The candidacy of Herschel Walker for the United States Senate in Georgia fits a pattern by the Republican Party to advance Blacks for public office who have no public service experience, little to no expertise, and who parrot the worst racist tropes to gain favor among right-wing White voters. Black male candidates like Walker fulfill the racist fantasies of White supremacists who long for subservient Blacks who fulfill the role of obedient bucks who embrace the narrative of White exceptionalism and Black inferiority. Herschel Walker is a White supremacist’s wet dream.

Walker is what many conservative Whites claim they resent – ignorance, immorality dishonesty, and tokenism – but embrace in their racist imagery of Black people. Herschel Walker is the perfect anti-Black, Black candidate. His candidacy is life imitating art. Walker is the flesh and blood incarnation of The Boondocks' character Uncle Ruckus and The Chappelle Show’s charcater, Clayton Bigsby, the blind Black White Supremacist. He is a buck dancing, nonsensical buffoon who only has entertainment value for racist Whites while posing a real danger to Black life.

Walker’s candidacy is the trend among Republicans in the Donald Trump era. The goal is to identify the most offensive Black voices who are compliant and willing to be used, throw money behind them, heavily promote them, and then unleash them among the electorate to sow division among Black voters. Under no circumstance, other than to reinforce White supremacy, could Herschel Walker have been selected as a candidate for the United States Senate. His candidacy is a disgrace and an embarrassment, and only serves to buttress and reinforce White supremacy. Republicans’ only use of Walker is to put a Black face on oppressive and anti-democratic public policy designed to further disfranchise and undermine Black citizenship in the United States.

Black Republicans should be highly offended by Walker’s candidacy, and their silence suggests that allegiance to Donald Trump is the only qualification for membership in today’s GOP. There was a time when Black Republicans looked like E. Frederic Morrow (look him up if you don’t know the name), William T. Coleman, Major League Baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, General Colin Powell, and Benjamin Hooks, and from a much earlier period, Frederick Douglass. There was a time when Black Republicans were at the forefront of the liberation struggle and championed civil rights and reparative public policy. Today, with few exceptions like former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele and retired Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts, Black Republican candidates and office holders simply parrot the worse stereotypical rhetoric of their far-right patrons.

In the 1950s and 1960s Blacks living below the Mason Dixon Line waged war with Dixiecrats, the southern, segregationist wing of the Democratic Party. The infighting was so fierce, White Dixiecrats like South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond eventually found themselves as outcasts and had to seek refuge in the Republican Party. It was the elevation of conscious Black voices that was at the root of the reconstruction of the Democratic Party as a ‘big tent,’ embracing Blacks, Latinos, and women. Has it been a smooth transition? Not at all but there is no denying that there is no equivalency between Democrats’ worst tendencies and Republicans full-on embrace of racism as foundational to the party’s electoral fortunes.

Herschel Walker is not qualified to be a candidate for the United States Senate beyond his meeting the minimum constitutional standard, 35 years of age, to run for office. Walker is incapable of articulating a public policy agenda. He is a functional illiterate at best. His greatest success, some four decades ago, came from running with a football, and everything he claims in his life since that time has been revealed as a lie. Beyond his name, just about every claim Herschel Walker has made on the campaign trail is a lie. From stating he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Georgia and being a law enforcement officer, to his claim of business success, Walker has proven to be a habitual liar with not a single ethical bone in his concussion ridden body. He is an unintelligible stereotype that White supremacist Trump Republicans seek to use as a token Senator in their quest to revive Jim Crow politics in the United States.

Herschel Walker must be defeated and rejected. The very idea of Herschel Walker as a candidate is repulsive. In the 21st century the Black community cannot allow this mockery of our culture and history to see the light of day. Georgia voters must send Walker down in defeat and those of outside the state must do all we can to support the re-election of Senator Raphael Warnock.