Interviews with African Americans across the US painted a heterodox picture of black America in the Obama twilight. Some consider Trump’s call for their support offensive and others deem it pertinent – but all felt it worth answering

Black Americans on 'what they have to lose' if Trump becomes president

In medieval courts, the jester had special license to speak unpalatable truths. The silly hat, garish costume and jingling bells somehow liberated him to deliver unwelcome news.

When Donald Trump launched his primary campaign last year, Republican elites underestimated him as a reality TV star – a showman good for entertainment, not high office. His acid tongue, however, enthralled the party’s base. He said the unsayable about immigrants, race, trade and the state of America, and he won the nomination.

Now Trump is turning to a new audience. On Saturday he is due to visit a church in Detroit, grant an interview to its pastor and address the congregation, his first campaign speech to a black crowd.

Trump tells a tale of Democrats' failure in Detroit, but locals aren't buying it Read more

An ambitious courtship, to say the least. For many African Americans, the Republican candidate is a sinister clown, the man who tried to prove Barack Obama was Kenyan, who flirted with white supremacists, who refused to speak to black organisations such as the NAACP, and who, upon spotting a black man at a rally, said: “There! Look at my African American.”

But the jester brings to Detroit a question, a blunt, uncomfortable challenge that compels attention and demands an answer. “What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump? You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?”

Set aside that he pitched this to black people two weeks ago while addressing a white audience and that this vision of Gotham was factually incorrect – black youth unemployment is 17.6% – and cartoonish.

It was, many feel, overdue recognition that eight years after the election of America’s first black president, millions of African Americans are struggling.

“Nothing to lose? It’s true,” said Katrina Langford, 46, book shopping with two sons in Leimert Park, the centre of African American arts and culture in Los Angeles. She cited dire rates of incarceration, illness and poverty. Her boys clutched books about Louis Armstrong and Keith Black, a neurosurgeon, but the scene up the street was less inspirational: a shabby park with homeless people dozing under the California sun.

Settling in for a trim 2,200 miles away in a Detroit barber shop on Gratiot Avenue, Leonard Logan, 45, saw things the same way. “What do you have to lose? And that’s true, that’s true. What do we have to lose?”

Umi, a cigar shop owner in Bedstuy, a black area of Brooklyn, shared that bleak verdict. “In terms of the black community, it never comes to us, it don’t trickle down this far.” It barely mattered if Donald Trump or Donald Duck sat in the Oval Office, he said. “They just had a black man in the president’s box and he didn’t trickle down nothing.”

Interviews this week with a cross-section of African Americans across the US – east coast and west coast, rust belt and the deep south, lawyers, barbers, students, mothers and veterans – painted a heterodox picture of black America in the Obama twilight.

Some are thriving, others floundering; some are hopeful about the future, others despairing; some consider Trump’s question offensive, others deem it pertinent. All, however, felt it worth answering.

Responses ranged from having nothing to lose to having a lot – a hell of a lot – to lose. Concerns included policing, economic opportunity, judicial representation, voting laws and reproductive rights.

The multifarious voices largely united on only one issue: the jester must not become king.

“We have issues in our community, but he’s not going to address them,” said Vanessa Greyman, a single mother in Harlem.

Terry Bethel, a Brooklyn barber, snorted at the notion of President Trump. “He’s a joke. There’s no empathy, there’s no sympathy.”

LaDreya Carlisle, a barber in Detroit, said the casino owner was too brash. “I can’t take him seriously because somebody who’s trying to win the votes of Detroiters and African Americans, you wouldn’t say things like that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LaDreya Carlisle, 22, of Detroit: ‘I can’t take him seriously because somebody who’s trying to win the votes of Detroiters and African Americans, you wouldn’t say things like that.’ Photograph: Ryan Felton

One exception was Ian, a 41-year-old Detroit barber who declined to give his last name. He backed Trump, he said, because of Democrats’ support for same-sex marriage and abortion rights. “I’m not voting for somebody because I think they’re going to make the economy better. Whoever gets in, it’s going to be trash. I’m voting more for my religious convictions and beliefs. I’m not voting for him personally, I’m voting the platform.”

Most, however, dismissed the billionaire businessman as a bad punchline. Courting their support after all he had said and done was a farce, they said.

Atlas Parker, a restaurant chain maintenance worker from Marlow, Alabama, shook his head. “It’s like a comedy act. He’s had nothing good to say about minority people this whole time, and now right at the end he acts like he’s going to save us.” Trump’s dystopian depiction of African American life was a double insult, Parker said. “He talks that way about us and then expects us to come to his side.”

Demiah Boykin, 22, a student and veterinary worker in LA, said Trump was a Republican party caricature. “He seems like a joke.”

If so, perhaps Trump is in on it, at least in relation to his visit to Detroit, where, accompanied by Ben Carson, he will address a congregation on the city’s west side and give a taped interview to Wayne Jackson, bishop of the Great Faith Ministries and the president of Impact Network, a Christian television network.

“Trump is delusional if he thinks he will get more than a tiny percentage of the African American vote,” said Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College. “His record of housing discrimination and incendiary comments is well known among African Americans, and a few gestures won’t erase that memory.” Which suggested, Pitney said, that the candidate was not in fact courting black voters. “Rather, he is trying to enable white moderates to rationalize voting for him.”

