Kennedys: An American Drama,” a 1984 biography of the family by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Bobby Jr. would visit black churches in the South and tell congregants that black people were “worse off now than they’ve ever been in the history of this country.” When a historian advised him to stop saying that because it wasn’t true, Mr. Kennedy replied, “You’re right, but it always gets applause that way, so I think I’ll leave it in.”
More than four decades later, Mr. Kennedy is still trafficking in misinformation. In 2021 he produced a one-hour documentary that peddled conspiracy theories about vaccines being designed to harm black people. During the pandemic, blacks were underrepresented among the vaccinated and overrepresented among Covid deaths. A 2022 analysis of the literature on vaccine hesitancy published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities concluded that “mistrust of the medical establishment” and “uncertainty in vaccine safety” were top concerns of black Americans.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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