How Herschel Walker Became White
He lost a lot more than the election.
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Soon Herschel Walker’s name
will not be on the lips of Republicans who pimped him out during Georgia’s 2022 Senate campaign.
Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz will stop taking his phone calls. So will Sean Hannity, who did not let him speak the last time he appeared on Fox News with Graham.
Donald Trump will likely say he does not know Walker. Or he’ll be too busy playing golf and defending himself against multiple legal battles to offer a shoulder for the failed white man to lean on.
Because, make no mistake about it.
More than anything else in the world, Herschel Walker wants to be white. And he has failed at that time and time again. That is his tragedy. That is his true loss.
As one reader commented the last time I wrote about the ex-football player: “Herschel Walker is about to find out he is not white. I love that for him.”
During Georgia’s Senate campaign, Walker made no effort to speak to issues that impact Black voters. It is doubtful that he cares or understands what those issues are even now.
According to the 2022 KFF/Grio Survey of Black Voters, some of those issues dovetailed with the concerns of all voters, regardless of race. Inflation, the economy and the rising cost of living were at the top of the list.
But Black voters were also particularly concerned
about the affordability of health care and housing, voting rights, gun violence, and criminal justice.
However, as Trump’s chosen candidate, Herschel had no choice but to court the religious values of Trump’s base. He spoke out against abortion, though he allegedly paid for at least two of them.
He campaigned against transgender athletes and denounced his opponent Rev. Raphael Warnock for co-sponsoring the recently passed Respect for Marriage Act. He also trashed Warnock in misleading commercials, which claimed the pastor had evicted impoverished residents from a building he owns.
In yet another nod to the mostly white Christian faithful
in the rural Georgia counties that supported him, Walker dismissed allegations of domestic abuse and other personal attacks by claiming that God had forgiven him.
During the campaign, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel served up a derisive video which made it quite clear. Almost all of Walker’s supporters on a given campaign stop looked and talked exactly like the MAGA faithful at a Trump rally.
Here was jingoism at its worst.
Here was a misguided but nearly successful hope that the fan-fervor which helped propel Walker down the gridiron would translate into victory at the polls.
Here also was the ideal Black candidate for people who not only believe they are white—but who also believe that are not racists. Walker carried 68% of them during the Georgia Senate runoff. Compare that to the number of whites who supported Barack Obama in 2008, which came to only 43% nationwide.
Roseanne Barr once said, “I’m America’s worst nightmare—white trash with money.”
But she was wrong.
America’s worst nightmare is Barack Obama. Educated. Sophisticated. Thoughtful. Resilient. Persuasive. And Smart enough to get the Affordable Care Act passed when the GOP tried its darnedest to stop him from achieving anything. Obama is also thoroughly American, though haters claimed for years that he is not.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in the First White President, it was white backlash to the Obama presidency that led to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. All of Trump’s dog whistles to the Alt-right, far right, and quasi-militia groups like the Proud Boys bear this out.
Trump’s victory was also about putting Black people in their place. How dare they rise as far as the White House? How dare Obama win the Nobel Prize? How dare he make the cover of Time magazine?
Herschel Walker was the antidote to Barack Obama
Or so men like Trump believed. Walker was Trump’s kind of Negro. A guy with Black skin who can’t string two sentences together. A man who can’t distinguish between an election and an erection. A convenient prop ready to parrot the talking points of white men who hate him. A 21st-century iteration of The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
As an African American born and raised in Georgia, I will tell you this. Herschel Walker’s candidacy was an insult to People of Color everywhere. Had he been a known Black conservative like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina or Talk Show Host Larry Elder, I would not feel this way.
But Herschel Walker was Donald Trump and his allies
saying to Black America—this is what we think you are. And as long as you behave like Herschel, we will stand by you. Not because we like you or care about you. But because we can use you. We can use you to show just how much we love our darkies. And how much our darkies love us.
As award-winning poet Caroline Randall Williams wrote in The Atlantic, Georgia’s runoff election was an “assault on the dignity of Black Americans” and a “kind of grotesque minstrelsy.”
That word “minstrelsy” is particularly apt.
It calls to mind African American performers in the early 1900s who painted their faces Black in order to transform themselves into the white man’s racist idea of bumbling, stumbling, comedic, rural caricatures.
It also calls to mind Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which satirizes contemporary Black TV shows that rely on hateful stereotypes. To make white people laugh. To gain their favor. To use that attention to earn money.
Herschel Walker did not have to paint his face black to give exploitative whites the minstrel man they needed. All he had to do was run for the United States Senate, where all of his flaws—personal, intellectual, and moral (despite his claims of God’s forgiveness)—would be paraded across the globe, reinforcing racist stereotypes of African Americans.
It was unfair of people like Sean Hannity to push Walker to run in the first place.
And it was foolish of Walker to let Hannity and Trump do this to him.
Because Herschel is going to find out the hard way now that all those white folks who helped him believe he was white will soon act as if he was never born.
If this seems like exaggeration, consider that Senator Ted Cruz has petitioned Wikimedia to have the photo at the top of this essay deleted. Why? Perhaps because the full photograph, which was taken one night before the election, includes the cheese-eating grin of the Texas senator himself.
Nor is this erasure likely to be limited to Cruz. Herschel Walker is going to discover that he is not one of them. He is not white after all.
Even though he espoused all their favorite right-wing talking points. Even though his supporters were mostly rural white Georgians who loved the way he ran a football and talked about God.
Even though they hugged him and kissed him and voted for him, Herschel Walker will never be part of their club.
Even though he did everything in his power
to become white, he is a Black man running from the inherited pain of blackness. Hoping, perhaps, that the embrace of whiteness would save him from his own unacknowledged shadow.
The tragedy is that the wish to be “white” is not merely the pathological demon of men like Walker. It is a sickness that preys upon the life of America itself.
Neuropsychologist Dr. Andrew P. Brown, III, has written that the entire concept of whiteness is based on a mythical racial hierarchy, a ranked stratification of humans grouped by skin color. Rooted in Christian theology itself, it is a social construct that invites European immigrants, who did not know they were “white” before coming to America, to participate in a lie.
Herschel Walker will soon discover that the belief in his own whiteness was mere illusion. The Heisman Trophy did not make him white. Running through a stadium filled with cheering white fans did not make him white. Impregnating white women did not make him white. Becoming a United States Senator would not have made him white, either.
Herschel Walker became white the same way he became a member of law enforcement. The illusion of honorary whiteness is as phony as the honorary sheriff’s badge he flashed during the campaign. With that illusion crushed by his failure to win Georgia’s senate election, all Herschel has left is the sad truth of the Langston Hughes poem, “Minstrel Man”:
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long…
You do not hear my inner cry.
Now that the election is over and Walker is no longer in the spotlight—his brand of minstrelsy no longer a clear threat to democracy—I hope we can find it in our hearts to wish him God speed as he comes to terms with what has been done to him and his own foolish part in the travesty. I hope he survives his pain long enough to find out who he is at last.
©2022 Andrew ‘Jazprose’ Hill
Thanks for reading.
Thank you! Sad to say although this is well written- Walker would not understand this.
PREACH.