Much of the criticism South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has attracted during his presidential campaign has centered around his relationship with his black and Latino constituents. He fought blight in the city in part by tearing down abandoned houses—but most of the homes were in minority neighborhoods , and some were held by local owners who wanted to restore them and said that their destruction furthered gentrification. He also asked the city’s first black police chief for his resignation after he allegedly inappropriately recorded phone calls of white officers accused of making racist remarks. And the ambivalence towards Mayor Pete some of his constituents hold isn’t just a local problem, but part of a trend that threatens his national campaign. He polls dismally with black voters, and his events around the country have attracted largely white audiences

Buttigieg has been frank about the need to increase his popularity with black voters and said his campaign is “ working to broaden [its] coalition .” With this in mind, he’s planned a series of events focused on the black community. One stop: 125th street .

Buttigieg rode the New York City subway to Harlem Monday to have a lunch of fried chicken, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese with Al Sharpton at the neighborhood’s famous soul food restaurant Sylvia’s. Mayor Pete’s black voters tour also contains more substantial stops, including a round table discussion with leaders in Charleston’s black community this week.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg dined with activist and former presidential candidate Al Sharpton at Sylvia’s, a Harlem soul food restaurant, on Monday. SOPA Images Getty Images

But meeting with Sharpton—a figure presented in conservative media as a spokesperson for all of black America, though he holds a decidedly mixed reputation among the African Americans he purports to represent—is something of a tradition among democratic primary candidates . He’s had similar Sylvia’s meals, posing at the restaurant’s camera-friendly front window with Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama. Even as our understanding of racism has evolved and new generations of black activists have come of age, the Al Sharpton photo-op remains a Democratic rite, a shorthand for broader efforts to reach out to black voters.

The battle for voters of color is especially crucial for Democratic primary candidates—in some states, like South Carolina, a majority of all Democratic voters are non-white. Come the general election, however, the black and Latino vote is practically a given, as voters of color are forced to chose between the Democratic candidate and a party whose de facto leader is openly racist.

For Democratic primary candidates, imagery-heavy and policy-light overtures to minority voters may be attempts to stake out a claim to a kind of fictive kinship. "They’re trying to make a symbolic connection that, 'I’m one of you, I support you,’” says Columbia Professor Frederick C. Harris, Director of the University’s Center on African American Politics and Society.

The Al Sharpton photo-op remains a Democratic rite, a shorthand for broader efforts to reach out to black voters. Getty Images

But these symbolic gestures might have less currency now than they once did. Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill devastated African-American communities through mass incarceration, but all it took was a saxophone performance on Arsenio and lack of visible discomfort around black people to help earn him the joking label of America’s first black president . That’s changed. Black voters in the internet age have considerably easier access to details about candidates' history and policy goals, and according to Harris, racial gestures don’t "have the same impact [they] did before, where symbols mattered more because people had less information about candidates."

But while 2020 Democrats seem determined to learn from some of Hillary Clinton’s mistakes—Wisconsin, the state she was so criticized for failing to visit, will host next year’s Democratic National Convention —they’ve been less able to break with her habit of non-substantive pandering to voters of color. In a primary that saw black voters questioning the Clinton legacy on crime fighting and welfare reform, Hillary responded, in part, by doing the nae nae on Ellen , temporarily turning her campaign logo into both a Kwanzaa kinara and a depiction of Rosa Parks , and publishing a blog post called “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela.”

The most infamous of these much-mocked incidents also seems to be the most authentic: Clinton caught flack for claiming that, like Beyoncé herself, she carries hot sauce in her purse , even though her passion for pepper was already well-documented. Problem was, the venue in which she mentioned it in 2016 was an interview on the hip-hop focused radio morning show “The Breakfast Club.” It was clear what audience Clinton hoped to alert to her love of spice.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

"I think that black voters have learned over the Obama years, even though they still find the First Lady and President Obama very popular, that symbolism is just not enough to address substantive issues that affect black communities,” said Harris. “And so I think that people are really paying less attention to those symbolic gestures than they used to.”

But the fact that Clinton’s less serious outreach initiatives went down like a lead balloon hasn’t held back this year's crop of Democrats from committing similar stumbles. And black candidates aren’t immune from the urge to clumsily pander to black voters— Cory Booker claimed to have gotten his “BA from Stanford but [his] PhD from the streets of Newark.” Meanwhile, Bernie’s mentioned marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. so many times that a reference to this fact elicited groans from an audience of women of color last week, and of course no 2020 candidate has made a more misplaced or offensive claim to kinship with people of color than Elizabeth Warren did with that DNA test .

Even if these ham-fisted efforts may no longer be quite a hit with black audiences (or at least the young, internet savvy black audiences prone to expressing their distaste via Twitter), they may also offer an indication to other constituencies. "Part of this is sort of signaling to black voters,” Harris said of Buttigieg’s Sylvia’s lunch, “but also I think to liberal white voters in the Democratic Party who may like him but are troubled or unclear about what his legacy of race relations have been in South Bend. So by going to Al Sharpton, this is also sending a symbolic signal to them as well.”

Bernie Sanders struggled to connect with the audience at She the People, a presidential forum focused on women of color held last week. Sergio Flores Getty Images

But at the core of the nae nae-ing and sax playing and fried chicken luncheons is the idea that affinity for or ease with black culture has some relationship to a candidate’s racial policy platform, or their general moral fitness as a representative of black constituents. After he ate with Obama at Sylvia’s in 2007, Al Sharpton declared that “a man who likes fried chicken and cornbread can’t be all that bad.”

It’s a joking line, yet it hits at the flaws in the entire practice—the idea that a candidate who is comfortable riding the subway to Harlem to sit with a black political figure and eat black food must have the interests of black voters at heart. But a man who likes fried chicken and cornbread is just a man with taste buds.

Not only do these symbolic gestures offer candidates diminished returns, they feel out of place in a primary race that finds an electorate re-energized around issues of race thanks in part to our singularly bigoted executive. “There is a greater sophistication of knowledge about structural racism,” said Harris, “and people want policy solutions and not just symbolic gestures as a way to address these issues.” In a Democratic primary debating topics as substantive as the once seemingly improbable question of reparations , maybe it’s time to do away with the photo-ops and hot sauce moments.

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io