Trump is delusional if he thinks he will get more than a tiny percentage of the African American vote Jack Pitney, a politics professor

When English ships destroyed the French fleet at the battle of Sluys, King Phillipe VI’s jester said the English sailors lacked “the guts to jump into the water like our brave French”. In a similar vein, one could say Trump’s black support can only increase.

In a Public Policy Polling survey this week, his favorability rating with African Americans languished below 1%. A USA Today/Suffolk poll on Friday gave him 2% support. An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll last month, in contrast, rated his support at a positively vertiginous 8%.

Trump’s handlers have drafted proposed answers for him to give to Jackson, including, according to a version leaked to the New York Times, un-Trumpian utterances such as: “I want to make race disappear as a factor in government and governance.” If asked whether his campaign is racist, he is advised to avoid repeating the word and to talk about his plan to wean people from welfare to work. “The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding. Coming into a community is meaningless unless we offer an alternative to the horrible progressive agenda that has perpetuated a permanent underclass in America.”

A Clinton/Kaine campaign sign hangs in the window of his barber shop on Detroit’s west side, but Vonzie Whitlow doesn’t mind Trump’s visit. “Why not? I think it’s a good thing.” The Republican’s rhetoric about the black community has an air of truth, Whitlow said. He reeled off recent presidents. “What’d they do for us? Ain’t too many [presidents] come into the black communities since I’ve been here, so I think it’s a good job for him to come out here, talk to the black people. Ain’t nothing wrong with it.”

I’ve not heard a single thing from Trump that I agree with James Fugate

Even if Trump avoids unleashing toxic fumes in Motor City, however, he will remain radioactive to the likes of James Fugate, 61, who runs LA’s Eso Won Books, one of the US’s few remaining African American bookstores. “I’ve not heard a single thing from Trump that I agree with. I think he’s a cynical person who is appealing to the most racist instincts of a lot of white people, to a legacy of fear about blacks.”

The real estate mogul and his father were sued in the 1970s for anti-black bias in rental properties. In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers demanding the execution of the Central Park five, a group of teenagers charged with a particularly heinous rape. When their conviction was overturned – DNA identified the real rapist – he doubled down, branding the apology and payout to them the “heist of the century”.

Trump hounded Obama over his birth certificate, emboldening the rightwing fringe that thinks the president is a foreign Muslim. He was slow to disavow an endorsement from former KKK leader David Duke. Supporters have insulted, shoved and punched African American protesters at his rallies.

Despite all that, the candidate’s Hobbesian diorama of ghetto hell, of an underclass mired in poverty, violence and hopelessness, has commanded attention. It ignores the existence of a large African American middle class; that in the past eight years, black poverty and unemployment have improved; and that Obama’s health law has extended healthcare to the needy. But black incomes have stagnated and the wealth and employment gap between black people and white people has widened. Fatal police shootings have underscored racial inequality in the criminal justice system. With just a few months left to Obama’s presidency, hope and change feel like a faint, distant echo.

“I love Barack, but I’m still struggling,” said Greyman, the Harlem single mother. She was on her way to a city jobs programme, as her current job will soon end. She travels an hour each day to take a daughter to a charter school for a better education. They still live with Greyman’s parents because she can’t afford decent housing. She is no great fan of Hillary Clinton, but will vote for her come November. “At least my kids would have a better shot with Hillary in office.”

I love Barack but I’m still struggling Vanessa Greyman, a single mother in Harlem

Bethel, the barber, is backing Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, because he associates Clinton with her husband’s incarceration policies in the 1990s. “The three strikes law is a pipeline to the prison industry, and these are the ramifications now in the neighborhood.”

Others, such as Umi, the cigar show owner, hope an election that has become a referendum on Trump will lead to an awakening. “I hope it sparks something in us as a race to understand that we don’t have no voice out here. Who waiting for leaders out here but us? Who waiting for somebody to say some shit to help us get ahead? We gotta get ourselves ahead.”

Fugate, a soft-spoken, bespectacled figure who hosted the LA launch of Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father in 1995, gives more credit to progressive achievements – achievements that would be imperilled under Trump. “What have we got to lose? Voting rights.”

The Republican-led effort to curb voting rights in North Carolina and elsewhere, said the bookstore owner, was the most offensive thing he had seen in 40 years. Trump-appointed judges would roll back recent victories on this front, he warned. “He’s already named 10 wackos” as potential supreme court nominees. ( Trump has named 11 potential justices, all white.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Fugate, owner of the LA book store Eso Won. Photograph: Rory Carroll/THE GUARDIAN

Another thing to lose, Fugate said, was police oversight, such as federal investigators uncovering the Ferguson police tactic of fining poor residents to feed city coffers. “They found out all the little tricks. But Trump? He’d be pro-police. He just doesn’t understand the world.”

Others cited Obamacare as an example of what could be lost. It all added up, in truth, to a rather short list of progressive accomplishments. But it was enough to decide that if the jester took the throne, there was plenty to lose.

Lou Gehrig’s disease has robbed Leroy Peete, a 72-year-old Detroit native and Vietnam veteran, of speech. He communicates by moving a pen toward letters printed on a sheet, spelling out words.

Asked about Trump’s visit to Detroit, an acquaintance read aloud his response.

“Don’t want his ass here.”

Asked about Trump’s outreach to African Americans, Peete moved the pen again over the letters.

“Bullshit.”