Ok…I’m not exactly sure why I’m publishing this one. Maybe because it just sticks in my craw and bewilders the heck out of me that the U.S. Senate contest in Georgia between Ralph Warnock and Herschel Walker is even close. It shouldn’t be.
I don’t write just for the heck of it or just because, gosh, this is sure interesting. I write to educate and stimulate thought and to let you, dear reader, take away – or not – what you want. So maybe there’s something for us to learn here about the weird and usually unrecognized dynamics of how race plays out in America. Senators represent their state. If she is from Georgia, she brings the pork home to Georgia, not Colorado, where I live. But still, how the senator from Georgia votes matters to me here in Colorado on, say, the 2022 Investment Recovery Act, or the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote or the 1865 ratification of the 13th amendment outlawing the enslavement of human beings in this country. Their votes matter.
My guess is that I do not yet have any readers from Georgia. (although I do have readers in Alabama) But who the Georgia voters pick matters.
Senator Warnock may not have moved and shaken the earth while in the senate. He’s only been there for two years. But in those two years he’s secured science funding for historically Black colleges and universities; new access to grants for Georgia transit authorities; secured funding to replace aging highway-rail intersections and for new programs to improve maternal health care.
His biggest achievement may have been his push for a $35-a-month out-of-pocket cap on insulin costs, which survived for Medicare recipients in the Inflation Reduction Act, but was blocked by Republicans for those with private health insurance and not Medicare.
Warnock pushed hard to expand health insurance access for the working poor in Georgia and other states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Tax credits for low-income workers to buy private policies made it through the House under Biden’s Build Back Better bill but died in the Senate.
But his largest contribution to Georgia and to the country was likely his support for a new Hyundai automotive plant, which, by 2025, should employ as many as 8,100 Georgians directly and another 1,000 at ancillary suppliers.
So I don’t know if that’s great for a senator’s first two years in office. But I do know that the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Doctor King’s former pulpit, did more for Georgians and Americans than Herschel Walker and all without paying for abortions for women with whom he had only been poking fun. And yet, here we are.
And for those of you thinking, “Hey, 501(c)(3) nonprofits are prevented by law from endorsing candidates, this is not an endorsement. This isn’t even about
Warnock or Walker. It’s about America’s weird racial dynamics.
Anyway, if you’ve been reading this column for a while, you know that I’m pretty happy to let others do the work for me. If they write well and have figured something out that I haven’t, I’m happy to take the day off and just cut and paste. Easy peazy. I read the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times and The Atlantic every day. The following was published this morning in the Times.
What White Voters See in Herschel Walker
Dec. 2, 2022
By Danté Stewart
To be a victim of injustice hurts hard. To be a victim of indifference hurts deeper and longer. And that is what is most gutting about the U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia between Herschel Walker and Senator Raphael Warnock.
How the hell did we get here? I grieve the fact that someone like Mr. Walker actually has a chance at a runoff against the incumbent Senator Warnock. What does it cost us as Black people to see this play out publicly? What does it cost this country?
I mourn what has happened to us as Black people since 2020. With each passing year — whether it was how by 2021 America quickly reneged on its promises of racial progress after the murder of George Floyd or how white people remain protected after an insurrection — we have been reminded that to be Black in America is to live on fragile soil. What keeps and sustains us is never permanent, is often compromised, and besides, is never given freely.
When Mr. Walker announced his campaign in August of last year, I knew that he represented himself less as Black people’s potential representative than white America’s tool. Disgraced former President Donald Trump endorsed Mr. Walker: “Herschel Walker will never let you down.” As the months rolled on, the scandals piled up: the allegation that Mr. Walker, who strongly opposes abortion rights, allegedly paid for his former girlfriend to abort their baby; his son’s rants against his father, and even recent questions about his Georgia residency. Throughout it all, Mr. Walker’s campaign draws from white supremacy’s greatest fantasy and stereotype: using a Black man for white people’s entertainment and consumption.
Mr. Walker is part of a long tradition of Black people willing to distance themselves from the humanity and dreams of their community in exchange for white praise and white power. Black people betraying Black people has a legacy stretching from the plantation to today. Mr. Walker has willingly, as he did in the N.F.L., taken the handoff from the likes of Mr. Trump, Ron DeSantis and Lindsey Graham, shucked and juked and jived over Black people’s real needs, just to hit the end zone and win at the white man’s game.
Although Senator Warnock in so many ways represents the pinnacle of what white society demands that Black people be in order to be successful — educated and exceptional — 70 percent of white Georgians voted for Mr. Walker, according to exit polls. There is a long history of white Americans trying to pull from the worst of us to destroy the best of what we can become. Senator Warnock, meanwhile, has had to prove his humanity, his leadership and his faith — I’m actually quite tired of seeing ads asking Georgians to declare their trust in Senator Warnock.
No matter how perfect or upstanding we are or how well Black people lead our state, white people seem to always become indifferent when we shout: This is not good for us! Once again Black people have to prove that we are trustworthy and that Senator Warnock is the best choice not just for us, but for America.
Politics aside, positions aside, I have to wonder: what is it that so many white people see as desirable in Herschel? A recent letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times suggested that it was the power of “celebrity” — that there was something alluring about Mr. Walker dancing his way to the end zone before winning a Heisman Trophy. For others, Mr. Walker is someone who represents Republican exhaustion with what Democrats have to offer. But it is not just celebrity or exhaustion. The race and runoff is a reflection of who white people believe is best for Black people and the nation. Herschel Walker is a very visible and violent symbol of just how far many white people in America will go to preserve a dying world of whiteness they refuse to let go of.
What a sad thing it is to watch a man’s and a people’s desire to destroy even themselves in an attempt to control what America is, means and can become. It is not just white supremacy. It is not just white hatred. It is white ingratitude.
White ingratitude is bent on breaking people’s hearts. It is white ingratitude that refuses to appreciate what Senator Warnock means to Georgia and this country and forces him to prove himself once again. It is white ingratitude that desires the stereotype of the ignorant charismatic Black athlete. It is white ingratitude that disrespects and disregards the Black tradition of faith that wants to both heal the soul and save society. It is white ingratitude that refuses to acknowledge just how deeply racist a vote for Mr. Walker actually is. White ingratitude is not just about open hatred and violence, it is also the everyday ways many white people make life so much harder for those who don’t look like them.
White ingratitude is very real and it is the heart of white power and white supremacy. If you are ungrateful for another person’s humanity and freedom, then you will do all types of things to devalue and disrupt it. Many white people are ungrateful for what Black people mean to America, what we have been, what we have done, what we have given them and what we have endured.
It seems that Reinhold Niebuhr’s words from “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” published in 1932, still ring true: “However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.”
We have done the forcing, again and again. And now what we are left with is not just rage, but the sadness associated with exhaustion. An exhaustion that none of us deserves.
Senator Warnock just might win. The celebration will ensue. A sigh of relief will be had. People will dance and declare how this country “works.” And yet, he just might lose. That is life, American life, American fragility.
No matter what happens the ingratitude and grief will still remain.
And I want America free of both.
Mr. Stewart is a writer and speaker on race, religion and politics who lives in Georgia. He is the author of “Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle.”