There are many tragic figures in the politics of 2022.
For me the most tragic is Herschel Walker.
Democrats don’t see it this way. More’s the pity. That’s because Walker represents the apotheosis of Jim Crow 2.0, a system of institutional racism that has been making its way across the south since I moved here in 1981.
It’s like this. Give blacks some places. Give them their own places, like Atlanta. Use thinly veiled racism to maintain white discipline and control in the suburbs. Use state policy to ghettoize the places with black majorities and encourage corruption. Meanwhile, take some with exploitable talent and raise them up. Coddle them, make them think they’re as good as white, so they become the new system’s avatars, black faces on a white system.
See, we’re not racist, look at X. Whose idiocy justifies the racists’ instincts.
Herschel Walker was a great athlete. He was given a “football” scholarship but never taught a thing. Instead, the University of Georgia exploited him. He wasn’t paid.
Herschel could have been one of thousands of black athletes tossed aside by the Southeastern Conference slave system, except he found someone to bail him out. That was Donald Trump. Trump made Walker rich, signing him to the New Jersey Generals for more than the NFL would have paid at the time. This let Walker thumb his nose at his exploiters while nurturing hopes for revenge.
I would call him a Stepin Fetchit character, but Lincoln Perry was an intelligent man playing a character. Herschel Walker believes his act.
Herschel’s revenge is to replace the covert racism of people like Brian Kemp with an overt racism built on Trump’s own capture of evangelicals Christianity and the white poor. His nomination wasn’t seriously contested by the white shoe crowd who felt, like Republicans in 2016, that Walker’s campaign would fail, and they would inherit his new voters.
But the Trumpian lust for power, the combination of ultra-wealth and white poverty targeting educated tech elites, is making Walker competitive. As with Trump before him, it doesn’t matter what Walker says, or what he does. “I don't care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate,” summarizes the whole campaign.
But what of Herschel? He has been raised up over the white shoe crowd at UGA who once exploited him. At the same time every flaw in his personality, and his life, has been mercilessly exposed. It’s a prison. Win or lose, his reputation is destroyed. But win, and the revenge (like that of Clarence Thomas before him) will be sweet.
It’s a sad story. He’s a sad figure. The fact that he could win has Democrats piling on about his faults and his ignorance. But I think they’d have a much better chance if they just took a minute to show a little pity for the illegitimate son of old Jim Crow.
