Ambivalence on race dogs Walker
Senate candidate’s apparent absolution worries Black voters
MACON, Ga. — Herschel Walker, the former football star leading Georgia’s Republican primary for Senate, had a mixed message about racial issues for 70 or so supporters, mainly white, who came to hear his recent stump speech at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.
He started with a joking aside — “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m Black” — before asking, “Where is this racism thing coming from?” Accusations of bigotry, he suggested, are often thrown around as a way to silence people like those in the crowd. He did say that he had recently been called a racial slur, repeating the word and adding, “Can you believe that?” But, he went on, that was OK, because raccoons are smart animals, and the Bible does not talk about Black and white, just believers and nonbelievers.
The white members of the audience cheered. The few Black onlookers had a different reaction, wondering what race-blind Georgia he seemed to be referring to.
As Walker nears his expected coronation Tuesday as the GOP nominee for one of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats, it is clear racial issues will be a major factor this fall, when he is all but certain to face Sen. Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Democrat.
The contest between Warnock, a longtime civil rights champion, and Walker, whose ambivalence on the issue has long dogged him, is expected to be tight. Either way, Georgia will still have a Black senator. But that does not mean race will be nullified as a factor.
“If anything, it could be put on steroids,” said Kevin Harris, an African American
Democratic strategist active in Southern campaigns.
Walker is clearly sensitive about the subject. Asked how he would distinguish himself from Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, Walker snapped, “Don’t say that. He’s running on separation.” He has struck similar themes in the past, arguing that civil rights leaders want the races divided. White Republicans here welcomed Walker’s assurances that accusations of racism and injustice are all about division when the nation needs unity.
George Jackson, who grew up in Walker’s hometown, Wrightsville, Georgia, and went to high school with the candidate’s older brother, reassured his friends after the speech, “Herschel is not racist” — a signal that for some voters,
racism by Black Americans, not by white ones, is the problem.
“Christ doesn’t look at race,” Kathy Peterson, 60, of Perry, Georgia, who is white, said approvingly after the speech. “We’re all the same. We’ve been divided by the leadership we have now for too long.”
The few Black members of the audience, however, saw Walker’s longtime ties to Donald Trump — and the former president’s endorsement of him — as a red flag and an indication that Walker was merely a vessel for the GOP and Trump’s ambitions.
“I can’t get a brother from Wrightsville, Georgia, jumping on the Trump campaign, you know?” Roderick McGee, 54, said at the Hall of Fame. “I can’t wrap my mind around that.”
He added, “He’s a puppet on a string, and somebody’s
pulling those strings really good.”
Walker’s early years are a major part of his appeal. He loves to recount his days as a shy, bullied, “big-boned” — “which meant I was fat” — kid with a speech impediment, who aspired to grow supremely athletic so he could stand up for himself.
He often riffs about what he calls an agonizing choice between joining the Marines or playing college football, then choosing a college as the most recruited high school athlete in the country.
Left unmentioned is another event from those days that Jackson readily offered up: a civil rights showdown in 1980 in little Wrightsville between the Black community and local law enforcement that brought Black leaders like Hosea Williams to town from Greater Atlanta, as well as Ku Klux Klansmen
like J.B. Stoner.
Black local leaders wanted their most celebrated athlete to weigh in, but barely 18 and a high school senior, Walker stayed away.
“He said, ‘I don’t believe in race; I believe in right and wrong,’ ” Jackson, who is white, said approvingly.
Republicans hope Walker will peel away just enough Black votes from Warnock to take back a coveted seat in a Senate now divided 50-50. Driven by Trump’s quick endorsement, many in the party have looked past the football star’s history of domestic violence, his admitted struggles with mental illness, and his lack of political experience to chant his slogan: “Run, Herschel, run.”
But it may not work the way the Republican establishment hopes. After the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Ahmaud
Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, 170 miles southeast of Macon, many Black voters are in no mood for the broad absolution of white people Walker appears to be offering.
“People need to stop being afraid to have these hard conversations,” said LaTanja Taylor, 45, who was walking with a friend in downtown Macon. “That’s the only way we’re going to heal.”
Harris, who helped engineer President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia, said Republicans were so intent on recruiting a Black Senate candidate that they latched onto a man whose views on race will alienate the Black voters they seek.
“He’s a flawed messenger,” Harris said, “but this is what you get when you’re not willing to do the work, and they don’t do the work on equity and inclusion. So they get Herschel Walker.”